Responding to Personal Challenges in a Business Setting

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Business relationships can be productive and rewarding. They can also be challenging when they trigger the unresolved past evidenced by strong emotions and extreme reactions. This article describes the experience of an executive client and demonstrates a process for responding as the fully resourced professional you are capable of being.

While the following story is true, some of the details including the name of my client have been changed. This article was written at the suggestion of the client when she realized the efficacy of the process that I describe here.

Several months ago, my client Juno started a new role with a new company. Despite having success and enjoying her current position, the challenge and compensation potential of the new opportunity lured her away from her previous employer.

Before taking the new position, she researched the new company and saw that it was in trouble. She recognized that her unique skillset and talent were exactly what the company needed.

Juno took the new position with eyes wide open, having done the necessary research and measuring the potential risks and rewards. She was hired as head of sales and marketing in and answered to the president and CEO who reported to a board of investors.

It only took days for Juno to have a clear picture of the challenges faced by the company and her department. The challenge was even greater than she had anticipated.

She developed short and long-term strategies and goals for turning her department around based on previous successful experiences with former employers in the same industry. The CEO and president pledged their support, and Juno went to work.

After only a couple of months, the CEO was fired and replaced. The new CEO, under pressure from the board, created new policies that ran counter to my clients strategic plan.

Juno came into our coaching session feeling upset. The previous Friday, the CFO sent an email to the entire leadership team threatening that “heads would roll” if things didn’t improve quickly. In the email, the CFO said that he wanted employees in Juno’s department fired for policy infractions. Reacting to her own upset, my client replied to everyone, criticizing the CFO for being unprofessional and defending her team.

Over the course of our one-hour conversation, we agreed to focus on three areas:

1.       Shifting from suffering to wisdom

2.       Clarifying her own Conditions of Satisfaction

3.       Generating a plan to achieve value-based (rather than emotion-based) objectives

Although June resisted the idea, she acknowledged that she was suffering. She felt hurt, angry and disrespected. I suggested that until she could shift out of her current mindset, she would not have to access the resources needed to choose her words and actions wisely.

Juno knew she wasn’t seeing things clearly and that she felt disempowered. She understood that if she could access her personal power and clarity, she could respond in ways that reflected her values and priorities. A plan could then be devised from wisdom and clarity to achieve objectives that were important to her.

In Juno's journey to regain her empowerment and perspective, her transformation was greatly aided by me, an IFS coach. Our conversation revealed that what upset her most about the situation was that she felt disrespected and unsupported.

On a scale from -10 (completely disempowered) to +10 (completely empowered), Juno told me she was at -10 when she believed that she was being disrespected and unsupported.

I asked Juno if it was true that she was being disrespected and she immediately realized she was reacting to a story she told herself to explain the CFO’s email. She believed he was calling her out personally and felt ashamed.

This situation reminded her of the complete disempowerment she experienced when she was a teenager under the rule of a controlling father. After I helped her step back from the memory and look at current circumstances again, she acknowledged that she could not be certain about the motivation and intentions of the CFO.

This helped her relax. She no longer felt so disempowered, but she didn’t yet feel empowered. We couldn’t move on to our second agenda item, conditions of satisfaction, until we were sure that those conditions reflected current circumstances and not the past.

After talking for just a short time, Juno recognized that the rules of the game had changed. The new CEO had come to the company with his own set of rules and expectations. The CFO was following the guidance of the new CEO. Juno saw that she was upset because her original agreement with the company was no longer being honored or supported.

Why, I asked, would the company get a new CEO? She explained that the investors were getting nervous. The company was losing millions of dollars each month and, although her plan for turning things around would work, it would be months before the company would begin to break even.

Juno saw that the CFO’s email wasn’t personal. Her automatic impulse was to push back when feeling bullied or criticized. She understood that her pushback was a programmed response to a painful memory. She had lost her perspective and reacted.

Now that Juno could see the circumstance in the context of present realitiy (her company was losing money so they were changing the rules of the game) instead of seeing it through a lense distorted by the past (another authority figure is controlling and disrespecting me), it was time to look at conditions of satisfaction. What would she need to resolve this situation for herself?

Juno told me there was a part of her saying, “Quit, I’m not going to change their minds. Nothing I say or do will make a difference.” There was another voice was saying, “Not so fast! What am I going to do about money?”

From her present-reality perspective, Juno reminded herself that she was now in her 40s and was in charge of her life. She was no longer the teenager who felt disrespected with limited optons. This new perspective gave her access to inner resources needed to plan a response that would reflect her current, powerful and wise self.

Clear about her conditions of satisfaction, Juno was ready to formulate a plan to accomplish value-based objectives. The conditions that had originally attracted her to the new company were still important to her.  She valued independence, trust, respect, challenge, responsibility, and the power and freedom to determine her own compensation through successful implementation of her skills, values, and diligence.

By the end of the conversation, she had a clear plan of action.

1.       Send a private email to the CFO apologizing for her public challenge. In the email she would request a face-to-face conversation to understand and appreciate what they were each trying to accomplish.

2.       Quietly put feelers out to explore other potential opportunities.

By the end of our session, Juno’s empowerment had moved to a level of +5 where she had plenty of access to clarity, perspective, and wisdom.

When you find that you are suffering, consider the possiblity that the past has taken over. Ask for help from a coach, therapist, counselor, or mentor to shift your perspective.

·         Acknowledge your upset and notice that you are responding to the meaning-making you have attached to the circumstance that upset you.

·         When you feel more empowered (or at least no longer feel disempowered), begin to explore conditions to be restored to power, satisfaction, and contentment.

·         As you do this, your sense of empowerment will increase. This increased empowerment means you now have access to the innate resources you need to identify value-based objectives and wisely craft a plan to help you achieve them.