Being Assertive with My Supervisor - For My Professional Health and Well-Being

Oo-ee. Yesterday was a day for the rollercoaster that represents my emotional state! I am going to blame the BEAUTIFUL full moon that I got to watch set during my commute, but, to be completely honest, this has been coming for quite some time. It has been pretty evident in my blog posts lately, and I finally figured out how to fix some of the issues with my work place, so I did it!

I was steeping in a stew of jealousy and boredom and feelings of inadequacy and imposter syndrome and frustration and difficulty breathing. Basically, I was letting my emotional mind run the show yesterday. I don't like it when I sink into my emotional depths, so I decided to get out the stew and do something about how I was feeling.

Now, if you have read my blog before, you probably know most of what is in the next paragraph. Feel free to completely skip it if you want to get to the meat of this post.

New to this blog? Here is some background about me... I'm a music therapist with 29.5 years of professional practice and 26 years of practice in my particular facility. I have two degrees in music therapy, tried for a third and gave it up for lots of different reasons. I work with children and adolescents and young adults who have a variety of educational and societal needs. Society and educational institutions are not equipped to work with these kids. I am. I am an internship director, and I usually end up being really bored when my interns are the ones with the most interaction with clients and when my role changes from therapist to supervisor. I am an author, crafter, creator, singer, cornet-ist, musician, therapist, aunt, sister, and daughter. I do not like summer and tend to have Seasonal Affective Disorder during the summer months. There - that's the intersection of information that you might want to have to understand why this is such a big deal for me.

So, I was sitting in my office space, listening to my interns having fun with my clients, and just finding myself incredibly bored with what I had available to keep myself occupied. I was, as aforementioned, stuck in a completely irrational jealousy fit thinking that someone did something that I did not agree with and was upset about. (It turned out to be completely unfounded, but my emotional stew just pulled that particular ingredient in and stirred it all up.) I was frustrated with myself. I was frustrated with my supervisor. I was feeling like there were more questions than answers for things, and that no one was even caring that I had ideas and things that I wanted to share. All of that came out, and, after crying it out a little bit, I decided that I needed to be more pro-active with my (still relatively) new supervisor and let him know that I needed some different opportunities to be involved in the facility.

I stopped by his office during a transition to get an individual for a session. He indicated that he might be available during the 30 minutes I had free during the day, and that he would stop by if he wasn't available at that time. We happened to find each other in the hallway at the appointed time, so sat down.

I told him, straight out, "I'm bored." I am. Work is boring for me right now. We are getting ready to put together a new program that will change how almost everyone does their job, but there are no answers because people aren't involving us in the way we can work with this new program. I have been bursting with ideas for this program, and no one can make a decision. Something else that you might want to know about me is that I am someone who loves puzzles, problems, and finding answers to impossible situations. I am happiest when I need to figure something out, so I am ready to be challenged... Anyway, I mentioned that I had figured out five different ways we could incorporate the specialists to increase leisure skill programming with our young adults in the post-graduate program. He liked it. I mentioned that I was able to arrange a curriculum scope and sequence for a program that we needed. I can write lesson plans. I can take a series of concepts and create materials to help students with different needs in the areas of visual acuity, level of difficulty, and other characteristics of learners both known and unknown. I enjoy doing that stuff, and I feel like I would be able to continue to do my music therapy position and these projects as well, even when I do not have interns.

So, I will be communicating with the teachers for our kids who do lots of specific tasks to start developing some new work boxes and file folder tasks. I will get to organize it the way I want to so that teachers can find what they need easily and share these tasks between classes.

This series of thoughts boils down to one...

I want to be useful at work.

I am going to start with ideas today. My brain has been clicking with things that could work. I have already started a list in my brain of things that I might want to have collected by others to help with this project. I also bought some rainbow colored bowls, cups, and plates to make a set of tasks for my own music therapy space. I don't know what goals we are working towards at this time, but I have some ideas for keychain assembly kits and craft kits as well as tasks that require multiple steps so one student can sort, the next could count. the next could assemble the kit, the last could prepare it for shipping. There are many ways to arrange and coordinate such tasks.

I now have a project. I was able to indicate to my supervisor that I was wanting to be more than just the music therapist stuck far away because of the noise. I am going to work in projects both at work and here at home. I figure that I can sell materials that I make on my Teachers Pay Teachers store site and get a little bit of revenue from my intellectual property. I can also use some of the things that I naturally hoard. I have so much stuff that regular people (I hear - I don't know many) throw out. I will get to use my hot glue gun! So excited!!

Anyway, there are times when you have to get out of your own way. No one but me knew how dissatisfied I was with my work role. If you do not tell people this information, how are they supposed to know??

Happy Friday. I've already been grocery shopping (oof - the inflation is really noticeable there) and started the laundry. It is nowhere near finished, but at least it is started. Think about what you want or need and then take some steps to get what you need...