My son's really struggling with this job now

How is he feeling today?

Thank you for asking, Kureha. He's asleep right now, but last night when he got home from work he was pretty agitated and irritable. We talked for a while and he calmed down before he went to sleep.

His main distress seemed to be that some of the calls are unpleasant. He says there are three factors that determine how well a call goes: 1. how nice the caller is; 2. whether or not he knows the answer; and 3. whether he's mentally prepared to deal with someone. I suggested ways he could improve all those factors.

He says other calls are very pleasant and he feels good about them. Then he has the bad ones, and those seem to be the ones that rivet this attention. I think he could have 20 good calls and 1 bad call, and he'd think only about the bad call.

My policy is: Don't take anything personally. I actually have two signs with those words on my refrigerator. One on the front, and one on the side. It's extremely hard to do, because we want to make everything about ourselves. But the things other people do and say aren't about us. It's about them. If we can truly understand this, we can have incredible peace.

He brought up "don't take anything personally" while we were talking last night. How can he not take it personally when the caller seems rude or impatient? So, I told him, you can say the same exact thing to ten different people and get ten different reactions. It's not about you or what you said. It's about the other person. Something inside them makes them react so. If one caller is pleasant and patient and the next caller is rude and critical, it has nothing to do with my son.

It's a hard concept to really take in and work with, but I know from personal experience that it will give you a lot of freedom if you can implement it.

I do that a lot - sometimes when it isn't even about me.

Some people are just like that though as well.

I hope his next day goes better

Yep. I think it's human nature to personalize things. I feel happier since I've learned not to. Of course, I can't always manage it, but the more I try, the better I get at it - and the happier I feel!

I hope so too. He works this evening.

He's so funny, because he vacillates between "I want to quit" and "I wish I were still working fulltime." Last night he apologized and said it must be frustrating for me to listen to him. But I don't feel frustrated. This is just the human experience. There's good and bad in everything. We want more good and less bad, of course, but we have to take the bitter with the sweet. It's not what happens to us that's important. It's how we react to what happens to us.

This is how we learn to work with our minds, and it's a lifelong effort.

I symptathize a great deal with your son. As I said, I also have a job where I'm on the phone a lot, and in a "telemarketer" type of way. It's my job to call all the patients and get them to come for diabetes education. It varies between people. Some are newly diagnosed and in denial. Others are having extremely high blood glucose levels which make them irritable and volitile. Some thing education is stupid and they don't want to change. Others are very pleasant, some are "reserved to their fate," and others won't even talk to me and avoid the calls. My favorite calls are the ones that the patients make to me, because that shows they are motivated. Or the ones where I just leave a message and don't have to deal with them.

Like I said, when people just pick up the phone and hang it up on me, that really gets to me. I can't stand that type of rudeness. At least say no thanks. Once a guy asked me if I "speak English" because he thought I was a telemarketer. I've lived in the same region of the US my whole life, so.... it was very weird and made me really angry to be treated that way. It's hard to deal with difficult people in general, but when I'm on the edge of an episode, it really gets me.

Other things that bug me are giving directions to our office. For some reason this makes me extremely aggitated and angry. I can't figure out why. Just... dealing with the phone in general really gets to me.... So, it's ironic this is my job and I've been doing it 5 years.

Costello, my T gave me this list concerning how my mindset can distort the reality. Maybe this can help your son in reframing things.

Definitions of Cognitive Distortions

1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

2. OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

3. MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water.

4. DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusions.

a. Mind Reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out.

b. The FortuneTeller Error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already established fact.

6. MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHIZING) OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement). Or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.”

7. EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."

8. SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

9. LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of over-generalization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He’s a damn louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

10. PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as the cause of some negative event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

[From: Burns, David D. Feeling Good. Morrow, 1980]

I feel for you, dark heart. I seldom use the phone at work. I guess when I do, I don't really have much of a problem with it. I can't say I like it, but it's so rare that it isn't a significant source of stress for me.

Sometimes people call when I'm on reference. When my office phone rings, it's almost always a misdial (my number is one off from the main switchboard). Occasionally I get the hang up calls in my office, because they wanted a different office. As you say, it would be nice if they'd at least say, "I'm sorry. I misdialed." Or sometimes people start asking me about financial aid or admissions or whatever. I used to patiently redirect them. Now that we have caller id, I don't even answer the phone in my office unless I know the number.

When people are rude, I just remind myself that that isn't who that person is. That's just how they're acting at the moment. Maybe if you caught them on a different day, they'd act better. Or maybe they just don't have good emotion regulation skills. Or maybe they're just unhappy people.

That's the one I come back to when I can't find any other way to extend compassion to the other guy. I just remind myself: Happy people don't act this way. That helps me to remember that this person is suffering and needs my compassion not my condemnation.

Thanks, cyber. I love this kind of thing. CBT is the first 'self-help' type of thing I did for myself that made any difference. I have a list similar to this one on my refrigerator door. It's getting worn and wrinkled now, so I think I'll print off your list and replace mine. Maybe if my son sees a fresh, clean sheet of paper, it will draw his eye. (There's no way I could just give this to him to read. He simply won't accept anything in writing. One of his quirks. But maybe if he notices it himself ...)

It's interesting you use the word 'reframing,' because that's one of the concepts I've been hammering on with my son. (My sister - who is one of the most upbeat people I know - is a master of reframing. I don't care what disaster befalls her. She immediately sees how fortunate it is that this has happened! She reminds me of the kid who got the barn full of horse poop for Christmas and grabbed a shovel and started digging for the pony. )

Anyway he brought 'reframing' up last night, saying he doesn't get it. So, we talked a bit about it. He says it's too hard. I'm not discouraged, though, because a lot these things seem too hard when you start working with them. The fact that he's thinking about it and talking about it is a good sign IMO.

I hope today goes ok

I do too. He looked pretty miserable this morning. Very quiet. Just sitting and staring.

When I mentioned I was going to take the dog to the dog park, he said he'd like to come along, so maybe it's not all bad.

Hi , Costello. I work in a call center. The last one was too stressful and the Associate Director was insensitive when my brother died. I'd worked there 4 years. Now i work at a better, more supportive one. I know what it's like when someone you love is hurting and struggling. It's difficult because you can't do aVulcan mind meld and you have to let them work it out.

Thanks, likewater. I do sometimes wish I could just open up his skull and tinker around in there a bit. Just a few tiny adjustments.

Oh, we're back to the job not going well again. So, quickly we went from "Cool, I'm going to get an apartment" to "I can't stand this job." He sounds really depressed.

Oh no. See, it's good you're talking him into waiting on the apartment. He needs to feel good at his job first. I wish I knew how to help him feel better about it. It's not fun to be depressed at work.

Last night they told him he needed to shorten his calls. The very next call after that was someone who just didn't understand what my son was telling him to do. So it took a looooooonnnnggg time. Then another guy kept asking him why he should buy one of their products. My son would tell him why, then he'd ask again. Over and over. My son didn't know how to get out of the loop.

ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

Because your son's job wanted him to shorten his calls your son immediately says that his job isn't going well. He has to understand that ALL jobs take corrective action in their employees to make them efficient in what they do to compete in the business world. Perhaps your son can do a mock phone call with you concerning those type of calls, a rehearsal, to help him better deal with them in the future.

Yep. Any criticism at all wounds him.

Life has ups and downs. You can't let either one suck you in too much.

It doesn't help that right after he was told that he ended up with two difficult calls... since he is new still, tell him the right thing to do now is to ask for assistance to learn the proper technique to shorten calls, especially with a difficult customer. This will make him look proactive in taking up their suggestions.

I get into the same mind-set so it's hard to see from the inside sometimes. I have been working on learning skills like this for a long time.

That's what I suggested to him. He's not really a salesperson although they do have salespeople available. I wonder if he could transfer someone like the second guy over to sales and get on with the next call.

Well, yesterday was a better day at work. So, he came home feeling better. I think he's just going to have adjust to the idea that there are good days and there are bad days.

Well, it takes time. Whenever something goes wrong I tend to start worrying like that too. Of course, my job does give me some reason to do that, because they do write me up and sometimes for really stupid things. Last year was the first year I went a whole 12 months without a write up in 5 years....

I think maybe the best thing you can do is just be his support system when he has a bad day. Maybe knowing he can always talk to you about it will help him get through.