Does your manager bring out the best in you

In an optician’s practice, the relationship with the person above you carries a particular weight. You’re balancing clinical responsibility with retail reality, patient care with time pressure, professionalism with fatigue. When clinics overrun and a patient concern lands late in the afternoon, the tone set by that relationship becomes the air you’re breathing. You don’t always notice it until it changes, or until you step into another environment and realise how different you feel.

It’s worth saying quietly that many people reading this will feel conflicted. You might respect your manager and still feel flattened by the way work unfolds. You might get on well personally but notice you’re more cautious than you used to be, more careful with your words, more likely to keep your head down when something doesn’t sit right. None of that makes you difficult or ungrateful. It just makes you human in a pressured, public-facing setting.

It might be worth asking yourself what actually happens to you on a typical day. When the diary is full and the morning has already slipped behind, do you find yourself leaning in or pulling back? When a patient needs more time than planned and the knock-on effect ripples through the afternoon, do you feel supported to make a call, or do you feel the clock ticking louder than the care? Those moments often reveal more than any appraisal form ever will.

Another question that can be uncomfortable is about voice. When you spot something that could be better, or notice a risk that others haven’t, do you feel able to say it without rehearsing it ten times first? Think about a handover that didn’t quite land or a conversation at the front desk that felt rushed and brittle. Did you leave it feeling you’d been heard, or feeling that it was easier not to raise things next time?

There’s also the quieter question of how mistakes and pressure are handled. When something goes wrong, or when the pace becomes unsustainable, is the focus on understanding what happened, or on who needs to absorb the discomfort? Many people know the feeling of sitting in a small room after clinic, trying to explain why a day unravelled, and wondering whether the explanation will be met with curiosity or judgement.

And then there’s the question of growth, which doesn’t always look like promotion or extra responsibility. Do you feel stretched in a way that helps you grow, or stretched thin in a way that leaves you depleted? When you think about how you were a year or two ago, are you more confident in your judgement now, or more hesitant? That shift often has less to do with workload and more to do with how it’s held.

None of these questions are about blame. Most managers are carrying their own pressures, their own targets, their own sense of being squeezed from above and below. The system opticians work in doesn’t make this easy for anyone. But acknowledging that context doesn’t erase the impact. The way someone leads still shapes the room, the conversations, and the version of yourself that turns up day after day.

There usually comes a point where reflection turns into choice, even if that choice is small and internal. You might notice that you’ve been waiting for permission to feel differently, or for circumstances to change before you take your own experience seriously. Often, nothing dramatic happens. Just a growing awareness that something isn’t quite aligned.

If you wanted to take a step forward, even a small one, you might start by asking what helps you do your best work on an ordinary Tuesday, not an ideal day. Is it clarity about priorities when the clinic is already running late, or knowing that a difficult patient interaction won’t be used against you later? You might also wonder what conversations you’re currently avoiding, and what makes them feel risky in this particular environment.

It can be useful to think about boundaries, not as ultimatums but as information. What are you quietly absorbing that you wish didn’t fall to you, and what would change if that were named out loud? In the gap between appointments, when there’s barely time to take a breath, what kind of support would genuinely make a difference rather than just sounding reassuring?

You might also reflect on what you’re learning from the way you’re being managed. Are you picking up habits you want to carry forward, or behaviours you know you wouldn’t want to repeat? That awareness can be uncomfortable, but it can also be clarifying. It helps separate what is within your influence from what isn’t.

And finally, there’s the question of what you want your working life to feel like, not in theory but in the texture of the day. When you lock up at the end of an overrun clinic, do you want to feel tired and satisfied, or just relieved it’s over? What would need to shift for the first feeling to be more common than the second?

These aren’t questions with quick answers, and they don’t demand immediate action. They’re more like signals, pointing towards what matters to you in a place where care, commerce, and people collide every day. Paying attention to them is not about disloyalty or ambition. It’s about taking your own experience seriously.

If any of this has landed for you, and you want to talk it through in a way that feels grounded and specific to your world, you’re very welcome to reply. Sometimes it helps just to put the words somewhere outside your own head.