You may be reading this at the end of a workday you’re still replaying. Maybe there’s one person whose name in your inbox evokes a feeling of anxiety, whose meetings you don’t look forward to, whose comments you’re still thinking about at home, hours later. And maybe you haven’t raised it with anyone at work, whatever has been said about it at home. People have their own reasons for that.
If that’s where you are, what you’re feeling deserves to be heard and taken seriously. People who are being bullied at work usually know it’s happening. The exhaustion, the dread, and the loneliness are normal responses to real mistreatment, not signs that something is wrong with you. And there are practical things you can do, starting today, in the right order.
One thing before anything else, and it belongs at the top of this page more than anywhere else on this site: coaching is not a replacement for therapy. If work has been reaching your sleep, your mood, or your sense of what’s real, the right first support is a licensed professional, your doctor or a therapist. Everything below sits alongside that. Nothing below replaces it.
Am I being bullied at work?
Dr. Shayne Tracy, my coaching mentor and a very experienced professional coach, uses the field’s standard definition: workplace bullying is “repeated health harming mistreatment of… one or more workers.” It shows up as verbal abuse, intimidation, humiliation, exclusion, gossip, and sabotage. And it is deliberate. A job can be hard, but a job doesn’t bully anyone; bullying is done by people, usually the same person or group, returning to the same target.
Two parts of that definition carry most of the weight. Repeated: bullying shows up as a pattern that keeps happening over time. Health harming: the measure is the damage it does to you. A personality clash, a blunt reviewer, a stressful quarter, none of those meets the definition on its own. A pattern of deliberate mistreatment that is wearing down your health does.
What are the signs you’re being bullied?
Dr. Tracy lists signs worth taking seriously precisely because they are so easy to explain away.
Dread before work is the first, and for some people it is physical: feeling sick in the morning before heading in. The second is how sick days get used. He describes people taking them as “sanity days,” not for illness but for recovery from the workplace itself. If your days off have become recovery from a person rather than rest from the work, that is a sign in its own right.
The third is a reversal he sees often, from golden child to problem child. You were the strong hire, praised and trusted with the interesting work, and then, sometimes within months, nothing you do is right. When the story about you flips that completely, the explanation is rarely that your competence vanished.
The fourth is gaslighting, which Dr. Tracy describes as part of the harm itself, a stage the mistreatment reaches. In his words, “people start to believe they’re responsible… the bully makes them feel that way.” Sustained mistreatment teaches its target to doubt their own account. So if self-doubt has crept in – if you keep concluding that it must somehow be you – treat that doubt as something the bullying produced. Self-doubt is one of its effects, and it tells you about the mistreatment rather than about the accuracy of your own read. Tell someone outside the situation what has been happening, and ask them to check your account with you.
Bullying, poor behaviour, or the demands of the job?
Bullying, as Dr. Tracy defines it, is deliberate. That also makes it worth telling apart from two situations that can genuinely feel like bullying from the receiving end, because each one calls for a different response.
The first is unintentional poor behaviour. Someone who is stressed, under pressure, or stretched too thin can come across as snappy, short-tempered, and demanding, and living with that day after day can feel like mistreatment. The difference is intent and pattern. Bullying selects a person and returns to them: the criticism detaches from anything you can fix, the standard moves after you meet it, and Dr. Tracy describes the pattern as one that escalates rather than settles. Stress-driven behaviour tends to land on everyone in reach, to rise and fall with the pressure the person is under, and to ease when the pressure does.
The second is the demands of the job itself. Relentless pressure to deliver can feel like mistreatment too. But a demanding job is heavy and even-handed: expectations are high for everyone, the pressure points at the work rather than at a person, hard feedback is specific and possible to act on, and when you improve, the improvement registers. You end most weeks drained and a little more capable.
Dr. Tracy’s test covers most cases. A one-time incident, in his words, “maybe… isn’t bullying. Whereas… the repeated behavior and pattern and process is bullying.” Three questions you can ask yourself tonight, calmly: does it repeat? Is it aimed at me rather than at the work? Is it getting worse? Three yeses is a pattern.
Getting the name right helps in both directions. Treat a stressed colleague as a deliberate bully and you may escalate something one plain conversation could have settled, or walk away from a job that was good for you. Treat deliberate bullying as just a hard job and you stay inside something that is taking your health.
What happens if you wait it out?
Most people’s first plan is endurance: keep your head down and it will pass. While you wait, though, the harm accumulates.
On the personal side, Dr. Tracy traces a progression that can run from anxiety into depression and, in some cases, to suicidal thoughts. If you are anywhere on that path, please treat it as urgent: a doctor, a therapist, or a crisis line today, ahead of anything else on this page. No career strategy outranks your life and health.
Workplaces where this goes unchecked take damage too. Dr. Tracy describes one workplace where 37 of 150 staff turned over in a single year. If it helps to hear it: what’s happening to you is a known and documented pattern that plays out in workplaces everywhere.
What should you do first?
Not what instinct usually suggests. Dr. Tracy’s advice is specific: don’t retort, and don’t set out to defeat the bully. Retaliating speeds up an escalation that is already underway, and bullies are far more practised at this kind of conflict than you are. The goal here is protecting yourself.
Start with a record. Write down each incident with its date, what was said or done, and who was present, in flat factual language. The record does two jobs: it turns a report into something a company can act on, and it anchors your own memory against the self-doubt described above.
Then report it, to HR or to a supervisor you trust, and bring the record. Dr. Tracy’s first steps are these two: report to someone with standing to act, and in the meantime step back and reduce your exposure. Reducing exposure is unglamorous, and it works. Where the role allows, shift exchanges into email, keep others present, and cut back the situations where the two of you are alone.
If reporting changes nothing, or the behaviour involves threats, discrimination, or retaliation for the report itself, a consultation with an employment lawyer is a reasonable next step to take. And keep an exit open as a real option. Some environments do not get fixed from where you stand, and choosing to leave one is a decision about your own life and health. It says nothing about your worth.
Who else can help, and what do you ask them for?
Everything above asks a lot of you, and that is one of the unfair things about workplace bullying. The person with the least room to act carries almost all of the work, while people with more standing watch from the side and wonder whether it is their place to say anything. Sympathy helps, and it is easy to offer, but it rarely changes the situation. Some people will help if they are asked for something specific and small, which is easier to say yes to than a general appeal for support.
Start with someone who was there. If a colleague saw an incident, you can ask them to write down what they saw, in their own words, with the date, and to keep their own copy. You are not asking them to complain on your behalf or to take a side. One independent account of one meeting changes how a report reads: your record stops being your word against another person’s and becomes much harder for an employer to set aside. Ask someone you already trust rather than whoever happened to be in the room, accept that the conversation may travel back to the person doing this, and if they say no, let it go. People weigh their own position, and some will decide they can’t.
The second ask goes to a manager who is not the one doing it. When you report, to the supervisor you trust or to another manager who isn’t involved, ask them to look at the pattern in your record rather than at any one incident on its own. A single exchange can always be explained away as a bad day, and months of them cannot. If that manager is willing to say, in the moment and in front of other people, that a comment was out of line, it does more than any private assurance to you. Bullying continues while nobody says anything, and someone with standing who speaks up in the room changes that.
Some people will not step up, and knowing that in advance helps. A refusal is about that person and about the place. Your read of the situation still stands, your record stands, and one person who does step up is enough to change how the next report is received.
Where does coaching fit, and where doesn’t it?
I’m a coach, so read this section knowing that. Coaching is not a replacement for therapy, and in a bullying situation the order matters: harm to your mental health is treated by a licensed professional. A coach doesn’t diagnose and doesn’t treat, and any coach who offers to should worry you.
Where coaching genuinely helps is the practical layer around the situation, once support is in place: thinking through the record and the reporting conversation before you have it, practising it out loud, planning an exit with someone who isn’t inside the situation, and rebuilding the confidence that months of mistreatment erode.
That is only half of it, and it’s the half that’s easier to describe. The other half is having somewhere to think out loud with someone outside your workplace, who isn’t judging you and has no part in what happens there. Being heard properly does its own work. From there the work is forward-looking: making sense of what is happening, planning a route through it, and building the motivation to do the work that route is going to take. Sustained mistreatment is draining, and acting on a plan asks a lot of you at the point you have least to give.
Dr. Tracy closes that podcast episode where I want to close this page: “if you’re being bullied, you do not deserve it.” If bullying has trained you to doubt that, it is the sentence to hold onto.
If you’d like a thinking partner for the practical side (the record, the conversation with HR, the exit plan), I offer a free intro call with no pressure attached. And if the situation is harming your health right now, book the doctor before you book me. That’s the right order.
If you are a manager who came to this page wondering about someone in your own team, the signs above are visible from where you stand, and my conversation with Dr. Tracy on the podcast is worth your time. Acting early is far easier than repairing what waiting does to the person being targeted.