Your Toxic Boss Has Less Power Over You Than You Think

It’s just happened again: your boss has ignored your efforts, denigrated your best work and made you feel like a piece of dirt stuck to the sole of his shoe.

You're a senior and successful leader - you didn’t climb the ladder to be treated in this way. You’d leave tomorrow but you need the income - your partner’s just told you she’s expecting your third child and now’s not the time to be finding a new job. What the hell do you do?!

In this article I’m going to lay out why you have so much more power over the situation than you think and exactly how to use it without punching your boss’s lights out.

This is a common situation for many people in the workplace today - feeling trapped between a manager that makes you feel less than you are, and the need to maintain a reliable income.

It can create intolerable stress because you seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard place - a toxic boss on the one hand and the perpetual flow of bills and expenses on the other. You are a victim. How on earth do you handle it? What is the solution here?

The key - as you will have picked up from my previous articles - is to go within - use an inside-out approach - and ask yourself: What is it I am doing that is creating my experience?

Now, at first glance, you’re not contributing directly to this situation. You are not responsible for your boss’s behaviour. You may well have signed up to a mortgage and all your other financial liabilities - but you need a house and so does your family. There’s not really a choice in the matter.

But that’s all outside stuff - let’s explore what’s going on within. At the bottom of the whole experience is feeling. You feel stressed, stretched, trapped, frustrated, angry even. That’s what is making life miserable for you at the moment - it’s the way you feel. Nothing more,  nothing less. That feeling is a perfectly natural consequence - don’t dismiss it, feel it fully.

Now ask yourself: what is the cause of the feeling? And if you say it’s your boss, your work, your situation, the job market, you’d be completely… wrong.

This is the nub of the whole issue and really worth taking on board as it provides not only relief from the feelings, but also a strategy for change. Here’s the truth of the matter:

The way you feel has nothing to do with the situation you’re in and everything to do with your reaction to it. Let that sink in. All the situation does is to trigger your reaction, it is not responsible for how you feel. You - and only you - are responsible for that.

You can prove this with a simple thought experiment: put 10 people in the same situation and you’ll get 10 different reactions to it. That’s because your reaction is determined by you, your history, your habits, your likes and dislikes, your personality.

So this is what’s really going on: your boss’s latest boorish behaviour is a trigger which unleashes a flurry of thinking on your part: “Here we go again. He never appreciates what I do. He thinks I’m useless. Perhaps I am. Maybe I’m not up to the job. I can’t stand it any longer”, etc. etc. The bit that is so easily missed is that you have to think those thoughts in order to feel the way you do. Every thought has an attendant feeling - thought and feeling are two sides of the same coin.

Although your boss provides the trigger, he cannot be held responsible for the thinking and feeling that ensues. That’s on you and you alone.

Let’s clarify this with another thought experiment. Imagine your boss accuses you of coming to work in your underpants - that’s right, shirt, jacket, socks, shoes, no trousers, just underpants. Ridiculous as it is, what would be your reaction? Would you be angry, upset, embarrassed? Of course not - you’d be incredulous, mildly amused even. Why? Because you know it has no basis in reality. You know it to be false. You wouldn’t even argue the point, it's so patently absurd.

When you know something to be true and there is no room for doubt, any challenge to it has no effect on the way you feel about yourself. But when your opinion or belief is challenged, you’ll defend it precisely because deep down you know it’s not simple fact, it’s open to doubt and may indeed be false.

So the reason you get upset when you feel unappreciated or criticised by your boss is because part of you thinks he may be right - you are complicit in the criticism - and what hurts you is not his opinion, but your own. If you knew what he thought to be as nonsensical as coming to work in your underpants, you’d have no truck with it whatsoever.

All your boss is doing, without knowing it, is reminding you that your opinion of yourself is out of alignment with who you truly are. That - and no more - creates the emotional pain.

Your boss, in reality, is doing you a favour by precipitating this knowledge in a way that you can't ignore. He is your teacher - if only he knew it!

As perverse as that may sound, I have plenty of clients who have benefitted immeasurably from adopting this realisation. It turns the situation on its head and transforms you from victim into victor.

But it doesn’t stop there. When you transcend mindless criticism from another - because you know who you really are - they start to change their behaviour, because your inner strength becomes palpable. And all you have done is to change your perspective without trying to change anything or anyone around you - your boss included.

From this position, the idea that you would give responsibility for your emotional state to someone else becomes ludicrous - it is far too important to give anyone else power over it. You reserve that privilege for you - and only you.

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See you in the next article.