I spend far too many hours each week consulting and coaching staffers who are uninspired and minimally productive. And the reason is not because each lacks professionalism; it is because they don’t understand balance in their lives.
Businesses exist for one reason: to make profits. Businesses seek only to perpetuate themselves. It’s all about return dollars to the people who have taken the risks of financing them; or to those who re-sell their products or services. They are not in business for charity, and they don't pretend to be. Therefore, any victimizing you experience as a result of your connection to a business institution has probably come about because you allowed it to happen.
If you believe a business – your employer - owes you some kind of loyalty and ought to reward your long service with a lot of benefits to you as a person, then you are carrying around groundless illusions. Companies will pay you for your services until you can no longer deliver the services it needs, and then you will be dismissed. And that separation will be done as cheaply as possible.
I don’t want to sound cynical, or hardened, but this is business in our western culture; it is simply the way things are. Whenever you become an employee of a company, this is what you are agreeing to accept. Even if it has such things as pension plans, profit sharing, incentive programs, or any other devices designed to hold on to employees, the fact remains that when a company doesn't need you any more, you will be replaced, and every effort will be made to get rid of you as cheaply as possible.
Companies simply do what they are designed to do, and I am not criticizing them. I use these companies to my benefit. But you are not a company. You are a human being who breathes and feels and experiences life. You do not have to be upset about the way businesses operate, nor do you have to commit yourself slavishly to institutions just because you are encouraged to do so by company spokesmen who stand to gain by your self-victimizing loyalty. The man who retires after devoting fifty years of untiring service to a company, and receives a gold watch and a small pension for his lifetime of devotion, has not been victimized by the company. It owes him nothing, so he should feel grateful for the watch and move on. He did his job and received his paychecks, and the company received its services. That is the way it is supposed to be. But the retiree has been victimized if he has devoted himself beyond normal requirements and sacrificed his own personal goals and his family activities, because institutions do nothing but continue, whether you kill yourself for them or simply see them as ways for you to make your living.
HERE ARE SOME COMMON VICTIM GAMES:
Listen to the full broadcast:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/vongoodwin/2012/06/24/how-work-works
Special thanks to Wayne Dyer