Leadership is Deciding What Gets Access to You

In 2005, I moved out of my hometown (a small western Pennsylvania steel town) to Pittsburgh for a job in Human Resources. My first real job in HR. I had been working a big girl job for 8 years prior, just not in HR. THIS was my first opportunity to dive in…

I took a pay cut to start my career. I would be working in downtown Pittsburgh.

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For a 28-year-old who had never been away from home like that, I was SO excited!! I hadn’t gone off to college, I was attending the local colleges and universities, so I had never left my hometown to live anywhere else, even temporarily.

But….that excitement started lessening…when I realized what city-living was…I started having to drive 13 miles to work…in traffic.

Living 13 miles outside of the city, that’s nothing, right?

Oh, it’s something…and not to mention the 3-4 lanes of traffic turning into 2 lanes to go through the tunnels entering the city…I really had no idea what traffic was because we didn’t have traffic where I was from, we had cow crossings. I had experienced it traveling, but it didn’t register too much because it was always a one-off and I was usually going on vacation, so a bit of a different energy than going to work.

Photo by Lou Barros on Unsplash

So, my new drive for 13 miles took me 1 hour to get to work. Previously, I never drove more than 20 minutes to work, most recently it was 5 minutes, because I had moved much closer. So, this was an adjustment….

But…that wasn’t all…then I realized I had to pay to park….I’m sorry? I’m paying to go to work? Aren’t you supposed to make money when you go to work? I hate work. I don’t even want to go to work. Now I have to pay to go?!? What in the actual world? Who lives like this?!?!

This was beyond crazy to me….but…lo and behold, it got crazier…in order to afford parking, I had to park across a river and walk across the Smithfield bridge everyday, in all the weather…all year around. And let me remind you that Pittsburgh isn’t known for sunshine and 80 degrees every day. My umbrella would blow inside out on rainy days…and I hated umbrellas to begin with…it was like I entered an alternate universe when I moved, what in the actual hell is going on?

The repeated question: How do people live like this?!?

Then….the drive home, I would always almost have a heart attack as we would be driving 65 and then come to a complete stop on a 4 lane highway. I swore I was going to die on that road. I didn’t understand traffic or how it worked, if we were all trying to get somewhere, why did we stop? If there was no accident, couldn’t everyone just keep moving and get the hell out of the way? We were already through the tunnel, it was smooth sailing from there…or it should have been…

So, as you can imagine, adjusting to all of these things at one time was….challenging. Then I made sure to read not only the Pittsburgh news, but also the news from back home. And it wasn’t just one newspaper, it was the newspaper, the news station, national news…you name it, I was obsessed with it. I think I thought reading the news from back home was comforting, keeping me in the know…but then I just became sad.

I didn’t know what was going on.

Randomly, I broke down in tears in my gynecologist’s office. (Of all places) I had no idea why. She gave me a card for a therapist. I called the therapist and could barely talk. She asked what was going on and I said “I’m just sad.”

So, a few appointments later, I received an anxiety and depression diagnosis and medication to start.

I had to accept the work. It was great exposure to HR and giving me the experience I needed. The people were all amazing. It was so cool to meet all of these great people in the city. The energy was a different level. No one was involved in everyone else’s business, everyone just focused on their own lives. It was refreshing, really. And once I was there, in the building, work was great!

I had to accept the commute, at some point, it just became a way of life. It was part of my day. BUT…I didn’t have to accept that damn bridge, my colleagues told me about a shuttle that ran at the other parking lot that would drive me across that damn bridge. So, I found that and happily rode the shuttle every day, which dropped me off less than 1/2 a block from the front door of my work. Things were looking up.

At some point in early 2006, I realized the negative impact the news was having on my energy. I would come to work in a good mood and then go to the news site and my energy would just…deplete. So I stopped.

Removing the news was the best thing I ever did for myself and it was something that stuck. Every once in a while I would be reminded of how negative it was when I went looking for something I had heard about, it was randomly on at a relative’s house or the TV was just on at my house when the news came on…I can remember thinking “Oh my gosh, everything is awful!” I would turn off the TV and turn on music. My house was filled with music for years, and still is a lot of the time. Though, lately, I’ve come to enjoy silence.

Fast forward to 2017…I’m living in South Carolina, waking up to go to work. I worked for a start-up auto manufacturer at the time. And I had an early call from one of my state partners…he said “Do you know anything about the article in the newspaper?”

I replied, “huh? what article?”

That morning, a local article was printed that said 25% of our applicants were failing drug tests.

I was the Talent Acquisition Manager.

I knew the numbers.

That wasn’t even close to being accurate.

And no one even asked.

Turns out the reporter had been sitting in a presentation where the plant manager used a funnel with placeholder numbers, just an example of what the hiring process could look like. Those made-up numbers became a real headline about drugs in our applicant pool.

That article showed me, first-hand, that the truth doesn’t have to exist for a juicy story to be printed. That was the day I no longer saw integrity in news reporting.

And it further validated why I had gotten so protective of what I ingest. Not because I can’t handle reality, but because I want to stay positive and actually live in my reality, not the one manufactured for clicks.

Now, I turn on the news if a hurricane is coming, but that’s about the only time. And even then, I take what they say with a grain of salt because every impending disaster is world-ending.

I prepare, I stay alert, but I don’t panic.

I have become much more aware of my feelings and the importance of protecting my own energy as I have gotten older. And the news is something I left behind a long time ago, as I experienced first-hand the inaccuracies that can be printed as well as the shift in energy after being exposed to it. People are usually shocked when I say I don’t watch the news. But, I made it! I’m still alive and well over here. And in a much more positive mindset because of it.

Life is hard enough without filling our minds with dread, terror and negativity about things that aren’t even true. My job as a leader and as a human is to stay grounded in my own reality, to make a positive impact where I can and to decide what actually gets access to me.