I Cannot Control My Boss. I Can Control My Response.

A colleague once asked me how I handled my boss when other people seemed to find it difficult.

My first answer was simple.

I have seen worse.

I once had a boss who threw files onto the floor while shouting at me. Earlier in my working life, I had military experience where overnight guard duty was normal. Overtime did not feel unusual after nights like those.

In my late twenties, I worked in the military-equipment trade. At one point, I was physically alone in a jungle while working in an environment involving foreign armed forces. I was one Chinese Singaporean man there by myself.

Experiences like these change the scale by which later difficulties are measured.

A long day is still tiring. A demanding boss can still be difficult. But neither automatically feels like the worst situation I have faced.

That explains part of my tolerance.

It does not explain the part that matters most.

I try not to begin with the most negative story

When a boss communicates badly, changes direction, or asks for something without thinking it through, it is easy to begin with a negative conclusion.

He does not respect my time. He has no idea what he wants. He is making my work impossible.

Sometimes those conclusions may contain truth. But if I choose one before I understand the situation, I have already decided what the interaction means. Every sentence that follows becomes more evidence for the story I started with.

I try to begin somewhere else.

My boss may have many things on his plate. The matter he is discussing with me may be only one small part of what he is carrying. He may not have had the time or mental space to think about it clearly before the conversation began.

This does not automatically make the request reasonable.

It gives me a more useful question: what is the actual problem we need to solve?

That small change keeps me from spending all my energy reacting to how the problem arrived. I can use more of it to understand what is needed, identify what is unclear, and work out how to move.

It is related to why I try to never assume my first answer is completely right. A negative interpretation is still an interpretation. I should test it before I allow it to control the rest of the exchange.

Difficulty can become a place to learn

I do not enjoy every difficult situation.

But I can treat it as a challenge to my ability to think.

Can I find the concern behind an unclear instruction? Can I separate the urgency from the actual priority? Can I bring structure to a conversation that began without enough structure? Can I communicate a constraint without making the problem personal?

Each situation teaches me something about how to work with different people, how to stay clear under pressure, and how to move when the path is not presented neatly.

That makes difficulty useful without pretending it is pleasant.

I can take the situation as a sign that there is something for me to learn and a capability for me to develop. The progress may be in communication, judgement, patience, prioritisation, or knowing when to push back.

The event may not be my choice.

What I practise in response can still become mine.

Event plus response equals outcome

A simple formula I return to is:

Event + Response = Outcome

I cannot control every event. I cannot decide what mood another person brings into a meeting, whether an instruction arrives clearly, or whether priorities change at an inconvenient time.

I can control more of my response.

That does not mean my response controls the whole outcome. Other people still make decisions. Organisations still have constraints. A calm and thoughtful response cannot guarantee a good result.

But if I cannot control the event and I also allow the event to choose my response, I have surrendered both sides of the equation.

The table below is how I try to preserve some choice:

The event remains real. The response is not positive thinking pasted over it.

It is the next action that gives the situation the best chance of becoming workable.

Empathy is not the same as acceptance

There is a danger in talking about resilience this way.

Someone may hear that I have tolerated worse and conclude that poor behaviour should simply be endured. I do not believe that.

A boss throwing files onto the floor and shouting is not good leadership. Past hardship should not become the standard everyone else is expected to accept. My tolerance does not make another person's difficulty less real.

Empathy means I try to understand what may be happening on the other side before I decide how to respond. It does not mean every action becomes acceptable once I can explain it.

Sometimes the useful response is patience. Sometimes it is clarification. Sometimes it is a direct conversation. Sometimes it is a boundary.

As I learned when thinking about what a system must say no to, a boundary is not a failure to help. It defines what can continue without causing damage.

Choosing my response includes choosing when something should not continue in the same way.

Perspective gives me room to choose

When my colleague asked how I handled the boss, “I have seen worse” was the easiest explanation.

It was true. My earlier experiences changed my threshold for what feels unbearable.

But endurance alone is not the quality I want to depend on.

The more useful habit is not beginning with the worst possible thought. It is leaving enough room to consider what the other person may be carrying, what the situation is actually asking from me, and which response moves it in a better direction.

I cannot control my boss.

I cannot control every event.

I can control whether my first reaction becomes my final response.

That is usually where my best chance of a better outcome begins.