Coaching (when to use it)

Coaching is a way to get an overview of current challenges. Both in life and work scenarios, most people have challenges with colleagues, family, relationships, career, stress, or other difficulties that impinge on their lives.

Coaching helps with getting clarity on the situation, finding a better way forward, and getting motivation and support to follow through with it.

Coaching lets you move forward in a good direction, so you can lead the life you want. Whenever there’s a challenge you can’t just work out by talking to your friends or colleague about, head over to a coach and get some clarity on the situation and breathe easily afterward.

There are many types of coaches, such as ones specializing in coaching for digital decision makers to spiritual coaches. Get in touch with one and see if it’s for you.

De-stress your work environment

Your work environment is an important part of your daily life, so I thought it would be a suitable subject to start a series focusing on your well-being and creating the life you want. This post looks at your physical and mental environment, mentioned in the previous post.

Looking at stress, there are a few things you should try to avoid in a daily work environment whether working in an office landscape or in an isolated location:

• Lack of, too much or wrong type of assignment – If you are assigned too much or too little work compared to your competency and experience, it’s easy to become stressed, which can easily happen if you are asked to start a project which you are not comfortable with. The key here is to communicate that there is something wrong, and that the person who handed you the task may not have understood the scope of the project at hand. For example, a manager who has no experience in IT development projects might ask you to create a certain function, but hasn’t realised that the requested functionality requires a number of other, seemingly unrelated, tasks before the task at hand can even get started – thereby of course making the task larger than anticipated
• Lack of control and daily influence of your own working methods and environment – If you feel that you have no control of the way you work and that you are constantly regulated by for example company policy, this might be a source of great stress. Again, the key to solving it is communication, to find a balance where you have enough control while the project gets done. Having enough control will probably make you more efficient as well, making everybody happy in the end.
• Lack of reward or recognition – If you never get any feedback, such as a bonus, an “employee of the month” award or a raise, it’s easy to start wondering if you are doing well enough. To battle negative feelings from this, ask for an evaluation of your work and discuss how you could communicate your progress better with the employer/project manager/task master. Knowing that everything is going to plan (or better) serves you both to help improve any lacking areas.
• Lack of social support and community – This one can be difficult to solve, especially if you are a freelancer, doing distance work or in another situation where you don’t work together with colleagues on a daily basis. If you are self-employed, a distance worker or similar, there is the possibility of finding a co-working environment in many major cities across the world. Another possibility is to find Meetups suitable for your interests (perhaps focusing on an area which you find lacking from the previous post about evaluating your life)
• Lack of justice – Another difficult area to address, as many complaints in this area can be seen as immature. Some events which occur at a workplace may actually seem unfair but are motivated as such because of different level of salary (I wouldn’t expect someone at entry level having the same responsibility as the supervisor) or a different title (for example, if you’re in marketing you will do something different than the person who is creating the software which makes your job is easier). If you find something unfair, you should try communication with caution and consider if you need some evidence before approaching whoever can change the situation.

When evaluating your own physical environment, consider some of the following as possible signs of closing in on a future burnout:

• Physical fatigue – if you are constantly tired even though you get enough sleep and excercise while eating healthy food, you might consider other methods to battle the fatigue. Signs include difficulty of sleeping, and lowered disease resistance.
• Intelectual fatigue – If you can’t concentrate, keep forgetting things, keep postponing tasks or have too many projects running at the same time, you could be running into a brick wall when it comes to your mind. Try to slow down, take one task at a time and prioritize
• Emotional fatigue – If you notice over sensitivity, self blame, emotional coldness, a concurrent sence of panic or a change in self-preception you need to take a step back and consider talking to someone about your situation.
• Social fatigue – Signs of this include isolation, being out of touch with yourself and lacking in commitment. To find a way to get back to normal social life you might want to try slow methods with anonymous contact, such as creating an anonymous Twitter profile to communicate with others about your interests, or perhaps going to meetups to meet new people. Do what you feel comfortable with – don’t do too much at once, but don’t sit still either…
• Spiritual fatigue – Losing your motivation to live life and pursue your dreams, lacking goals, inability to motivate yourself and find energy and depersonalization are signs of spiritual fatigue. This shouldn’t be confused with anything religious or new age, but rather be thought of as an area of motivation and goals.

If you have ideas, suggestions or comments, feel free to write a few lines below…