"It's not what happens to you that matters, but how you take it."

OK so I finally clocked that myspace had reinvented itself and stopped hosting blogs. Shows how often I used it. While there is probably a lot of content that can just shuffle quietly off the internet coil.... there are a few posts that I shall "reuse and recycle" - so there may be a few posts while I translate the content.

This time last year I was reading a book called "Control Stress" by Paul McKenna. He quotes Dr Hans Selye as saying

"It is not the event, but rather our interpretation of it that causes our emotional reaction."

I figured I would double check that quote, and the closest I could find was the one I have used as the post title.

"It's not what happens to you that matters, but how you take it."

Hmmmm. Now this was at a time when I have been signalling pretty strongly that things are not good at work - to both my line manager and HR. And spent time looking at stress triggers and so on and so forth. Not much happened as a result. From where I stood it felt that it wasn't a question of sheer workload, it was much more about behaviour. 

 (I did a mind map where the centre said "everything is grim" - I found it the other day.... not much has changed :( )

Then a colleague went off with stress, and another left for a new job. So then we had all the previous complexity and chaos, but exacerbated by 40% less resource in the management team.

So there I was.... stressed. According to Dr Selye I should have been able reframe that... reinterpret it... so that my emotional reaction is different.

What happened next ? Well they appointed a new director, who restructured us and then left. Joy. My job disappeared and my team were split up. Three guesses how I felt.

There still seemed to be a prevalent view that any negative view of what had happened was purely about "point of view". As I said to one of my HR colleagues: if something is a muck heap, I can look at it from any side, from any point of view, it is still a muck heap.