Even if your workplace is not a good fit for you, there are things you can do to improve your experience for as long as you choose to stay there (and help you get your next role lined up, too).

This article will walk you through three sanity-saving practices. Each alone will improve your experience, but combining all three will yield the best results.

Before we get started, why should you listen to me? What are my credentials for teaching you on this topic? In addition to having thrived in all kinds of workplaces, from teaching English in France to bartending to writing internal communications in corporate tech, I’ve spent the last 5+ years coaching women in tech (and other industries) on exactly this topic (and a bit of everything else, too).

Ultimately, many of my clients wanted to leave their jobs, but at the moment they hired me, they weren’t ready to do that yet. Therefore, much of our coaching focused on how to stay sane (or even feel good) in a job or workplace that wasn’t ideal for them. Being able to leave a workplace on your own terms and timeline is empowering. The tools I’m teaching in this article will enable you to do that by showing you how to create a better experience for yourself, no matter what your workplace is like.

Sanity-saving practice one: establishing boundaries

In order to thrive in any workplace, you need boundaries, and they’re especially important in a not-so-great workplace. Boundaries are how you protect your time, space, and energy. While the idea of having boundaries with others is gaining more cultural awareness, you may also need to use boundaries with yourself, to direct your own behavior towards ways of working that enable excellent performance while steering clear of burnout-creating activities.

Whether your workplace is a giant global company or a small local startup, it’s important for you to know that setting boundaries will not control other people or how they interact with you. Instead, your boundaries are for you, even when they apply to a situation that involves another person.

For instance, it’s possible that if you inform someone you have a hard stop at 5pm, they’ll end the call promptly, but much of the time, you will need to be the one to enforce your boundary. This could be as simple as politely saying, “It’s 5pm and I need to hop off this call. I’ll follow up with you via email.”

Another way of thinking about boundaries is that they’re your best practices and you stick to them unless there’s a reason not to.

As an example, I’ve had several clients who’ve established strong boundaries around what time they begin and end their workday. If someone invites them to a meeting outside these boundaries, it’s an automatic ‘no’ unless there’s a special circumstance.

Another way they’ve created boundaries with themselves is by only checking email at certain points throughout the day instead of always having the window open, becoming distracted by the countless emails that are always rolling in.

In both cases, the boundaries were about what would help them work well without overworking. In the first example, the boundary was keeping work from creeping into their personal lives. In the second, the boundary was enabling the client to work more effectively by eliminating distractions.

Whatever boundaries you choose for yourself, know this: boundaries are for you. They may feel uncomfortable at first, as they involve shifting how you engage with others and yourself, but their job is to support you so that you can do your best work when you’re working and live your life in peace when you’re not.

How do you actually create and use boundaries? You design your own boundaries, based on what you know about how you want your life to be and how you work best. Then you use those boundaries as a guide in your decision-making. Important note: your boundaries will likely need to be somewhat informed by the workplace you belong to. For instance, when I was in corporate tech, the standard hours for my team were 7-3:30, so it would not have made sense to have had a boundary that I didn’t respond to emails until 9am, but I could select other boundaries that worked better with the standard hours, such as not continuing to check email after I’d logged off for the day.

Sanity-saving practice two: managing expectations

Managing expectations is an essential tool for both your workload and your work relationships. Basically, what it means to manage expectations is communicating to others what you can do, what timeline you can do it on, and what you need from them to do it. This is a good best practice you can use in any workplace or relationship, but like boundaries, it’s especially useful in a not-so-great workplace.

Years ago, I had a client who was always getting last-minute requests from her team. She was understandably frustrated by this, and it was disruptive to her workflow. To resolve this, we created a turnaround policy, clearly outlining how much time she needed between the request and the finished product. The policy also indicated what her direct reports would need to provide in order for the work to be completed on that timeline. Creating this expectation with her team trained them to behave in a new way, and they did.

Expectation setting is not just for direct reports. You can also use this for peers and leaders. It’s simply a way of communicating what you can do, how long it takes you to do it, and what you need from others in order to get it done.

How do you actually communicate expectations? Setting and managing expectations generally means having conversations with your direct reports, peers, and leaders. It might look like instituting a turnaround policy like my client did, or it may look like informing your supervisor that you have the bandwidth to complete only one of two projects on the original timeline and discussing which one makes more business sense to prioritize.

Sanity-saving practice three: building a useful mental narrative

The human brain has a bias to remember and focus on negative information. When you’re in a job that’s not a great fit for you, this bias can create discomfort, overwhelm, and even a sense of hopelessness. You may find yourself frustrated and upset at the end of every workday, ruminating on the impossible deadlines or the way a senior leader bullies people in big team meetings. It may feel difficult to pull your attention away from all the things that aren’t working.

Building a useful mental narrative is not about gaslighting yourself. You’re not going to pretend that this job is amaaaazing. You’re going to create a perspective that helps you have more of what you want (without lying to yourself).

In order to counteract negativity bias, you need to seek additional information to balance the brain’s over-emphasis on the negative. This means intentionally looking for things that are going well, even if not everything is. If there’s not a whole lot in that category, you can also look for what’s going neutrally. Any non-negative data will help counterbalance the negativity bias.

Please note: you’re not doing this so that you can excuse anyone’s bad behavior. You’re doing this to help yourself feel better in a situation you’d prefer not to be in until you can leave that situation on your own terms.

How do you actually build a useful mental narrative? Lists work wonders. Make a list of what’s going well and another of what’s going ok, and add to each list daily. At first, this might feel weird or silly, but if you stick with it, you’ll start feeling much better. When you spend time looking for ways your situation is positive or neutral, you will find them. And again, I’m not talking about gaslighting or lying to yourself here. What are you building by staying in the role? What skills are you honing? How is the choice you’re making - to stick with your current work situation - serving you and your larger goals? Reorient your decision around what you’re creating for yourself and you will feel much better.

Staying in a not-so-great role or workplace is tough. But that doesn’t mean you’re doomed to feeling stressed and unhappy. There are things you can do to feel better. Start one by one or implement all three at once. When you implement these sanity-saving practices, you will feel so much better. Your current workplace will stop consuming your thoughts. That alone is a great outcome, and it will also give you time and energy back to network, upskill, and research so that you can land a new role at a workplace that’s better suited to your preferences. And once you’re in that new workplace? Your ability to set boundaries, manage expectations, and build a useful mental narrative will help you enjoy your new workplace and do good work, without burning out or over-performing to the point of resentment.

In the comments, share which of these three sanity-saving practices you’ll do first! Then go do it! Ideas are wonderful, but you have to apply them in your own life to reap the benefits.

Have questions about anything in this post? I’d love to answer them. Let me know where you need more help or information.