You are offered a nice job position, in a nice communication agency, well located. You feel great.This was supposed to be the biggest announcement of 2019 so far.
First day : everyone is smiling at you, welcoming, but you don’t know how to act, feeling everyone’s look upon you. 15 days later, you’re done. Nobody speaks to you.
My first (and peculiar) reaction : asking Google about that. Because that state of loneliness hit me so hard that something in my head told be to check on the internet if I could share this with other people. I found several psychological/kind of depressing articles, but didn’t find anything appropriate. These were just a bunch of people complaining without giving advices about it.
Being connected to a social circle has never been so important as far as Facebook, Twitter Instagram or Snapchat have (or at least one of them) taken over our lives. (Really ?). But Internet is another problem.
At work, indifference is the greatest contempt
People at work can be even more cruel and can really destroy you for no particular reason. When you’re highly implicated, work hard, do the best you can and all of a sudden you feel so bad because you see people gathering themselves to talk, make private jokes, working (or acting like working) closely together, trust me, it is normal to feel left behind.
Welcome to ostracism. A land where your imagination is tortured everyday. It is not about being sensitive, because sensitivity is different from one person to another. It is strictly about being ignored.
So how can you handle at work ?
Right now, your boss is not talking to you anymore, and you’re one of these scared “millenial” that thinks that work should be a place where you can express yourself, in a blossoming workspace, with some intricate and thrilling frameworks, imagining stories that matters. And you’re not doing any of these things. You’re not fitting to the work spirit of the company, and now, panic-stricken.
All social interactions with your coworkers are slowly going down, to the point of not even saying “hello/goodbye”. It’s going wrong for real. And this ostracism can lead to depression, because feeling useless and hopeless
1 — Stop complaining
Did I mention that I’m French ?
I think it is truly specific to my country. People are complaining every minute in advertising/digital agencies. About clients, about emails, about the amount of work, about the boss… This is clearly annoying. Their time spent complaining could be used doing real-work no ?
So if you’re being ostracized, be strong, and simply face this fact as it is. Being down-to-earth is very useful when facing that kind of situation. It is important to visualise the situation to better go forward and being less stressful.
2 — Dig up your mind
Ok so, now that you have understood the situation, let the anger and worries go and stop trying to make clumsy conclusions or getting ahead of yourself, asking “but why is this happening, what did I do, did I made something wrong, maybe I’m not good enough…” In every overrated advertising agencies, people are mostly the same, so you will face this situation in every one of them. Just sayin’. I’ve been working in agencies for 4 years, and it’s been exactly the same, most of the people are faking work.
“Think outside the box, make things that change things” (and other posh mottos), they said. Agencies are mainly copy and paste. They are baking and re-baking ideas since 1980’s, but with higher prices, using the same Istock / Getty / Shutterstock/ Thinkstock image banks. Using the same reportings with so low Facebook interactions, not even asking themselves what people would like to see when interacting with brands. It is really funny since I’m writing this from my desk, in a nice advertising agency, observing people writing emails, sending Gif or tagging themselves on the last Tasty recipe on Facebook.
If you are feeling alone and like you’re in the spam box, it’s seriously no big deal. You have now time to think about yourself and step back at how different you are, simply by speaking your mind and asserting yourself .
3 — Just do something else with your free time
Now that you are barely transparent, you can do things far more interesting than nothing.
Meaning : “Great ! I’m out of this sham and mockery system.”
Read, take time for yourself, leave your phone, learn something you didn’t know. In a nutshell, be curious.
If you read this, you can now take a deep breath and play down the situation. And if you want more cool, follow me 🙂
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