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Guest post by: Jane Straus Become an Author

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The other day a client sat nervously in my office, dismissing her "silly" feelings preemptively with a wave of her hand. “Please explain,” I encouraged.

She pulled a tissue out of the box and dabbed her eyes, looking at the carpet as she spoke. “I’ve had a lot of health problems recently. I don’t want to be a complainer but it’s been a push just to get up in the morning and go to work. Yesterday, my boss just left a stack of work on my desk and walked away without a word.” With that, her voice broke.

“What does that mean to you?” I asked.

“I'm not important to him except for what I can do to make his life easier. He doesn't even see me as a person. The part that really hurts is that he didn't even ask me how I was feeling."

My heart ached. I thought of so many times where I’ve felt that what I did for someone mattered more than who I am, that without having something to offer, I wasn’t worthy. For most of us, the need to heal that one often presents itself at inopportune times and in painful ways. I took her hand. “You can use this as evidence that your boss doesn’t value you or you can tell him how you felt.”

“I’m afraid he’ll just get defensive or think I'm stupid.”

“But it's already what you think he thinks. So what do you have to lose?” As I write about in my book, Enough Is Enough, I believe that what we fear, we project and get mirrored back to us. But we often need a reminder of this so that we can consciously choose to move through our fear and take a stand on our own behalf.

She looked me in the eye as she said, "What I'm really afraid of is that I'm expendable in his eyes. But you're right. If I already feel expendable, what else is there to fear by telling him?"

She could no longer hide behind hurt or confusion anymore; the decision to stay or to leave a working environment that didn’t uphold her worthiness was her responsibility to make. Perhaps the hardest decision she would have to face was how much she was willing to risk in order to value herself.

The woman who walked into my office the next week looked very different. Her shoulders were straighter and she had the confidence that comes with having just met fear with courage. I wondered what I would hear. Had she been fired? Quit?

“He admitted that he’d been a jerk. He said that I was right to be upset. Then he said that he respected me for speaking up. I must have looked pretty skeptical,” she said, “because then he asked how he could prove it to me.”

“What did you say?”

She smiled slowly, “I said, ‘I will just know.'"

“And?”

“The next day he dropped another stack of papers on my desk. But this time he stopped to say good morning and he asked how I felt. I told him fine and, for once, I really meant it. Regardless of the ups and downs of my physical health, my well being is intact."

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