Sometimes I wonder whether my financial survival up to a 2010 layoff had been possible simply because I hadn’t yet seen a raw enough economy. Somehow I had blundered into work where an employer needed workers badly enough that there was little competitive screening for hiring. Going forward from 2010, I quite possibly completed more job applications and showed up for more job interviews than in my whole career prior to 2010, and for all that effort, I was earning in my best years somewhere around two thirds what I had at the job that laid me off in 2010. By 2021, I was scrounging as a subcontracting traditional taxi driver in a region where few people have enough to tip generously—if they even can afford cab service.

I survived. The easier prior decades had prepared me with the conviction that money would be scarce in my life; I’d better find ways to minimize spending. I made paying the mortgage a priority. I seldom had resources to make principle-only mortgage prepayments, but I somehow kept it current. That was taxi driving then. I had ideas for increasing my cab-driver visibility. And then a life-changing email. My county Workforce Development worker had found out about a mass hiring event.

I already knew something about this employer. I had driven a few customers to a parking lot where company shuttles picked up workers for the commute over some of the most notoriously congested northern California freeways. I’d tried applying to the company at its website and after an email saying I’d hear from a recruiter presently I’d heard nothing for a couple years. From later conversations with customers who worked there that I’d drive to that company shuttle stop, I gathered that a common way to get work there was through a temp agency. I had the name of an agency one of my informants had used and recommended.

Now that all became beside the point. Apparently the quit rate and the company’s need for workers had prompted it to send a team of recruiters to a rented hall right in the city I live in. Seems a tide had turned. I won a door prize for answering a question during a part of the company presentation to the whole 200 some of prospects who showed up. And then they assigned us to smaller interview groups. I braced a bit. Would this be where they’d see whether I were ready to really sell myself? The interviewer may indeed have had some criteria for disqualifying such as apparent lack of enthusiasm. Once I’d completed the conversation, it seemed the primary thing being screened here was whether I and fellow interviewees spoke English fluently. Instead of seeking to disqualify and exclude first, this process seemed to be about scooping up as many willing qualified candidates as possible.

Just Luck or Real Shift in Valuing Myself?

I’ll go along for a bit with a theory that something had shifted more towards my pre 2010 layoff job-hunting experiences where it seems I was always hired back to work within at most two or three months’ hunting. At the same time, this job’s compensation easily beats what I’d earned just before the 2010 layoff. It seems quite likely to me that my having kept the job so far shows that I now consider myself worth this additional income.

It’s also true that this work has required me to withstand some discomfort. I believe that in my past, often if a job required me to stretch outside confines of some cruddy personal cozy shack, there was a fairly strong chance I would sabotage my opportunity. This job requires my peers and me to maintain a certain pace completing assigned processes as the product we’re building rolls past on an assembly line. As I’ve looked around me, I’ve noticed that I tend to be among the slower members of my team. In the first few months, this perception led to considerable anxiety. Was I that close to being let go because I wasn’t keeping up?

Furthermore, I’ve seen peers master skills so much faster than me. I can remember some times seeing myself falling further and further behind at my assigned station and then panicking trying to catch up. I became clumsy. Stumbling and falling definitely didn’t help me catch up!

I still see plenty of room for me to increase my contributions. At the same time, I’ve also come to believe that this overwhelmed sense of incompetence was largely the result of inaccurate self-messages. By this time I had begun to understand how I was setting myself up for unhappy outcomes, and the actual undoing of habitual patterns wasn’t instantly ready.

I can remember during this early spell how a peer of mine tried to get me to install a part a particular way he believed to be correct. I was willing for him to demonstrate it to me. But when he insisted I do it exactly his way, I refused. I had developed a way that worked for me, and I hadn’t heard from those with authority over me that it wasn’t right. Further back in my underearning past, it was fairly likely I would have capitulated. I had a fear of displeasing anyone, fear of conflict, fear that my refusing to do what even a peer told me to do was going to make people not like me. In a way it’s as though I had this outsized impulse trying to control how anyone else saw me and if anyone didn’t like what they saw, that was a big problem. Because my approach to relationships was so highly slanted towards giving up whatever I needed to to please others, I had abandoned myself. This left me dependent on others to tell me what to do and when to do it, a high-maintenance employee.

Now this was entirely within the authority structure of hierarchical workplaces. If I were doing something on my own time of my own initiative and not answering to anyone else, I was perfectly capable of guiding a project to completion. Such projects might save me money, but if I expect to earn, it requires relationships either with an employer or directly with a customer.

My refusal to go along with my peer’s demands that I do installations his way was part of my process of working through my initial anxieties about not working fast enough or learning new skills fast enough in this new work place.

Since that episode, I certainly have developed an appreciation for some things about this coworker. He has a very keen eye for things that are not as they should be and his letting workers know it needs to be fixed has prevented many a defect from slipping on down the line where repair becomes more expensive—if it even gets repaired before shipment to customers. At the same time I remember a time at the beginning of a shift he pointed to some trash left by the shift we were relieving and ordered me to throw it away. If he’d asked me in a way that acknowledged that we were peers, chances are I would have been happy to. But this ordering … not even people with formal rank over me ordinarily ask for things in such an obey or be damned tone. I told him if he wanted it thrown away, he could do it himself. It stayed there until we rotated to new stations.

To me it didn’t seem that obvious. Well, if I’m not finishing jobs fast enough, the problem would seem to have to do with my coordination, manual dexterity, something like that. This idea of owning some sort of adult authority and being willing to let people hate my guts for not giving in to everything they ask for seems separate. But what I’m observing is that as I start to act as if my way of seeing things, my interests, my opinions matter … at least for me, I’ve been showing up with greater confidence. That, in turn, has allowed me to practice my installations and at least in a few cases develop a degree of facility and grace such that I’m keeping pace with the production line, and sometimes I’ll even have time to spare if a coworker is in a jam and can use some help. No, I don’t believe I’ve become a star performer on my team; there are still plenty of processes and skills I haven’t learned. But I’ve mastered enough to keep me going this far. I’ve earned a raise and kept at the job long enough for a cost-of-living wage increase to take effect.

I don’t know if I hadn’t been willing to change some things about how I treat myself and allow others to treat me whether I would have stayed at this job long enough for those positive changes. Yes, I see having been hired there as a lucky break having been set up by the Great Resignation. And for me to thrive there has required me to look at some of the ways I’d always before then set up underearning results, self-sabotage which would have spoiled my opportunity sooner or later.

I’ve more to share about how I’m showing up for myself and teammates and how I came to identify patterns like the compulsive pleasing I’ve described this time. I plan on writing more blog posts. If you found something of value, I invite you to post a response and certainly to visit again soon.