EDIT: wrote this before reading someone else’s comment, we don’t disagree as much as I thought!
>Maybe they don’t talk to you about their ugh fields? If they are doing a good job I am confident they will talk to someone else about it, or perform substantially worse if they don’t have anyone to talk to about them.
I think you are right about this, and no, it’s not a job with narrowly defined responsibilities. I don’t disagree that very successful people can have “ugh fields,” but in my mind talking about psychological problems is something you would do with a friend, family member, mentor, or therapist, not with a boss. Like other people have said, if the discussion is framed as “help me find a way to work around this,” it might be okay to bring up. But I wouldn’t go to my boss and ask to get out of a task because I procrastinated so long I developed a psychological aversion to it! And it puts the boss in a pretty bad position too, because if the thing has to get done they then have to get someone else to do it. It’s probably going to take the new person longer to do it than it would have for Person 1 to just finish it, and then the boss has to explain to the client why it’s late. And the next time there’s an important assignment, that boss is going to wonder whether they can trust you with it or whether you’ll just get halfway through and then abandon it.
Having to find a way to get yourself to do things that feel aversive to you seems to me to be a vital life skill. Some things that have helped me with “ugh fields” are the ‘eat the frog’ technique, i.e. do the aversive thing before anything else, doing the task with another person to keep me honest, and using artificial motivation-boosting tools like energizing music or lots of caffeine.
EDIT: wrote this before reading someone else’s comment, we don’t disagree as much as I thought!
>Maybe they don’t talk to you about their ugh fields? If they are doing a good job I am confident they will talk to someone else about it, or perform substantially worse if they don’t have anyone to talk to about them.
I think you are right about this, and no, it’s not a job with narrowly defined responsibilities. I don’t disagree that very successful people can have “ugh fields,” but in my mind talking about psychological problems is something you would do with a friend, family member, mentor, or therapist, not with a boss. Like other people have said, if the discussion is framed as “help me find a way to work around this,” it might be okay to bring up. But I wouldn’t go to my boss and ask to get out of a task because I procrastinated so long I developed a psychological aversion to it! And it puts the boss in a pretty bad position too, because if the thing has to get done they then have to get someone else to do it. It’s probably going to take the new person longer to do it than it would have for Person 1 to just finish it, and then the boss has to explain to the client why it’s late. And the next time there’s an important assignment, that boss is going to wonder whether they can trust you with it or whether you’ll just get halfway through and then abandon it.
Having to find a way to get yourself to do things that feel aversive to you seems to me to be a vital life skill. Some things that have helped me with “ugh fields” are the ‘eat the frog’ technique, i.e. do the aversive thing before anything else, doing the task with another person to keep me honest, and using artificial motivation-boosting tools like energizing music or lots of caffeine.