Bloom Where You’re Planted

Bloom Where You’re Planted

Discover the power to bloom where you’re planted in our insightful blog. Shift your focus and embrace personal growth and happiness

Many times, we focus on how hard it is to find a job, but too many times it turns out that the hardest thing for many of us is keeping a job.  Inevitably, once you start a new position in the hopes that you have left behind various problems at an old company, the honeymoon will end, and the grass will once again start looking greener elsewhere.  The reason this subject is important enough to blog about is that we see it happening on hundreds and hundreds of resumes every single day.  As we discussed in “The Tale of Two Employees” blog, this ultimately hurts your prospects for successfully advancing your career, because it causes your resume to paint the wrong picture about you; one of unreliability and perpetual dissatisfaction.

To be sure, there are problems at every company that are not of your making, nor within your capability to fix.  The very same thing could be said about your family, the schools you attended, your community, your State, even your Country, and yet here we are, nonetheless.  A few years ago, I happened to strike up a conversation with a stranger, who I discovered was also from out of state.  I expressed that I was having a hard time coping with some cultural differences, and she said she once had the same problem, until somebody told her to stop complaining and “bloom where you’re planted”.

That conversation had a profound effect on me.  There are so many things in life we like to believe we have control over, and while people generally believe we have control over our own happiness, still we tend to believe our happiness is dependent on other things being perfect, being done properly, honorably, to our liking.  Our spouses, kids, coworkers, bosses, and complete strangers should treat us the way we expect, people around us should work hard and competently, and we should get the things we want, otherwise we feel justified in complaining about our lot in life and constantly looking for more, for better situations.  

Of course, if someone else treating us better, or having a better work/home situation, is really what it takes to make us happy, then the truth would be that our happiness really IS out of our own control, and that leaving an unpleasant situation is always the best solution (which it may be in cases of personal endangerment).   I’m not going to throw statistics at you, but let’s just say the numbers show this isn’t the way it really works, because people leave jobs all the time – nobody seems to have found the perfect company, otherwise we’d all be standing in line to work there!  The real way it works is for you to decide whether to spend your life expecting an “inpouring”, or whether you want to instead become an “outpouring”.  

Are you a Tumbleweed, or a Bloomer?

We all have people around us, either at home or at work, who are in the “inpouring” state; they want better things to come their way, as do we all.  We can never do things to their satisfaction, never keep them happy for long, never quell their complaints, and daily their dissatisfaction splashes all over us.  The inpouring state is one of sadness and frustration, “Why aren’t things I want coming to me?”, “When is it my turn?”, “Why are people such punks?”.  I used to ask those questions too, until I started learning to bloom where I was planted.  Blooming means letting your truest, happiest nature shine through, even in demanding situations, and discovering that it is the very blooming of your own happiness that makes those situations easier to overcome.  To bloom is to become an outpouring of abundance in the world; kindness, laughter, knowledge, contentedness, peacefulness.  It isn’t until you start putting those things out into the world around you that you begin to see them come back to you.  It is the “outpouring” state that triggers the real “inpouring” in your life.

Sometimes you may feel at work that things around you have deteriorated so far, there is no way to stay there and be happy.  Occasionally, you might be right, but more and more often you might find that blooming and letting time pass may turn your entire situation around.  While you are blooming, change your focus.  Do you want to strangle the person working next to you because they smack their gum all day?  What they are doing doesn’t ultimately affect you but it angers you because you focus on it and obsess over it; stop focusing on things that don’t move you forward and focus on something that will help you personally or professionally; if you can have headphones in, listen to a podcast or music instead.  Are you a machinist outproducing your coworkers? Are you a welder unhappy with your boss or your workload?  Check out a few of our past blogs for some suggestions on how to change your focus to one of continual personal improvement instead of external blame, to determine if leaving is truly the best thing to do.

Above all, becoming a creator instead of a victim is one of the most important shifts in focus we can make in our lives, and this can help us become bloomers instead of tumbleweed; learning more about The Empowerment Dynamic can inform your decisions about what to do next in amazing ways.  Discover the transformative power of blooming where you’re planted. Learn how to shift your focus, find happiness, and become an ‘outpouring’ force in your life.


Barracuda Staffing, Inc. cares about your success: check back next week for more tips on increasing your satisfaction in the workplace, and remember that one of the best things to have on your resume is Job Stability; however, if you are looking for a new place to spread your wings and grow into a leader in your department, we invite you to browse our current openings in Tulsa and surrounding areas, call to talk to a Recruiter, or simply Submit your resume online today!