With thanks to a couple of great people I know, Dan Dackombe being one of them, I’m encouraged to occasionally sharecase studies based on my work in the last decade. I stress two things: the stories are composite to protect confidentiality, and they are absolutely realistic and reflect people coping in every day life, the kind of people you'll recognise. If we look at the statistics around trauma, adverse childhood experiences et al, we will quickly see that these pen drawings reflect what is very real for many more people than we realise.
Why put these stories out there? Simple really. We are in a world where awareness of the need for good mental and emotional health is thankfully on the rise. We are in a world where compassion, empathy, tolerance and understanding are not only key to our ability to work with mental health - for ourselves and others, but they are also key for surviving this messy upside down world that we live in.
When a client shows up for coaching, there’s always a reason for it, some declared goal to be achieved. What’s often not seen by the client (or their Line Manager) is the relationship between what is manifesting today and the backstory. So here goes, ‘Every One Has A Back Story #1. Meet Joanna’.
Joanna goes to work wearing a tailored navy skirt suit, navy elegant heeled shoes and high shine gossamer flesh coloured tights. Her hair is always immaculately organised into either a french pleat or a dutch braid. She is the epitome of elegance with her manicured nails and flawless make-up.
And there is more. Joanna is highly successful within the financial services company that employs her. She is respected for her intellect and her capacity both to manage projects, and the competing demands upon her time. As you might suspect from the way she presents, she is also a perfectionist. This drive for ‘getting it perfectly right’ has been a major contributing factor to her success. She’s swift in her thinking and she’s had her fair share of promotion in a business that is very results focused. She is efficient and matter of fact and, people know exactly where they stand with her, especially given her clarity of decision making and direction. She is always in control.
Recently however, cracks are beginning to appear in her armour. There have been a few mistakes recently which have led to friction within her team. She is quietly frustrated at these mistakes and she blames herself for not being good enough, for not having seen the mistakes coming.
Outside of work Joanna doesn’t invest much time in unwinding or relaxing. She often takes her work home with her and to be fair, she loves her work and her career. She believes that if she had worked harder or, had been smarter then she would have seen the problems occurring ahead of time and been able to head them off. She’s especially upset that her boss has called her out on these issues recently and she’s very worried that her so far unblemished track record is not quite so unblemished. Joanna hasn’t asked for help and was surprised when her boss suggested a coach.
Joanna engages someone and begins by saying that her reason for coaching is that she needs to be better at her job, find a way in which she can do more, and be more effective at managing her team. They get to work and it doesn’t quite go as Joanna expected.
Here is Joanna’s back story.
Joanna is the eldest of two children, by 7 years to her younger sister. When Joanna was 10 her parents divorced after lots of marital conflict and her father became estranged. Joanna sought refuge with her grandmother, a stabilising solid influence in her life at a time when Mum was numbing her own distress with alcohol. Her grandmother died when she was 13, a critical time in Joanna’s teenage development.
By the time she was 16 her mother had remarried a man who also had children. They became a blended family, but not a happy one. There was always the threat of physical abuse, and alcohol remained a present feature of her mum’s life. During her teenage years she rebelled before finally escaping to university at 18. Out of this environment she was determined to succeed, and not be defined by her history. She graduated with an excellent degree, the usual student debt and then some, but undeterred she set about building a career and found her way in to financial services.
This experience taught her that to be successful she needed to work hard, be smart, strive for perfection. This would bring her success and therefore safety, although that latter isn't something she would recognise or put into words. If she could just be perfect then maybe the approval and recognition she so desperately desires will be found. Deep down, very deep down she always has and still, yearns for the acceptance and acknowledgement of her mother and her estranged father.
Our life's experience is wired into our neuopsychobiology. For evolutionary reasons, the body always looks for safety. If working hard brings recognition, and validation, then Joanna has a sense of being safe. She is seen, recognised and has a basis on which to make her way in the world. And when this strategy stops working, a break-down will occur. (Breakdown, not in the sense of a 'nervous breakdown' as we colloquially speak of it, but rather a rupture in her day to day equilibrium.
But Joanna doesn’t realise the connections in any of this and of course neither do her colleagues - why would they? They don’t know the back story, and even if they did, would they make the connection?
With her coach's assistance, Joanna begins to make sense of how her history shapes and influences her behaviour, how it works for her - and will always work for her - and how she might also be able to create different choices once in a while. Over time she finds that she can more deeply embody a felt sense of being enough. Simple in words but a really powerful and positive shift in how she feels about herself, the actions she takes and the mistakes she makes. She can always be enough, and there will be more too. It feels empowering. Instead of living in a mood of 'constantly pushing harder'. She begins to find moments when she can just slow down a little, survey the horizon from a different perspective, exercise more self-care and compassion. In turn this impacts her team with a softening around the edges and, she's more approachable. Of course she still has high standards, of course she can still turn up the gas when she needs to, but she can now also turn it down when that is a better more fruitful course of action.
