A person I admire for their courage and authenticity recently resigned from their role as a business coach at the company from which I currently receive a paycheck. It is a rather predatory company. This former employee said moving forward, they have a list of non-negotiables for employment, and this got me thinking of my own. In their separation, they are able to work through a reflective emotional inventory of how this role has led them to feel as an individual, and thus construct their list.

For me, I’ve noted frequently that it’s led me to live in a repressed state of contradiction in order to ensure my survival security. It leads me back to thoughts I swam in prior to joining the company: present moment society often requires a contradiction of ethics in order to perpetuate the way the system operates, and thus requires individuals to invalidate their true nature in order to satisfy the desire of material comfort. This thought leads me to wonder if the path of human rights is to transform the desire for material comfort that requires the contradiction of ethics into a human right that provides collective consciousness more of a platform to express itself authentically.

None-the-less, I made my list of non-negotiables. A huge roadblock for me has been believing the universe did this to me as punishment, or to laugh at me. To acknowledge my ethics as an individual and what strokes my genius, recognize myself as in an extreme state of needing survival security, and then giving me the exact opposite of my ethics to observe and see if I would compromise. The answer is yes, I did. And I would again. Because I choose myself first. I choose my emotional safety first. That is prizing consciousness. Injecting my pride before I have the resources to back it up surely leads to suffering.

As I move forward and seek out my own departure from this role, I made my own list of non-negotiables, wanting them to motivate the entrance of a new opportunity into my life and sending me down the path of whatever action I need take to get it.

Here are my non-negotiables:

• I will not work for a company that employs a Money Back Guarantee as a predatory sales tactic. Through my employment, I condone the actions taken by the business to gather clients. They tell customers they will receive a Money Back Guarantee. This plants a false belief in the client that makes them more likely to make a large purchase on the call. Almost no one receives their money back.
• I will not work for a company that imposes the pressure to renew clients as a performance measurement tactic for clients who were already exploited prior to joining with a high-urgency purchase. Part of my performance is measured on my ability to renew clients who are already over-paying for an under-developed curriculum. I am intended to renew these clients and employ personal manipulation tactics in order to do this. It is self-interested and exploitative of the individual’s moral and ethical composition.
• I will not work for a company that does not respect my voice to save themselves from minor operational disruption. I do not believe it should be my responsibility to always have to be on guard around a manager that lacks self-awareness and know I will be responsible for confronting them to step targeted call-outs and subtle shame tactics. While they are receptive to feedback, I have twice been denied requests to change managers because there isn’t enough just cause.
• I will not work for a company that condones the practice of remote monitoring employee’s laptops. Even if not active in use, learning this about the company when I started created anxiety in my role and separated me from my work. I am a highly sensitive individual that has an array of projections inside of me. I am self-protective. I stopped writing my book when I started working at this company because I feared they were watching me.
• I will not work in an environment that mandates the recording of every call. This creates an environment of fear and oversight, and ensures employees speak with a filter masking their true sentiments. Honesty is not permitted to exist.
• I will not work for a company that requires email monitoring in the CRM (micromanagement) due to the need for self-protection against their designed Money Back Guarantee policy. In my position, I have to subject myself to strict oversight, which reduces the ability for natural trust to build in a role. This is because the company must ensure every e-mail and check-in is sent, every follow-up made, etc., because if one is missed, clients have grounds to claim the Money Back Guarantee. This subjects employees to extreme oversight and pressure to be perfect. The business is granted prioritization over the individual’s right to feel empowered and trusted in a role. As a result, I experience a lack of trust due to the insecure and predatory foundation of the business.
• I will not work for a company that dismisses labor exploitation as a standard practice. This is one of my most important non-negotiables. The arrogance of projection and entitlement of exploitative labor practices (modern day slavery called efficiency) due to privilege of geographic location. It is a structure that lacks empathic design for the maintenance of individual entitlement, regardless of what collective ethics should be determining of acceptable practice. For example, roughly 60% of the CEOs I offer executive coaching to have off-shore, low-cost VAs. Why? Because they can. And it has been normalized for them as acceptable. I am complicit in this. While I don’t actively provide the resources and avoid this as much as possible, I am aware. My avoidance helps me to sleep at night – however, the awareness and continued involvement leads to the normalization.
• I will not work for a company that requires me to withhold authenticity, such as the dismissal of arrogant client expression for the sake of brevity and not expending my energy continuously explaining others contradiction of ethics to themselves. For example, I have clients who express tax avoidance, fire quickly without attempting sincere change, and are generally exploitative of labor. I can rationalize all of this away through understanding they are individuals programmed by the normalizations of their environment. They are faultless. I see this humanity and innocence. Yet through this rationalization, which I make purely out of self-interested survival, I contradict myself. These individuals are capable of understanding how their actions may be detrimental to the collective.
• I will not work for a company that forces technology adoption on employees, such as AI. While AI can be a useful tool, to impose it as a requirement (such as mandatory internal staff AI competitions) requires the individual to compromise their values in order to generate efficiency improvements for the company – for example, I do not want to expose myself to AI because while it seems ingenious being a new technology, it actually exposes the individual to standardized language and reasoning that then shapes consciousness and limits development of individuality and authenticity. Idolization leads to a decrease in actual value because the technology is assessed as the solution to all inefficiencies. And that means a prioritization of cost-saving and efficiency, as opposed to true value which typically evolves over time.
• I will not work where I am required to provide executive business coaching for a business that undergoes no ethical review of the idea or service being provided by the CEO. In my present role, I am required to provide executive coaching to any client assigned to me. If I disagree with their ethics or service provided, I still must guide them through the curriculum and strengthen their presence in society. However minuscule, this creates impact.
• I will not work for a company that employs predatory sales practices, such as false promises, as well as the over-use of empathy and aesthetics to gain trust. As the sales representatives make a commission on each sale, they are self-motivated to make false promises and not care for the coach who must then work with the client. I have clients who paid $10,000 for coaching under false or misleading statements, and are then not eligible to withdraw from the program or receive their money back. They essentially must reconcile receiving a service they didn’t pay for, and accept this loss as an individual, which is not great for empowerment. It cultivates a dependency on a false promise and forces the individual to believe it will work because they become contractually obliged to do so, as it becomes their self-interest. This is especially true for CEOs whose annual revenue sits around 200k and they paid 10k for the program. It is exploitative. The sales representatives are also all incredibly attractive individuals. This exploits the human predisposition to trust more attractive individuals and speaks to how beauty may manipulate. It also perpetuates a society resting upon aesthetics as a determinant for value.
• Overall: I will not work in an environment that requires me to withhold my authentic self or be uncomfortable in my work. I consistently withhold authentic thought or feedback in order to protect my position and receive a paycheck. My survival security is more important to me. This position shows I am as much of a hypocrite as any other individual. Recognition of this does not condemn me to acceptance. It leads me to a recognition of what I stated at the beginning: a recognition around the contradiction of ethics when concerning survival security, and when done frequently enough, this leads to a normalization in society.

Through creating this list of non-negotiables, I have recognized this role doesn’t allow me to feel like myself or thrive in my zone of genius. I have been able to create a detailed list of what registers as upsetting that I dismiss on a daily basis, because what can I do about it? I am grateful to have a job. How is my acceptance different from the acceptance of the filipino VA? What power do I have that they do not? Do I have power that they do not? How would my refusal to do the work benefit me? I would be without income and risk my survival security. How would their refusal to do the work benefit them? They would be without income and risk their survival security. Labor is the same, and labor is One. What does that mean in the present moment? Exploited.

This role reveals the psychology of the modern workplace as one that often requires the contradiction of ethics out of a self-interest in survival security. This normalization is then what builds and creates our society.

In the role, I experience a separation from my authenticity and zone of genius. I experience a lack of trust and an expectation of blind comportment. I experience feelings of shame and guilt connected with predatory and exploitative labor practices. So how do I live with myself? I am a human. And that means I have the ability to repress out of my conscious space what I perceive as out of my control. I also have the ability to demonstrate empathy with myself. And believe and know I will find myself in a position of strength and greater alignment in the future.

I will do this with my voice, and my action. What I have to believe for me is that when I do find my way out of this role, that my interest in myself will return to me. I am valuable and have a lot to offer. This role crushes me. At least I have the money to make my student loan payments, right?