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Survival Tool#13: Embrace Your Inner Creator
Toxic Workplace Survival Guy is under no illusions.
When you find yourself subject to the arbitrary whims of a vindictive, authoritarian, micro-manager, it’s very hard to see beyond the injustice and absurdity of the situation, or imagine how it might be helping you to grow.
Your first priority is to build a network of supporters outside your toxic workplace who see you for who you really are — and can witness your progression through this debilitating ordeal with as much compassion as they can muster.
Toxic workplaces are painful.
There are no shortcuts.
There are no easy answers.
As Lissa Rankin argued so beautifully in the latest edition of The Body is A Trailhead, you deserve to be supported in your struggle — not told you can just think your way out of it, or that it’s all happening for your highest good.
And yet, if we’re going to survive, we have to start reclaiming every grain of agency we can find.
That means that how we frame our predicament to ourselves matters.
Finding New Angles
It’s vital to examine our beliefs about the situation and its protagonists.
That way, we can jettison inaccurate assumptions, and explore our predicament from fresh angles.
We discover we have more options than we realised, and begin to navigate with greater skill.
That’s where frameworks such as Stephen Karpman’s work on the Drama Triangle (Survival Tool#12: Escape Your Drama Triangle), or the work of psychologist Ramani Durvasula on grandiose, communal and covert narcissism, can provide such important frameworks for making sense of what’s happening to us day-to-day. (Survival Tool Number#8: See Through the Confusion).
In the last edition of Toxic Workplace Survival Guy, we explored the basic Victim, Perpetrator, Rescuer dynamic in the Drama Triangle — and how this forms the basic building block of the toxic workplace.
In this edition, I want to offer a reframe created by David Emerald in his succinct book The Power of TED (*The Empowerment Dynamic).
Emerald shows how we can transform the roles of the Drama Triangle into more empowered alternatives:
Victims become Creators: The Creator stance is the opposite of victimhood: It’s about tapping into your passion, developing a vision, and pursuing a desired outcome. The key is to focus on things in life that hold meaning and purpose, and take gradual steps toward the outcomes that you’re trying to achieve.
“A creator is vision focused and passion motivated,” Emerald writes. “To really live into your Creator self, you’ll have to do the inner work necessary to find your own sense of purpose and passion — whatever touches your heart and holds meaning for you.”
Perpetrators become Challengers: The Challenger helps you to see life’s painful experiences as opportunities for learning, growth and development. Although
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