Let’s be honest about your situation: you can’t quit today. The bills are real, the timing isn’t right, the market is what it is, or the next opportunity isn’t ready yet. So the question isn’t whether to endure — it’s how to endure without losing your health, your record, or yourself.
I’ve been in that holding pattern, in more than one uniform, under more than one impossible leader. Here’s the complete strategy for surviving the season — and using it.
1. Reframe Who Your Work Is For
This is the shift that changes everything. From today, your excellent work is no longer aimed at his approval — that tank has a hole in it, and nothing you pour in will ever stay. Your work now serves four audiences that actually matter: your record (the documented proof of what you actually are), your reputation (the people beyond him who see your value), your exit (every skill kept sharp is currency for what’s next), and your own mirror (the person you’ll have to be when this is over).
Work for the record, not the review. The paycheck clears the same either way — the difference is who your effort is building. Him, or you.
2. Keep Excellence Without Bleeding
Don’t confuse survival excellence with heroics. Deliver defined work at high quality — and get the definitions in writing with a same-day confirmation email. Don’t volunteer for unresourced rescue missions. Take your vacation days. Leave on time, quietly and consistently. A toxic season can run long; sprint pace on a wilderness-length course is just burnout with better intentions. David served an unstable king for years — sustainable pace was part of the strategy.
3. Run the File
Fifteen minutes a week: a private, dated record of incidents, witnesses, and your wins — kept off company systems. This isn’t just legal protection. It’s mental protection: once an incident is written down, your mind can put it down. The file carries what you’ve been carrying.
4. Protect the Perimeter
A toxic boss shrinks people — their confidence, their relationships, their world. Refuse the shrinking. Vent only outside the building, to people who don’t report to him. Keep your circle strong: the friend, the spouse, the pastor, the counselor, the mentor who knew you before this. Guard your evenings from the replay loop — every hour spent re-arguing today’s meeting is unpaid overtime for a man who isn’t even in the room. And keep something in your life that’s entirely yours: the workout, the faith, the project, the thing he can’t touch.
5. Build the Exit While You Wait
Surviving and preparing are the same activity done with different eyes. Quietly, on your own time and devices: resume current, skills sharpening, references warm, savings building, network alive. Not because you’re leaving tomorrow — because a person with options carries themselves differently, negotiates differently, and sleeps differently. Options are oxygen.
And when the day comes, leave well: planned, on your timeline, with a clean forward-facing story and every bridge standing. Your impulsive resignation is the one gift a toxic boss truly wants. Deny it on principle.
6. Watch for the Signals That Change the Timeline
Two things should accelerate your plans: signs he’s building a formal case against you (sudden write-ups, a performance plan from nowhere, HR in routine conversations), and signs the cost has moved into your body and your home — the sleep, the health, the person your family says you’re becoming. No paycheck buys back those years. When either signal fires, the holding pattern is over; execute the exit.
7. Guard the Person You’re Becoming
The deepest danger of a toxic season isn’t what he does to your career. It’s what the fight can do to your character — the bitterness, the cynicism, the hardness that starts to feel like armor. Check yourself honestly and regularly. The goal isn’t just to survive him. It’s to walk out of this season still you — and one day, when you lead, to be the kind of leader he never was. Your greatest victory will never be defeating him. It’s refusing to become him.
Go Deeper
Everything here is drawn from my book, The Spirit of Saul: Surviving the Boss Who Wants to See You Fall — the complete field manual: the psychology behind the toxicity, the seven disguised weapons, the documentation system, the allies you need, and how to leave like a king in training.
This season is survivable. More than that — handled well, it’s preparation. Hold the line, keep your hands clean, and finish your song.
Commissioner William Epps is an author and security leadership consultant. His books are published through E.P.P.S Method Publishing Co.
Commissioner William Epps 
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