Coaching for work change

I was asked earlier this week about what it was I actually did, and who I did it for. Not being a natural marketer, I don’t have off-pat answers for these questions. So, in an attempt to articulate them for myself, I began to write a story. Only half way through drafting, did it hit me that it might be an interesting and useful post; that not only did it give some insight into my coaching style and process, but also portrayed something of the journey of people awakening to a different kind of work.

Just for the record, Joe, who you’re about to meet, is an imaginary client, but him and his story are based on my very real experiences.

From the outside Joe’s life is the epitome of success. He’s an Associate Lawyer, working in Corporate Finance for a top law firm, earns a top salary, has a beautiful wife and cute small daughter, and owns a big house in one of London’s prestigious suburbs. But something has rocked his world.

I’d coached Helen, a former Investment Banker and one of his friends some time ago, and she tells him he should hire me to help him regain his motivation. And, indeed, that’s his key coaching goal. “I want to feel energised about work again,” he says. Fair enough. We begin to meet in person about once a fortnight; a relationship that lasts for a little over six months.

A bubble bursts

When I ask him what has happened to de-energise him, he shares that he’s recently had what is for him the crushing  news that the promise of Partnership, which has been dangled before him as a golden carrot for several years, has just evaporated. Fee revenues in his firm have slumped, and as a result he’s been told that he won’t be promoted this year and that the firm can now not guarantee that he’ll ever be promoted. To underscore the reality of this, a number of Partners are being made redundant, something that was, before now, unimaginable in his and other law firms.

He veers between anger and disbelief. “How dare they do this to me?” “What am I supposed to do now?”

“What has it all been for?”

I ask him what being a Partner has meant to him. He tells me that it has been about achieving to the highest level in his profession; that it has meant he’d be secure for life, both from an employment and financial point of view; and that he’d have more freedom to control his own work load. He has put in round-the-clock performances, meeting deadlines on financial deals, in the certain knowledge that it was for “something”.

I ask him what has driven him to want that “something” so badly. He tells me about his working class family and the relative poverty in which he grew up, and how he has wanted to ensure he never returns to that place. He shares how his father, looking back, may have had some kind of personality disorder and how he could be loving one moment and punishing the next and how there was no way of controlling or predicting his mood. Joe admits how unloved and self-doubing he could often feel as a child.

Through our conversations, he comes to see that he has used his brightness as a way both of escaping his father and of trying to get what his father could not give him. He shares with me that, although he often did not particularly enjoy his school studies, his excellent grades were a way of him proving to himself that he was okay.

I reflect to him the brilliance of this strategy. How I can see that whilst he could not predict his father, he had relatively more control over his own performance.

“Yes,” he says, “but crazy as it might sound, despite being top in everything, my achievements have always felt hollow to me. I’ve really never felt good enough.”

I tell him how sad it makes me feel to hear that, and I wonder aloud whether he can begin to give himself permission to be good enough now.

Letting go of an old identity

He begins to confront the prospect that his identity is shifting, but for a while he is so caught up in the picture of himself as an eminently successful lawyer, that this is difficult.

“I’ve been offered Partnership with a smaller firm,” he tells me proudly during one session.

“Partnership?” I say. I’m surprised that anyone is hiring at that level anywhere, let alone in the midst of a recession.

For a few moments he tries to impress me with how glamorous and important it is. He talks of how he can give two fingers to his existing company and let them know that, although they may not want to give him a Partner role, somebody else does. But as he keeps talking I notice that his chest falls, and say so. He admits that this is not an equity role – so he doesn’t get the elusive share of a business for which he’s been yearning. What he gets is a glorified associate role, with a bigger job title, more responsibility on probationary terms and with none of the benefits of a fully-fledged Partner. I reflect to him his continuing need for external things to validate him. He agrees, but goes on to tell me just how brain-numbing it is for him to live with such uncertainty.

Uncertainty and struggle

We talk about this and I share with him my own perspective that life is intrinsically uncertain. When I ask him to tell me more about the affect uncertainty has on him, he shares how deeply uncomfortable and anxiety provoking it is not to be in control of things. I say that I wonder what he is choosing to believe about uncertainty and he tells me that he sees it as bad; as something that has to be fought against and overcome. I suggest to him that he think of reframing it as a creative space: as something that offers potential and possibility. I see this idea provoke a bit of a shift in him. I go on to tell him that, in the midst of uncertainty, there are things of which we can be more certain. I challenge him to put his focus on what he feels as being true and alive in his life right now. I ask him what these might be. He tells me: his wife, child and existing client work. He acknowledges that he can regain some energy for himself by switching his focus.

He turns the alternative job offer down, yet goes through a period where he wrestles an emerging knowing about himself, with a desire for things to be fixed and sorted. He talks about how exhausting it’s starting to feel to him to be putting in 18 hour days; how part of him wants to, yet part of him just can’t muster the energy. I encourage him to start boundarying his time better, so that 18 hour days become less of a norm. He starts to spend more time with his family and to appreciate them more for who they are and what they mean to him. He begins to send me photographs of his daughter and to tell me stories of cute things she has done. He has the insight that, part of his erstwhile drive to work 24/7 has been a way of not having to relate to them so closely. That relationships have until now been scary for him. I tell him I’m not surprised given what he’s told me about his father. “But,” I say, “your past does not have to define your present.” And I challenge him to find the courage within himself to trust that that is so.

Experimenting with new possibilities

One session he says that he doesn’t know if he really wants to do law in the long term. But, his problem is, he says, that if he isn’t a lawyer, he doesn’t know who he is? Or how he will pay his way in life. I reflect to him how I feel him putting pressure on himself to be clear and make a decision. And whether he might not think of his questioning rather as a process. Not, “who am I?” but “who am I becoming?”.

He asks me if I have any advice for him in supporting himself through this period of self-discovery. I ask him what it was he did as a child that he needs to rediscover. He smiles, and tells me that he’d loved both reading and creative writing, but that in the quest to be a top lawyer, both of these had been put aside. I encourage him to reconnect with them; that whilst they of themselves may not be the answer, they give voice to a part of him with which he has lost touch, and which may in turn allow its own creative answers to emerge. He commits both to finding some books that he’ll enjoy reading, and to creating fun writing time for himself in a cafe one late afternoon a week. Next time I see him he’s beginning to look and feel like a different person.

External push-back

Him starting to work more on his terms and to put some life back into his work has the knock-on of upsetting his bosses who have got used to his indispensability. They begin to challenge his loyalty and professionalism, and in our coaching work we look at how this unsettles him and how he can confront them positively and constructively. I encourage him to focus his conversations with his superiors on his delivery of his objectives and to stay clear of needing to get into extraneous stuff about culturally required, but personally damaging behaviours.

He finds that, the more he commits to his personal interests, especially his writing, the stronger he becomes in standing strong against his doubters.

A deeper sense of identity and purpose

By the end of our work he has come to a big understanding of himself: he intrinsically loves law, but he wants to work with consciousness, and therefore continue to work more on his terms. Crucially, he decides that, although for now he’s happy to work for a top name firm, he does not want to be a partner for any law firm. He has recognised for himself the ball and chain that that would mean for him and how it would now take him away from himself and what he is beginning to create in his life. He has even told his firm that they need to take him off any promotion lists they’re still keeping. The sense of peace and internal space he’s created for himself, he tells me, is immense. He’s even toying with the idea of asking if he can do a four-day rather than five-day week.

He’s loving his writing and imagines that he may write a novel whilst still in employment and see if it goes anywhere. He also starts to consider how he may play a bigger role in the world, and he gets involved in a community outreach project in some of London’s Inner City schools, educating the poorest children on what it means to work in the City, but from his new perspective.

Has he met his coaching goal of feeling energised about work again? “Absolutely,” he says. “Although not in the way I’d imagined. I’d wanted things to go back to how they were and I was a bit disappointed at first that you would not play that game with me! Now I realise that there could never be a going back. It has been a magical journey and one that doesn’t stop here.”

And I wonder, as a reader, what you take from that story? And how it might apply to your life?

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