I am an evolved man. Or, at least I’d like to think I’ve matured a great deal. So, just as a result of the way things have been going I’ve sort of been in a funk lately. I didn’t really realize how stressed I’ve been all week up until a friend suggested it to me. Heck, that might explain why I felt listless yesterday. About mid-morning today I somehow got involved in a bit of an exchange with the team lead. I had to walk away from the situation, so I took my teapot and filled it up. Instead of letting everything stew for the next few hours I went up to him and asked him for the next task. Apparently that was enough to break the ice. We decided to take a coffee break together, and at the Tim Hortons we both just laid the cards on the table.

It was a great exercise for me in terms of maintaining a certain level of objectivity. I am a person that often reacts entirely based on emotion. There are a lot of good things and bad things that occur as a result. On the one hand I’m quite perceptive and have some sense of unspoken things that run beneath the surface. On the other hand, I have a tendency to take things personally, or absorb others’ emotions without much effort. So yeah, as much as I’m good at seeing other people’s points of view, the lines between my experience and theirs can be blurred.

So yeah, I made sure to get him to clarify his stances on certain issues, and made sure he understood where I was coming from. I mean, as much as I’d like to think I’m easy to read, no one is a true mind reader, right? I can’t afford to leave someone like that guessing as to what’s brewing in my head. In the end, we both came out feeling much better. Now, I consider all of this to be quite mature. I know that an older version of me would have just ignored it all and held it inside. In the end, it all just ends up as a messy explosion. By laying it all out, I’m effectively removing any doubt. In the work place, that’s the best thing that can happen. At this point, I’m feeling a bit better about the team and the situation. I can deal with this.

Oh man…I need to work on my mind-to-mouth filter. My manager saw me looking as if I was in an intense moment of thinking. He asked what was up. I shocked myself by telling him that I hated the project that I was working on. He jokingly said: “those are some strong words there.”

Well yeah, that’s how I feel about my current project: I’m just tired of it. However, I can’t believe that I just flat out said that I hated it. Ugh…this time of year is also around the time the annual review gets done.

What the hell was I thinking.