6 Life Lessons From a Cubicle

Sometimes the office life gets a bad rap, especially in the Christian world. Like a cubicle is nothing more than a suffocating prison sucking the life out of you as the second hand moves around the clock tick by tick.

To many people these days cubicle life seems like the worst and last possible option to pay the bills. To sit in front of a computer, typing away, or heaven forbid, talking on the phone for hours is enough to make you shudder, at least in comparison to traveling and volunteering, being outside, or working with kids.

I think we’ve gotten a little over dramatic and have forgotten that God is bigger than a cubicle – He can use you for His purpose wherever you are, whatever that may look like. Believe it or not, there can be joy and purpose in office life.

That truth is at the forefront of my thoughts this week as I begin the process of updating my resume and job hunting once again. I’m in a place where I need a job to pay the bills so I can continue writing blogs, editing my book, serving as a leader at my church’s youth group, AND so I can be around people outside of my little bubble. This will most likely mean a trip back to the office world.

As I transition into this time I can’t help but reflect on the year and a half I spent in a cubicle before I left on a year long mission trip. I worked for a small company specializing in market research. I had always told God, “I’ll never work in a cubicle, no way!” I am pretty sure God was laughing to Himself as I walked through those doors on my first day and sat in my cube for the first time. This wasn’t in my plan, but it was in His, and I am so glad it was.

Like with every job, there were definitely good days, but there were also bad days. There were days I felt 100% confident in the job I was doing and others I would hang my head in my hands feeling like a complete failure. Throughout these ups and downs, there was a constant. 30 of them to be exact. The people I worked with are what made it all worth it.

You don’t have to travel the world, work in a church, or be a camp counselor to bring Kingdom. The time in my cube was really hard at times, but I have no doubt God wanted me there. He wanted me to just be still and learn some things and realize I probably wasn’t there so I could QA reports or troubleshoot a browser issue…I was there for the 30 faces around me.

Here are six things I learned from the time in my cube that I know I will carry with me into my next opportunity and into each day of my life. I hope they resonate with you as well:

6. Patience and Letting Go

Not everything is always in my control. There are times I have to let go and be patient. I cannot control every aspect of a task – the reality of most every situation in life is that it will require more than one person, so you just do your part and anything you can to help keep things moving, even if that means just sitting back and letting someone else handle it.

5. A smile and a laugh can change everything.

That one meme, sarcastic comment or joke spoken in passing has the power to change the whole atmosphere of a place or how someone’s day is going. I know there were a few pretty bad days at work – I had my head hunkered down in my cube and it felt like this shadow was hanging over my whole day. All it took was one of my co-workers to pop her head into my cube, look me in the eye, smile, and ask, “Hey Emily how’s it going?” Her smile and sincerity lifted me out of the fog I was drowning in and pulled me up out of it, reminding me it wasn’t the end of the world that everything wasn’t going exactly right. You never know when that smile or listening ear can mean the difference for someone.

4. Blaming is time well wasted.

Things go wrong in life. It’s a fact. Things change, break, unexpected things pop up that you can’t always control and you can’t always account for.  It is human nature to fix the blame not the problem (see Genesis and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden), but doing so and fixating on who’s to blame for something takes the light off what is really needed: a solution.  Moving forward and away from the blame question allows for more time and energy to be spent where it should be: problem-solving. What’s the issue/root cause and how can it be fixed/prevented from happening again? I admit, I often find the knee-jerk reaction of “hey it wasn’t my fault!” spilling from my lips when an issue arises, but that is something I know doesn’t help anyone. I need to spend more time on fixing problems and not the blame.

3. It’s okay and often necessary to ask for help.

I worked on a team of eight people, but really, we were almost always in coordination with the other teams as well. The very nature of a team is to work together toward an end goal. With all our tasks and deliverables it seems crazy to think any one person could do a whole chunk of it all on their own, all the time. Not going to lie, I am not the best at asking for help. Whether it is at work, carrying groceries or luggage, or trying to figure out how to change the oil in my car, I just don’t ask for help. I have always struggled with this pride, this independence to a fault – that I think I can do it all myself and am strong enough on my own. But, I have learned that true strength is in knowing yourself, especially your faults, and knowing that it is necessary to ask for help! True strength is found in Him. As God reminded Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:9, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” It is okay for me to lean on my team; we wouldn’t be much of one if we couldn’t trust and rely on each other for help.

2. Don’t view life with a week or month filter on.

It is all too easy to become crushed under never ending lists of to dos and checklists. Sometimes I would find myself looking ahead, a week at a time, and then even a whole month at once with all my tasks and upcoming deliverables! Needless to say the panic and invisible weight of accomplishing everything well and on time would grow and then sink as a daunting feeling in the pit of my stomach. As I have learned, we as humans cannot handle that much all at once. Why do you think God doesn’t allow us to glimpse all of our lives all at once – that we actually have to live out each day individually on its own? He asks us to trust that He knows the plans for us and that that is enough. All we can do is live in the day – one at a time. Tomorrow will worry about itself.

1. People are what matter at the end of the day.

My most memorable days in the office are not the days I spent with my headphones in, going to town on a report. They are not the days I checked a bunch of tasks off my list at the expense of having a real conversation with anyone. They are not the days I spent reading a book by myself in my cube on my lunch breaks. The days I remember are the ones we played a movie trivia game every day over lunch for two weeks straight. The days I remember are the ones when I stayed almost an hour past quitting time just talking to my team on the way out the door. The days I remember are the ones laughing over what someone’s dog did or a stupid joke or plotting elaborate pranks we never actually carried out. The days I remember are the ones when my co-workers would sit down with me and just talk life with me – asking and truly caring and waiting to hear the answer.

Like with anything in this life, there are lessons to be learned and joy to be found – even in a cubicle. That’s why it’s vital to look up from your cubicle, your classroom, your hospital floor, your desk at church, and focus on His face. Ask Him what He’s trying to show you.

What life lessons have you discovered from your past or present work environments?