#bosses' kid is leaving in june and coworker got offered her old job back in two weeks.

[littlekingbergara]

everyone at my job might be leaving at the same time 😶

[lamalefix]

Okay so, a couple of weeks ago started my new journey.

I've been reorienting a bit in the past few years.

As much as I loved and will always love psychology, developmental and learning psychology specifically, brain (to be read exclusively with zombie-like voice) and its physiology, disorders and rehabilitation and so on, I found that Human Resources was a field so interconnected with what I studied and caught my interest. It didn’t always have my interest, I thought at first that this kind of organizational, managerial thing wasn’t fit for me but...

... Sometimes life treats you good when you least expect it, sometimes the things you do, the tiny choices you make on the road, change your life, your journey completely.

And it's quite a long story so sit down, take a cup of tea and let me tell you this story...

Please note that I’d use nicknames for the story, not because I want to add privacy at the matter but because I usually use those names with my friends (I’m weird, I know)

We live in a pretty chill, green area in Rome. 

For some reason beyond my knowledge, when we bought our apartment, back in 1998, we ended up to live near my godmother. 

She had a couple of dogs, and has a lot of dog-friends and dog-owners-friends. 

A lot of you know I have a dog (Zelda, that beautiful silly golden retriever who loves to snuggle with my shoes), and when this story started, due to my internships and different jobs around the city, was usually my ma the one who took her on her strolls. 

Before we decided to get a dog, right after my master's degree graduation ceremony my godfather (my godmother's husband) died. 

It hit hard. At five in the morning on a cold day at the end of january my godmother called and told us the news. He had a heart attack and died on the spot, while working. 

I clearly remember the last conversation I had with him, a couple of days before he died. He was walking his dog and I was waiting the bus under our homes. He was always so funny, he made a joke, and if I close my eyes everytime I step near that bus stop, I still hear him laugh and huff something along the lines of “Urgh going to the gym at this god-awful hour by bus, you really want to suffer”, and I smile everytime. But aside of my weird choices about my fitness life, this isn’t the story I want to tell you about.

After his funeral, for the next months before my internship started, I practically only slept at my house but lived at my godmother's to help out. So there I met two beautiful men (in both the inner and outer sense), that we’ll call Grey Fox and Tall-n-young, that lived across the road. They had dogs, Grey Fox had two adorable sausages dachshounds and Tall-n-young a chubby half-beagle. My ma just fit in, like a clockwork, rolled around them, every evening walked with them without a dog, but with them and my godmother, her sister and their dogs. (The story of how my godmother found her new stray dog on her husband's grave and he looked at her when she called him with her husband's nickname is for another time but... You know). 

Meanwhile, my dad at work meets a new coworker whose wife is a pet trainer. And everything clicks in the right place. 

I went to met Zelda (fishing my hand into the litter and she chose me by licking and snuggling against me - and my shoe) only a few months later.

But this isn't the story of how I met my dog either. This is the story of how I met my boss and how I decided I wanted the HR Management field to be something to pursue.

I met my boss, mentor and friend in a very weird moment of my life. I was finishing two contemporary internships at a Private Centre and a University Centre that offered help to families with kids with developmental and learning disorders. Up til that moment I knew my job would have been in that field, developmental psychology and rehabilitation, even if it was a stressful place to be at some point. I wanted to be a psychologist since age 5, not a princess, never a princess, who cares for princesses? I worked, without being paid (because that's how internships work for psychologists in Italy) more than 40 hours a week, from monday to saturday 8 am to 8/9 pm, and I hat to take a lot of work, papers and so on home, for over two years... And you'd say, "Why Giulia did you like it so much?".

One of my friend urged me to quit because I was so tired, couldn’t find time for myself and I just found out I couldn't enter the PhD I wanted, but I needed my abilitation at least, be a psychologist.

Meanwhile my ma was always around with the dogs and her new friends. She met Lovely, another dog owner who took a liking in me. A beautiful lovely girl, who sadly had a very aggressive cancer, that took her away three years ago.

One day Grey Fox who shared his birthday with Lovely invites me over along with my ma and my dog, because Lovely wanted me there. I never met Grey Fox’s partner up til that moment, everyone said he worked a lot, everyone said he did weird hours and travelled a lot, and he was doing something very similiar to what I studied, he worked as something like a therapist. (Something you’d call a life coach, in hindsight),

So, when I get there I finally met him, we will call him Nose-y (because you know, he has a pretty big nose), my boss, my mentor. He was sitting on that beige sofa in Grey Fox’s house, one of the dachshunds licking the back of his head, the other snuggling on his lap. And we start to talk. About tv series, about psychology, therapy, schoo, learning processes, about work and career paths. He said he was about to quit is job and move forward to get something done by his own hands, and open up what you'd call a start-up in coaching and HR management. 

He wants me on his boat, he wants me to help him.

And that's how it started.

But not when I decided I wanted to go in this direction. As I said HR management and coaching per se, are like very close and interconnected with psychology, but I always sat on another corner, walking another path. Preferring underlying brain processes and biology more than production and management. 

That decision was took sometime later. 

After he quit his job as a top manager and Lovely died, after i got my abilitation and started to help out as a volunteer with elders, homeless and people with social and financial difficulties.

One day Nose-y asks if I want to join him and an actress and acting teacher, a beautiful woman that we’ll call Blondie, in one of their workshops. 

We end up in the centre of Rome, in a theatre right behind Piazza Navona. The participants were members of a high performing team of a big org, I don’t remember the names, and I wouldn’t even if I tried. 

They enter at some point in the theatre, and it doesn't need a psychologist to know that they are broken. Blondie makes me sit behind the light and sound effect technic table, and instructs me how to help out with that. Music, lights, enable their (our?) method to be even more effective. 

The theatre is a underground thing, like a cavern-ish, basement in the centre of Rome, a typical thing you’d call a cellar that you’d find in old buildings. 

I didn't know when I went there that morning, at the end of june, that I'd make some final decision by sunset.

The team, I was saying, was a tiny super-high performing team. But with high performance comes high stress level. And one of them killed himself. And they found him in the morning, in their office. And in that dark theatre they were blaming each other, and Luigi and Marta's job was to accompany them through grief and acceptance and restore their team work. By the end of the day, they were all more able to communicate, to listen, to help each other.

That was the moment. When I saw them leave, Nose-y and Blondie all tired and all wilt on a couch, but satisfied that I decided. I wanted to change, to be a better person, maybe a better manager, for a better future. I wanted to be one of the many people who work in HR Management that can be a support for emplyees, I wanted to be the change, to be there to help managing that work/life balance. 

I don't know where this journey will lead me, I don’t know if I’d make it, if I’d get to be the better version of myself, the better version of what i wanted to be when this thing first started but... 

I’m on my way and the only thing I can say is, it’s never too late to change direction, to pursue another dream, to have a new vision of that future you want to build. 

It’s never too late. You can always grow up.