During my last days at the EE (not it’s real name), I had someone tell me that there were so many places in the company that still needed my talent, drive, creativity, and execution of changes. This person, somewhat intuitively considering he didn’t know me that well, suggested that I had stayed too long working for someone who could not match my speed of thought, was conservative in all ways to include being risk averse, was a micro manager and not a leader, and simply was a bad fit and didn’t deserve my loyalty.

Loyalty and unswerving loyalty is, for me, a character defect that I recognize I have. I know I should take a deeper look at it, yet have not to the extent I should. It was certainly not the first time someone said this to me, my brother has said it to me more than once and he also can be like this. In my personal life I can be too loyal to people who don’t deserve it and in some ways I think it is a perverse action of my ego thinking I matter more than I actually do to others. What stung in the statement made to me by this acquaintance was that I  should have been more conscious about staying with a leader that was mediocre and did not match my intelligence, who didn’t like that I led to get results vs micro managed, and should have taken action to take a new role, but I did not. I DID stay working for a leader who didn’t deserve my loyalty and in the end he proved in no uncertain terms that I had zero loyalty from him. I am, right now, angry at myself for letting the cards fall where they did and forcing a layoff that frankly satisfied him in a perverse way and left me happy to get the package vs quitting and not getting the full package but yet it still wounded my ego and reputation.

So let’s analyze THAT. Why didn’t I move on into a new role under a leader who respected me, wanted me on their team, and would be an advocate for me? In a nutshell, I think, because I didn’t really want to be there in the first place. I had been ready to exit for years and felt in my heart that if I pursued further advancement or moving to a new area, that I would find myself in a position of wanting to stay because of rewards, recognition, and some sense of comfort that outweighed the incessant nagging that while I was successful and exceeding numbers and performance, this was never the right use of my talents. I was complacent and using a third of my talent yet exceeded most of the people around me. I had extreme loyalty from my own leaders who reported to me (ironic?) and had cultivated a team that I truly liked. I did bring out the best in most people who worked for me. That said, they worked for me in an industry that I didn’t believe in, that I had no passion about, and that had an ultra conservative culture of mediocrity packaged as more than it was – just repackaging of the same things cycling around the mini planet that was this corporation.

I never planned on staying there for as long as I did, but did. I wish I hadn’t but am glad it is finally over. As I write this, reliving the choices I made, I feel stress. Maybe it is just time to consider the exit taken was the right move and not look back. Maybe this time writing needs to focus on what is ahead of me. Like that this morning I signed up to take a photography course in Ireland and plan on getting a LLC for photography and other small businesses that are doing things I love. Maybe that is where I focus. There will be stress, but stress for things I love and feel passion about, not things that I stay at just for the money.