Life Coaching For Work

Many challenges face us in our working lives. Over recent years, I have worked with people to help them overcome many such issues.

A common situation

For example, organisations can change around us. A new government reorganises civil service departments or emphasises new policies. A company may be acquired by another organisation leading to a subtle, or not so subtle, change in ethos – internal culture, attitudes to customers and suppliers, standards of service, investment in growth versus cash extraction, and so on. Markets, fashions and competition come and go with increasing rapidity, creating stresses throughout commercial organisations.

I have worked with people facing such situations. As we get to know a job and an organisation, we settle into its ways and expectations and absorb its values. However, when the organisation itself suffers disruption from above or outside, we can find ourselves losing our bearings. We may feel personally affronted by the imposition of new values, or disconcerted (even enraged) by what we may judge to be inferior approaches to providing service or solving problems. We may feel acutely uncertain about whether we still belong in, or are up to the new demands imposed by, the organisation. We may end up stressed about the potential impact on not only ourselves but also others around us in our lives – uncertainties over family income, meeting commitments, and failing to meet expectations.  

An example

Following a change of or in government, two previously separate departments merge under the one secretary of state. The two departments may have originated at very different times and with very different national policy objectives. In the past, they have attracted very different people to work within them, with very different motivations, creating very different cultures and value systems, with very different working practices, measures of project success and expectations around what career development looks like.

A person attracted and suited to the objectives and ethos of one department may find themselves struggling if that department is subsumed into another, the yardsticks of which are quite different and possibly ill-suited to the work of the original department.

The same situation can equally well arise in the face of corporate take-over, sale to private equity, or market, political or environmental disruption.

How coaching can help

There are two levels at which my coaching has proved helpful to people. These are not mutually exclusive and there is certainly overlap between them, but broadly we may term these ‘horizontal development’ and ‘vertical development’.

Horizontal development is about the expansion of technical horizons – knowledge and skills. This may indeed be supported by reading and attending courses or getting specialist skills-oriented training or coaching. In my work, I may introduce the work of one writer or another as an aid to expanding horizons and perspectives on approaches to such and such a situation.

Vertical development is about attending to the personal growth of the individual who has come for coaching. This is about how the individual experiences situations, increasing their awareness of what typically goes on within themselves, and with increasing awareness comes a greater possibility of choice – of choosing a different response to a situation from the reaction typically experienced before.

For example, fear often obscures for us solutions to problems we face. Are we typically fearful of questioning the statements of another – a superior, or an aggressive or self-assured colleague? What are the stories we are telling ourselves which cause us to hold back even though we may see a better alternative? Or does fear hold us back from looking full in the face the possibility that our job no longer is the one for us and facing up to the uncertainty of seeking fresh employment?

The raising of self-awareness and the concomitant increase in self-assurance is transformational in enhancing presence and personal impact on others within, and without, an organization. It is about how a person experiences him- or herself and their relationship with the world and it is about opening up the possibility of making choices which might before have felt too forbidding – even if those choices may not in the end be made.

With this kind of coaching, problems and issues which felt forbidding or intractable come not to feel like problems at all.