Give Yourself an A to Stay Motivated Despite Your Bad Boss

One of the biggest challenges you face with a Bad Boss is the complete lack of boss-given inspiration or motivation. Yet only when you are inspired, will you remain sufficiently engaged to do your best work--and succeed.

Your Bad Boss not only won’t inspire you to your best self, prime demoralizer you’re your boss is, he/she is completely incapable of it. No worries--you can keep the drive alive by motivating yourself!

I came across a wonderful idea that Benjamin Zander, college professor uses with his students, operating in the competitive and arduous world of classical music. “On the first day of class he announces that everyone has already been given an A for the semester. Their responsibility is to 1) document why they have earned that grade in a letter written in the past tense and 2) act as an A student throughout the duration of the semester. Giving each student an A on the first day of class has revolutionized his students’ lives. Benjamin Zander and  Rosamund Stone Zander report in their book that Benjamin Zander's students’ performance in the classroom and on stage improved over their previous performance.”

Use this approach to motivate yourself! Give yourself an A for whatever project or task you’ve been assigned, take a minute or two to jot down why you earned that A, and then spend the rest of the duration of that project or task behaving like a A student.

You’ll amaze yourself at how much easier it is to perform at your very best, when you’ve set yourself up mentally to do just that.

Even if you have the very baddest of Bad Bosses.