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Close to burnout

Client A is close to burnout. Part of the reason is that he constantly over-stretches himself to meet other people’s requests for help, their demands for task-fulfilment (whether in A’s remit or not), their apparent need for protection from the consequences of their own behaviour, or the assumptions that A makes about their expectations of him. He never feels good enough. A’s childhood was one in which his needs and voice weren’t acknowledged by his parents. The only way he ever felt approved of or accepted was through his intellectual ability and achievements. Emotions were considered irrelevant in his family, and he felt neither loved nor lovable. He attempted suicide in his teens.

Alienating behaviour

Client B alienates others with her ‘honest’ but brutal and judgmental behaviour, has very high and unforgiving expectations of herself and of others (her language is peppered with ‘should’ and ‘have to’), she often feels isolated, and consistently unappreciated and unvalued, and at the same time is never satisfied with her own performance. She leaves roles or is ‘invited’ to leave (both of which happen relatively frequently), and realises that her reputation is becoming career-limiting. Her personal relationships have (unsurprisingly) also been difficult. She yearns for peace and ease with herself. She reports that as a child she was starved of love and grew up in a family where ‘good’ was never good enough.

Love and self-love

Both are senior, bright, talented people, with much to offer. Both have now reached a point at which they realise that their own behaviours are getting seriously in the way of their leadership, and they want to understand how to manage themselves differently. Both have been deprived of love in their formative years – and both evidence little capacity for self-love as well as a powerful need to be valued and approved of by their external environment.

Wellbeing, career and self-protection

Besides the negative impact on their wellbeing (exhaustion in a life that has little space, pleasures or joy in it, in one case, and a relentless drive to squeeze ever more achievement from self and others in the other, and deep-seated unhappiness, in both cases), each is also damaging their career prospects, unconsciously constraining themselves in a trap of attempted self-protection. What has turned out to be a trap, however, started as a means of self-protection which was perfectly appropriate at an earlier stage in their lives.

Messages and loyalties: a new freedom

For both of them, the coaching enquiry into deeply-rooted messages and loyalties that were once appropriate but no longer are, is both painful and cathartic. In their own ways they each experience a liberation, a freedom in an awareness that gives them choices that they hadn’t offered themselves before. They begin to learn about compassion for others, appropriate responsibility for self and others, and – critically – self-compassion. It’s a slow journey, and it’s not easy for either of them to let go of the old patterns that they have held on to in an attempt to keep themselves safe. Hard, too, is the acceptance that it’s appropriate to pay attention to themselves without self-judgment. But they learn, each in their own way, that there is strength and safety and a new-found sense of wellbeing in learning self-love, learning how to listen to their own needs, and self-acceptance.

Working relationships

The health and vibrancy of their working relationships change. Client A begins to find his (assertive, clear but not strident) voice, to be heard, and to find a new sense of belonging. Client B learns to listen to herself and to others with greater presence and with less judgment, and so to discover new richness, breadth and depth in her working environment.

Time will tell what the impact will be for their longer-term career fulfilment and for the effectiveness of their leadership. For the moment they both appear to me to be more balanced and more at peace.

Love has everything to do with it

Each of them is bringing more presence and self-love to work. A new, more settled, state seems to be emerging as a status quo, a way of being. It seems to me that love has everything to do with that.

_{Photo by:}_{Annie Spratt via Unsplash}

What’s love got to do with it?

Client A is close to burnout. He constantly over-stretches himself to meet other people’s requests for help and for task fulfilment. As a child, he felt neither loved nor lovable: the only way he ever felt approved of or accepted was through his intellectual ability and achievements. Client B alienates others with her ‘honest’ but brutal and judgmental behaviour, has very high and unforgiving expectations of herself and of others, and is never satisfied with her own performance. These behaviours are getting seriously in the way of their leadership, and they both want to understand how to manage themselves differently. Besides the negative impact on their wellbeing, each is also damaging their career prospects. The coaching enquiry means they each experience a freedom in an awareness that gives them choices that they hadn’t offered themselves before. They learn, each in their own way, that there is strength and safety and a new-found sense of wellbeing in learning self-love, learning how to listen to their own needs, and self-acceptance. Love has everything to do with it.

Endings and leavings

The primary emotions that arise from losing a sense of belonging need to be attended to, just as much as organisations need to acknowledge the contributions made by those who have left. Endings (and the associated feelings) that aren’t resolved or aren’t fully integrated into a system somehow ‘hang about’ and leave their impact to be felt, sometimes for decades, in the form of burdened roles. A particularly impactful ending is represented by death. There’s value in accepting ‘what is’, and being alert to what may be emerging: experiencing it as a state of being rather than thinking or doing. Loss or ending might actually be, above all, a fertile space – the Gestalt notion of the Fertile Void. Good endings allow for good beginnings.

Are you being heard?

Voice matters because it is a channel for the self-expression that people need in order to feel acknowledged and seen, and – more broadly – because it can have a significant impact for a team or organisation when judgment, uncertainty, ideas and innovation, collaboration, communication and coordination are in the mix. An absence of voice may mean compliance or obedience, but it isn’t territory for sustainable engagement - and sustainable engagement is essential for the flexibility and adaptability that characterises resilient, robust, flourishing teams and organisations. What enables voice is psychological safety: believing that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. That belief means the leader, in the first instance, consistently modelling behaviours that authentically welcome inclusiveness and diversity (including diversity of thought), that mean that help is offered and requested freely, that engage without judgment in taking risks and failing, and that make open conversations the norm – all this without fear of judgment, penalty or exclusion.

The illusion of solutions

Family therapist Barry Mason characterises solutions as ‘only dilemmas that are less of a dilemma than the dilemma one had’. There’s no such thing as right or wrong in the coaching encounter: no predetermined answers, no pre-set course, but rather flow and emergence, and the noticing of these. And here’s where certainty and uncertainty arise, mirroring the working environment - and particularly the leader’s environment. Thinking in terms of certainty may mean that the leader doesn’t see all the tripwires, since not everything is either certain or predictable. In my experience of coaching leaders, the capacity to allow, and allow for, uncertainty – frustrating as that may be – also allows for versatility, responsiveness to the situation as it is, rather than as one wants it or assumes it to be, and creativity. Which in turn allows for a more agile response.

Coaching through COVID and Beyond

Are you an NHS/care sector worker struggling to manage stress, get your mojo back or work out next steps? If so, we can help! Coaching through Covid and Beyond offers FREE confidential independent support to key workers who wouldn't normally have access to high-quality coaching. Maybe you just want a one-off chat, or you'd like to sign up to a programme of up to six sessions - whatever works best for you. You can get in touch via our website www.coachingthroughcovid.org or email us at info@coachingthroughcovid.org and we can take it from there.

Award for Coaching through COVID and Beyond

Pro bono coaching programme Coaching through COVID and Beyond (of which I'm a co-founder and a member of the core team) has won the Coaching at Work magazine award of External Coaching Champion (Organisation). The depth of our psychological safety in the core team has meant that we’ve been able to have difficult conversations in a spirit of openness and honesty, we’ve been ready to take risks in a context of uncertainty, we’ve been agile and responsive and happy to experiment in a spirit of ‘test and learn’, and we’ve welcomed diversity of all kinds. Living diversity means that we’ve constantly called on our collective intelligence - and so we've been able to achieve innovative success in several important ways.

Trauma

Trauma is a living expression of a life-changing experience that often can’t be expressed in words but is a fundamental – and literally visceral – part of an individual’s identity. The range of manifestations is endless, including addictions, anxieties, physical pain, illness, problems with sleep, problems with relationships, and repeating patterns of behaviour which are counter-productive but which the individual doesn’t seem able to change. Despite appearances, the most apparently well-balanced, cheerful and obliging colleague may be hiding pain and distress which can get triggered and thus result in unexpectedly negative behaviour. The need for compassion and self-compassion, patience and acceptance, curiosity and tolerance is significant. What do you notice at work – about yourself and others?

Belonging, identity and confidence in uncertainty

You might recognise a situation where an organisation’s strategy is unclear, poorly-defined, poorly communicated or in constant flux. In this context, the role and place of any individual in the organisation (and especially a new recruit) can be unclear. The criteria by which his or her performance is evaluated are also likely to be unclear or in flux, or even more unsettling, implicitly in flux. As a result his or her confidence, their sense of identity, and sometimes even confidence in their survival, take a knock. None of this is good news for performance or growth or development. Leaders can therefore begin to turn things round by being curious about what they could be more aware of, by enquiring into their reports’ experience, and by listening.

Fear and courage

Fear and courage are intertwined when it comes to leadership of self and others. Fear is inevitable and - if unchecked - inhibits and erodes performance, versatility and the creativity that can be crucial to address the challenge, complexity and uncertainty that are constants in the life of leaders. Courage isn’t inevitable, but it’s an invaluable resource when fear is present. Learn, experiment again with a small change in courage, keep learning, and keep experimenting.

The impact of kindness and compassion

The news emerged that Dame Clare Marx, Chair of the General Medical Council, was stepping down from her post, having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She reflects on her career that ‘in my happiest moments, I felt respected, valued and listened to. I felt I belonged’. Her wish is that ‘every doctor and every patient experiences the compassion that defines first-class care’. It’s the humanity between colleagues and by leaders that can evoke either distress or joy, isolation or feeling part of something bigger. How would it be if all of us, as leaders, spent just a couple of minutes each day being aware and conscious of compassion, kindness and listening? Awareness is the crucial starting point for change.

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