Dancing Through a Minefield

I am not a person who seeks the limelight . . . except when I am.

I never want to be the center of attention . . . except when I do.

I want to be the maestro orchestrating everything behind the scenes, laboring in obscurity, the woman behind the curtain – the one far enough away to not have to take the actual slugs from the crowd, but still have enough power and control to get things done they way they should. I want to be recognized for all my hard work . . . but not too much.

What IS that? WHY is that? Is it another from of passive aggressiveness? A martyr complex of some sort? “Oh, watch her toil back there in obscurity, oh isn’t she wonderful to work so hard for a pittance?”

Is it because I am ultimately afraid of confrontation? To be out in front means that eventually you have to deal with people who are most unpleasant. I’m into making people happy – I’m a "go along to get along" type gal. You have to take a stand and defend it to people who may not be all that great to responding to reason. That’s why I would never run for office, you have to suffer too many fools – especially when they are standing there yelling at you for things that are so totally not in your power. When I worked on a local County Board race, people would come up to the candidate arguing about the death penalty and abortion and a bunch of other national topics. Um, hello? County Board? Nothing to do with those topics, nowhere NEAR those topics.

Anyway, my new position at work is a bit more political than any I’ve had in the past. Have to deal with people’s personalities, know the history of how we’ve interacted with them in the past, have to try to mend fences for things that were (or weren’t done) years ago, where a lot of residual anger has built up because of it.

Every day I have to tell myself, “They aren’t mad at ME, they are mad at the organization, they are mad at the situation – I can’t undo the baggage of several years of neglect in one interaction.” But it hurts. It is hard. My boss and I are here now and we are trying to do our best to serve our clients. But our clients aren’t having any of it, “We’ve heard this before and it didn’t happen, we give up.” “No. No! We are going to do it! We ARE doing it! See?”

It is very discouraging and I am getting very discouraged. I know that if I get through the next six months it will be fine, I will have reached the next level of my career, I’ll be able to handle so much more, I’ll have some real SKILLS. But I’m not sure if I can handle it in the short term, it is so overwhelming, so scary, so hurtful to think about . . .

We are having a conference in a few weeks which could turn out to be very ugly because there is so much pent up frustration and anger at our organization’s neglect of certain things – and I totally understand it, I’d be ticked off too if I were them – but we’re the ones who have to deal with it and I am . . . scared. I mean this is a situation where certain strong personalities in our field may actually stand up in the middle of meetings and cause a major ruckus because their agendas aren’t being addressed . . .

I’m getting ulcers just thinking about it. Adding insult to injury, my boss and I are the only ones who are taking this threat of ugliness seriously – no one else sees a problem . . . which is part of the larger problem in itself . . .

So, this is going to be a huge confrontation. And a huge opportunity. Will I meet the challenge? Will I be able to finesse the political minefield and start affecting positive change? Or will I end up in a fetal position in a corner and demote myself back to being just a scribe, researcher and jack-of-all-trades? . . .

Has anyone else been through something like this professionally? How did you get through the doubts and the fear? Any advice?