Please note: * the person in this story is made up of multiple coachees with similar stories.
Coaching is confidential and personal stories will NEVER be shared by me.
Meet Jamie
Jamie was having a difficult time of it. Life was bombarding her on multiple fronts, and she kept putting on a brave face ,and going through the motions. Her work kept asking her to take on difficult projects in highly sensitive arenas. Her kids were acting up and she struggled to handle all those relationships in a successful manner.
She felt like she had no control, and that things kept happening to her. Her lack of connection to her family and work purpose made her feel as if she was drowning.
Jamie needed to reconnect to her life and her family, before she could take back control of her own life.
When Jamie first spoke to me, we focused on her career and how she could gain influence within her work environment. It quickly became clear that her underlying difficulties came from her personal relationships, which then spiralled into her working life.
We started with grounding. We breathed together, letting out the stress of the current moment to enable clearer, focused conversations.
We explored Jamies emotional reactions to certain situations with her children. We practised a simple Pause, Breathe, Respond exercise to stop reacting and enable care and curiosity to become the cornerstone of her conversations, rather than reactions based on generational emotional trauma.
Over a series of sessions, we worked on Jamie’s Circles of Control, using differing lenses to expand her range of influence and gain clarity as to where she could take control, and where she needed to let things go as holding on was just stressing her out, and making her feel more out of control. We explored her own support mechanisms, where she could go to get more support and how she might find the moments of joy and gratitude in her life to enable greater peace within her.
The breakthrough came when we did 3 things:
- We combined her various circles of control lens to see the bigger picture. This enables Jamie to see how with certain lenses she believed she had more control and influence over the same things, as when a different lens was applied. By exploring this she realised that she had a much greater space to work with than before. It enabled her to apply techniques she used in the work place to her home life, and vice versa.
- We explored her emotional circles – which emotion she generally started with for conversation with certain people, and which emotional reactions she had with them. Through this exploration, we uncovered a childhood situation which was dictating her reactions in certain situation.
- I then tasked her with a Cutting the Cord exercise for homework to reduce and as much as possible remove this baggage that has been controlling her emotional reactions for years.
After 4 sessions, Jamie felt more in control of her life, and more able to relax.
After 6 sessions, she felt freer, had started reconnecting on an emotional level with her children, and had stopped reacting.
She had reconnected to herself and her family, and they noticed.
* the person in this story is made up of multiple coachees with similar stories. Due to the confidentiality of coaching, personal stories will NEVER be shared by me.