Feelings, nothing more than feelings

I am consumed by my "feelings" lately. They keep me up at night, the bog my brain while I am trying to read or work. Even while I was cooking (or attempting to cook) last night my mind was fixated on my feelings. It is so frustrating how easily rattled I am at work lately. These past few weeks have been very trying but I think I have held myself together well and my composure has been quite cool. Towards the end of the day I had a semi-altercation with a contractor for our practice in front of several of my staff and I am still frustrated about it. I lost my cool and sort of took myself down to her level. I felt threatened though and it deemed necessary that I protect my staff and myself as she was being pretty vocal about our inability to perform or follow orders. I am a totally sensitive bunny when it comes to not doing things 100% right. I have done a fabulous job lately at realizing there is only so much I can accomplish in a day and that I can't really beat myself up about every little thing.

Yesterday though I was feeling good and it seemed like things were starting to fall in place well. I feel annoyed at myself that I am even caring this much about something so trivial in the big picture of things. I don't like someone coming into my office for a couple hours a week and telling me that I am not doing my job. Don't dictate to me what is important if you don't have a full breadth of this practice. I could feel this persons negative energy when she entered the practice and I should have recognized this and tried to calm the situation down. Throwing lighter fluid onto the fire does not help anyone or anything.

Now I have had some time to sit and analyze the situation. I am doing some research into the supposed problems that created the situation. There was nothing that was performed incorrectly. This person had everything in their hands and it was correct. What I failed to do was to take a big breath and look at the complaints in a more thorough fashion. I was not given the opportunity to do that yesterday as our discussion quickly became heated before I could look at the initial complaint. I am sitting here realizing that I did do my job right; that my staff performed at my request and at the request of this contractor. Where I failed was to be able to calmly assess the situation and show her the information that she assumed she was missing.

My job is to run a medical practice. I am the Office Manager. I am not big on titles and I often just tell people I work for a Dermatology practice. Nobody really likes the manager of an office. They are the bad guy, the one who has to police everyone. I don't work that way though; I don't carry an imaginary bat that is ready to strike when someone makes an error. I have expectations, but they are reasonable and everyone here at my office maintains these expectations daily. My feelings/emotions/control issues have just got to calm down. I am seriously learning my deep breathing techniques, along with screaming, "Don't Stop, Believing" by Journey in the car as I drive to work. "Some will win, some will lose. Some were born to sing the blues." I don't really want to sing the blues anymore. My TGIF for this week is to find gratitude that I am a kick ass employee, wife, friend, daughter and human being.