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Coaching
Success Story
Sue
was a VP of Marketing for a nonprofit organization. She
described her work and home life as a semi-organized
chaos. “Overwhelm” was a frequently used word –
Sue was overwhelmed with life as an executive, a mother
of 2 teens, a wife to another busy executive, and a
daughter of aging parents.
At
work (an organization where it was hard to say
“no”), she was constantly asked to do more with
fewer resources. She worked a lot of hours and chores
piled up on the weekends. She felt overwhelmed and
paralyzed – if a task seemed too big, she wouldn’t
start. She came to coaching to get more control over her
life, lose weight, find ways to get fun and
exercise into her life, and get more organized at work
and home.
Sue’s
Signature Strengths on the VIA (Values in Action; Survey
of Signature Strengths) were:
-
Capacity
to Love and Be Loved
-
Humor
and playfulness
-
Creativity,
ingenuity and originality
-
Zest,
enthusiasm and energy
In
the coaching relationship, Sue immediately went about
making a plan to get her life back in control. Planning
and goal-setting were key coaching tools in this work.
Sue realized that she did too little planning. She was
too busy putting out the fires to plan her work. Sue
used her humor, creativity and zest to rethink how she
wanted her life to look. We worked through trouble spots
in her workday. She made a plan for how to handle late
afternoon fatigue.
Sue
increased planning time in her work schedule. She set
aside time at the beginning and end of each day to take
stock. She found it helpful to look at her daily
schedule, focus on priorities and make decisions about
what to let go of.
Sue
made plans for exercise as well. I helped her reframe
her beliefs that exercise had to be hard and isolating.
“What’s another way you could think about that?”
She liked the idea that exercise could be fun and easy.
I
helped Sue generate ideas about how to make exercise fun
and easy that would also include her family. She loved
activities like ice skating, family hikes on the
weekends and working out with her teenage sons. With
Sue’s top strengths being “to love and be loved”
and “humor and playfulness”, her best workouts were
fun activities that included family and friends.
Since
Sue was a self-proclaimed perfectionist and high
achiever, she tended to make everything into work. I
requested that she be willing to underachieve in her
exercise efforts, that she find a way to include her
loved ones and make it fun and easy, and that she
consider the possibility that even a minimal amount of
exercise would be helpful to her. This was her most
important homework. It shifted her perspective, helped
her learn to have fun with her workouts and kept her in
action.
Sue
needed to learn to delegate. She realized that she
expected a lot from herself and her employees, but
little from her husband and kids. She was frazzled with
constant demands and interruptions. “How do you want
things to be?” She began delegating chores at home and
recommitted some of her time to her own self-care.
She also began finding ways to delegate at work more.
She had difficulty seeing herself as a leader. She
thought of herself more as a team player who always
pitched in to help. When she began to view herself more
through the lens of leadership, she began delegating to
her assistant more. She used her assistant to screen
more calls, reduce her schedule and handle more tasks
independently.
Asking for help wasn’t easy. I acknowledged Sue for
her willingness to step into uncertain territory and her
courage to try things that were difficult. We set up the
structure of a “confidence file” in which she made a
note in her planner when she did something well or met a
goal. It was a way to acknowledge her own successes
rather than gloss over them.
Sue
learned to honor her commitments to herself and to hold
herself accountable, something she never thought she was
“strong enough” to do before. She learned to
consider different perspectives and and be a more
flexible thinker. She learned that a little planning
goes a long way, and how important planning is to her
daily schedule to help avoid overload. Best of all, she
identified her strengths and learned to honor her
strengths and values in more areas of her life.
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