I was assertive,

AMH

and followed my gut feeling. I wanted to have this conversation with my supervisor in person but todays issues with my son made me decide to send the very best email i could so that the issue would not be drawn out and create more negative. The issue was at our last program director meeting (about 14 people) I was on the agenda to talk about a topic briefly that i have experience with, working camp during school dismissals. When the time came i stood with the papers and then my supervisor proceeded to talk over me for the entire topic. So i used only I statements, nothing that said 'you did this' but still addressed that i felt frustrated and embarrassed, I have worked every camp since i started with the organization and my staff has recieved their work requests forms in a timely manner each time (that has been an issue). I also told her that as the designated positive person I give the benefit of the doubt about whatever happened and i wanted to make sure unaddressed issues did not affect our team.

I am doing some important things from home while watching over my son and feel good about addressing the issue. I have a tendancy to not address things however compassion may mean telling her more than avoiding.

Dakini

This is the second time you've posted about unfair or inappropriate treatment by your supervisor. Is there a pattern here? Is there something deeper going on than just these seemingly isolated incidents?

AMH

I am not sure, there is the issue of me being 15 ish years older. And we have different styles of working, management, personality. She tends to act towards staff with write ups and firm talks. I ask and listen first and then am not against documenting actions with write ups. I just had to do 2 recently, but I know these staff better so they did not get a chance to throw crap back at me or otherwise behave badly like they did last year.

I have heard that my personality tends to challenge people even though I am typically considered the most positive and energetic in the room. I am pretty smart and lately have stopped putting those fillers 'like' and 'you know' into my speech. I had one principal that I ended up being the negative target for one year, and at the time I was counseled to try harder to do what she wanted but my gut was screaming to stand up for myself. I was getting told my pre-observation lesson plans were not up to standard, after the 2nd one I asked for an example of one that was correct so I could learn and she could not produce any. The year after i quit she was asked to reture.

The interesting thing was that I took an awesome class called civilized assertiveness for women (there is a book if you are not in Denver). The author and presenter called me twice to follow up about my situation and told me I had no problem with assertiveness, the work environment was just bad. Very nice lady who used to work in education.

I am quite chatty, maybe need to work on a writing project while off work today. There may be a reason to all of this, pushing me to write after all.

Dakini

Confident people can be intimidating to those with hidden self-esteem issues. Who knows what's going on in your supervisor's head? It sounds like she may be operating on a completely different level than you. From a position of control, as opposed to deeper understanding and personnel management.

It can be frustrating when a small-minded superior doesn't appreciate our efforts and talents. Good luck with that.

AMH

Hey Dakini, I had to tell you how it went. In her answer to my email she didn't know what I was talking about. So we met this morning since I was back at work today after my yesterday. So she did recall and I was able to just tell her what happened. It went really well, in fact she knows she does this enough that she may excuse herself from our meetings more and let the program specialists handle the meeting cooperatively instead of her as our supervisor.

Then we had a super good talk, I was able to advocate for my skills and work, and the negative feeling I was having is pretty much handled. I also was able to tell her that I need to earn a lot more money and asked for any support in terms of networks or if she sees any jobs or hears something on the street. She understood, which was very good.

I think i am going to take some aleve now

Dakini

I've checked your other threads. It sounds like everything came together all right in the end. When we're stressed, we can begin to catastrophize in our minds, and make things out to be a lot worse than they really are. The trick is to get our mind to work for us, rather than against us.

Thanks for the update. I like your ideas about new jobs, too (other thread).

MindGate