Tag: love
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“We Trust You to Manage Your Own Time” Means You’re Always On
“We trust you to manage your own time.” It sounds empowering.Modern.Adult. But in a lot of workplaces, it’s not trust. It’s removal of boundaries. Freedom Without Protection This phrase usually arrives alongside flexibility. Work from anywhere.Set your own hours.Take ownership. But what quietly disappears is the end of the workday. No clear start.No clear finish.Just…
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“Let’s Circle Back” Is How Problems Go to Die
“Let’s circle back.” It sounds collaborative.Non-confrontational.Reasonable. But in most workplaces, it means one thing: This is not getting fixed. The Soft Dismissal “Let’s circle back” usually appears when something uncomfortable is raised. A broken process.An unrealistic deadline.A decision that doesn’t make sense. No one argues with you.No one disagrees. They just delay. And delay is…
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The Day You Realise They Never Intended to Keep You
There’s a moment in some jobs where the illusion quietly collapses. Nothing dramatic happens.No argument.No HR meeting. Just a small, almost forgettable interaction that makes everything click. And once it does, you realise something uncomfortable: They never planned for you to stay. The Long-Term Talk That Never Happens Think back. How many times have you…
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You’re Not “Hard to Manage”… You’re Just Hard to Exploit
There’s a label managers love to use when an employee stops playing along. “Difficult.”“Challenging.”“Hard to manage.” It usually appears right after you do something unforgivable — like asking for clarity, questioning priorities, or noticing that expectations keep changing while rewards never do. Let’s be clear: you didn’t suddenly become difficult.You just stopped being convenient. When…
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“We’re Just Not There Yet”: The Corporate Phrase That Means Never
There’s a phrase that should instantly trigger your fight-or-flight response. You’ve heard it in one-to-ones.You’ve heard it in performance reviews.You’ve heard it just after you’ve gone above and beyond for the third quarter in a row. “We’re just not there yet.” Not there yet for the promotion.Not there yet for the raise.Not there yet for…
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How Being Good at Your Job Turns You Into a Dumping Ground
Nobody tells you this when you start your career, but being good at your job can be one of the worst things that happens to you in corporate. Not because competence is bad, but because in the wrong environment, competence is not rewarded. It is exploited. At first, it feels positive. You get trusted. People…
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“We’ll Revisit This Later” Is Corporate for “Nothing Is Changing”
There’s a sentence every underpaid high performer eventually learns to dread. “We’ll revisit this later.” It sounds reasonable. Sensible, even. Calm. Like progress is happening quietly in the background. It isn’t. It’s a polite way of ending the conversation without solving anything. A soft close on a door that was never open to begin with.…
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The Moment You Realise You’re the Only One Who Cares About Doing Things Right
There’s a moment in every corporate career when you realise you are the only person in the room who cares about doing things properly. Not quickly. Not cheaply. Not in a way that makes leadership smile at a dashboard. But properly. It hits you slowly, then all at once. You’re in yet another meeting where…
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When You Stop Caring (And Nobody Notices)
It doesn’t happen in one dramatic moment. There’s no single day when you slam your laptop shut and declare you’ve had enough. It happens slowly. Quietly. A little more each week until one day you realise something that used to matter deeply now feels like nothing at all. You stop caring. And the scary part?…
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The Day You Realise You Cannot Do Corporate Anymore
It does not happen all at once. At first, you convince yourself the frustration is normal. Every job has bad days. Every company has politics. Every boss has flaws. You tell yourself it will get better. You tell yourself to stick it out. But then one day, something shifts. A meeting, a comment, a decision…
The Toxic Boss 