Shola Richards - Making Work Work: The Positivity Solution for Any Work Environment

I almost killed myself.

Just to be clear, Im not talking about accidentally doing thisIm talking about a very real time in my life when I gave some serious consideration to intentionally and purposefully taking my own life.

Ive never shared this with anyone before. People who know me personally are probably finding this information incredibly shocking. After all, Im the guy with the perpetual smile on his face, the champion of all things positive, and a person with a love of life that most people would be hard-pressed to match.

While thats all true today, there was a time in my life when I honestly believed that the only solution to healing the deep, festering, and very well-hidden wounds of my soul was suicide. I can promise you that positivity wouldnt have even made the Top 100 of viable solutions for the broken heap that was my life at the time.

What went wrong? Its not that I was mentally ill, grew up neglected and abused, or ever struggled with depression. Suicidal thoughts arent supposed to come to people like me, right?

Thats what I thought, too, but I was very wrong. I learned a lot about myself on the day those thoughts paid me an unexpected visit, and its from the pain and utter desperation of that suicidal moment that the book youre about to read was born.

Like millions of people in this world, my story begins with an experience that far too many of us can relate to: going to work at a soul-destroying job.

Im no stranger to terrible jobs. If you can think of a workplace horror story, Id be willing to wager an ice-cold beer of your choice that Ive experienced something that is equally as bad, or I have witnessed someone else on the wrong end of something that is equally as bad.

Vicious bullying, physical violence, sexual harassment, overt racism and sexism, egregious abuses of power, constant rudeness and incivilityyou name it and Ive seen it in my career. Unfortunately, thats exactly the problem. For me, it was impossible to witness this type of behavior on a consistent basis without losing a sizable chunk of faith in the human race each time it happened.

Over ten years ago, I worked at a particularly horrific job, one that gave me a front-row seat for most of the life-destroying behaviors mentioned above. I also witnessed the effects that those behaviors can have on people, including me.

Most of my coworkers at this particular job seemed resigned to the pitiful fate of spending each day dodging the bullies, accepting deep-seated job dissatisfaction, and judging their days success on whether they remained sane by the five oclock quitting time. Each day started with the same sorry goal in mind: survival. On and on it went: Lather, rinse, repeat. It didnt take me long to realize that jobs like this only had one purposeto slowly strip the humanity away from each of us until we unwillingly became helpless and mindless zombies.

I believed that this pitiful fate was not going to happen to me. I will never become a zombie like them, I would say to myself defiantly as I looked down my nose at the broken souls in the cubicles next to me. Unfortunately for me, even though I fought valiantly, as the weeks turned into months and the months turned into years, I could feel my humanity slowly slipping away with each passing day that I worked there.

It is very challenging for me to explain how I felt each morning when the alarm clock went off in preparation for another workday. But the best way to describe that sickening feeling is soul-destroying pain.

That is not meant for dramatic effect.

Each day before work, I would sit in the parking lot and stare at my watch (which was perfectly synchronized with the office clock), and literally wait for the last possible second before I would leave my car and pitifully drag myself inside the office to deal with three spirit-crushing constants for eight hours straight: (1) being treated in a subhuman fashion by the leadership, (2) being expected to happily accept any and all forms of horrific customer abuse or risk being fired, and (3) dealing with a toxic culture of bullying, incivility, gossip, and backstabbing from 90 percent of the people who worked there.

With the exception of my first month on the job, I dealt with the aforementioned reality of that miserable existence every day I worked there. And I worked there for two long years. I might still even be there if it werent for the life-changing, and nearly life-ending, moment that completely transformed me forever.

When my alarm clock went off on that nondescript autumn morning, I noticed something that was very different about me. Instead of feeling the usual fear, dread, or soul-destroying pain that were my constant companions for close to two years, all those feelings had mysteriously vanished.

Little did I know it at the time, but this was not a good thing.

Instead of feeling pain, I woke up feeling nothing. My pain was replaced by complete and utter emptiness. It was such a bizarre feeling, and unless youve ever felt complete emotional emptiness before, you might not grasp what youre about to read. Absolutely nothing mattered to me anymore. My job didnt matter to me. My girlfriend (who is now my lovely wife and the mother of my two equally lovely little girls) didnt matter to me. My parents, friends, and loved ones didnt matter to me. My happiness didnt matter to me. My life didnt matter to me.

On that day, I knew what it was like to have my soul destroyed.

The normally enthusiastic, life-of-the-party, and boundlessly energetic guy who loved to make everyone smile was effectively dead inside. I officially became one of the companys soulless zombies who would mindlessly support its mission until I was too old and broken down to do it anymore. The company had won and I had lost. Even though I was fully aware of this fact, and even though I swore that I would never become one of the companys zombies, at that point, I was too emotionally devastated to care.