When someone at work has the power to shake everything up and even drive you to quit your job, you have to learn to stand up for yourself to keep it from happening. Anyone who has ever worked in a corporate job knows that no one will do that for you.

One of the most important skills you must learn as early as possible is standing up for yourself. It starts as early as kindergarten, when one of your classmates accuses you of stealing all the crayons, and you know for a fact they are the ones at fault. Even when you’re that young, your tiny brain understands the injustice and will do anything to prove to the teacher that you’re nothing but innocent. That ability to stand up to someone else and prove oneself will be used countless times in a kid’s future, especially in workplace situations.

This may surprise you, but some of those situations are not so different from those we all experienced back in kindergarten. Adults can be just as childish when it comes to taking accountability for their actions, which means that ‘standing up for yourself’ is no different than how it is when you explain to the teacher who really stole all the crayons.

When it comes to the employee in this story, they actually had to stand up to the teacher, AKA their boss. This boss wanted to shift them from hourly pay to commission, only because, in his eyes, they were making too much money. This workplace situation forced the employee to show their boss they cannot be pushed around, and it didn’t take long before they were successful in their methods. Try as he might, the boss couldn’t get his way.