Olivia dreaded waking up to go to the office. The goal posts seemed to move daily, and performance feedback was given with a personal and threatening tone. Her boss’ style of management was erratic and unpredictable.
For someone who cared about her own professionalism, this environment felt toxic and unsafe.
But Olivia was also determined and ambitious. She wanted to grow in her role. She asked herself daily:
Olivia learned that her default mode of operation was to make decisions logically, bypassing her emotions almost entirely. Without access to her emotional world to inform her decisions, she wound up producing results that made more work for herself and those around her.
Her staff became more reliant on her, they argued with her direction, and she looked for validation from the one person who had proven she couldn’t provide it – her boss.
She’d been avoiding her own emotions as a way to cope with a ‘blame and shame’ work culture. By avoiding her emotions, she was inadvertently making things worse for herself and her staff.
This awareness changed everything for her.
Olivia’s breakthrough began when she took different actions to break out of the patterns.
To counter the poor results of her fear-based choices, she began to make decisions from a more neutral and fulsome place. She took the bigger picture into consideration. Every new action led her to see that she could be powerful and effective. The belief that she didn’t count began to fall away in place of a newfound confidence.
The biggest breakthrough came with her recognition that she’d been using her high-pressure, intense work environment to avoid how she was really feeling deep inside.
Once she recognized that her emotions were rich with valuable information – and learned to work with them – she liberated herself from the false assumption that she was destined to suffer abusive bosses.
Olivia was in charge of her own life.
Olivia now:
After our coaching together, Olivia shared with me that she was deeply grateful. She’d given herself the gift of agency.
If you’re navigating a challenging work environment, questioning your decisions, or feeling stuck in patterns that are holding you back, personalized coaching with Lynda Hoffman can help you understand those patterns and make choices with greater clarity, confidence, and agency.