One of the factors that Adam talked about was Delivering Quality Work, and I feel as if I have many examples from my early twenties when I was a high school math teacher that I could draw on to exemplify this tenet. But across all of those examples, there were some generalizable conditions that I now know to avoid. Basically, the situation was that I was too overworked in order to do a good job. The last year that I taught, I had such an intense workload that even though I was working 7 days a week, sometimes from 8am – 8pm, I would still not be able to get everything done – that was, even the basics of preparing a lesson that I felt totally confident about. Often times this meant I had to teach when not fully prepared, which caused me to have severe anxiety and stress me out to the point where I would become physically ill. I think it was more like, I was stressed because I was so anxious about not meeting my own standards. In that situation, it felt very much like the end of the world to me, because I took the job so seriously and I put so much of myself into the students’ education that any failure on their part felt like a failure of mine, and me not being able to execute at what I knew to be my best felt like I was betraying them or ruining their life.
Luckily I have a different relationship to myself and my paid work now, and I am also choosing a career where I don’t have to shoulder the burden of the government’s failure to provide basic resources to a healthy society (the reason I was so overworked was because there weren’t enough teachers hired, so I had to take on more than what a single teacher should take on). Today, I have no fear in leaving a job that isn’t allowing me to do my best work. I already know that I have the highest standards for myself, and I feel very competent and capable of meeting them. I mean, I will stay up all night if I have to. I take great pleasure in doing a good job, that is something that’s always been me. But if it’s due to unfair working conditions, then I say, f that. I think the reason that I am this way now is that between those early days as a teacher and now, I’ve really built up my confidence as a creative. Now, I know what my best looks like, at any given time, because I know my limits. And I know how to protect those limits as an artist, and it requires me to constantly say no. I hope I transmute this knowing when I again return to the corporate world, since that is different from being an artist. But I think I will.