employer blues

today, i fired someone. i've never done this before. it was awful. it was deserved but nonetheless it sucked. i want to believe that people, given the right environment, encouragement, guidance, will improve, but there's something bigger at work that i have no control over and as much as i'd like to wave a magic wand and fix people's lives that's not the way things seem to work. the hardest part was making the decision—trusting intuition and following through. i've known for months that this needed to happen but i didn't trust my gut which told me that all kinds of things were wrong. not attending to my intuition, i began to be affected by my employee's problems. this last week i've had tremendous headaches. perhaps my intuition was punishing me for not listening to it. i'll know tomorrow. someone said to me this afternoon, "at least you feel terrible. it lets you know you care and are human."