What to do when life is giving you a bumpy ride

Imagine riding through life on a bicycle with bumpy wheels. A recent coaching session with a client demonstrates just how central health and well-being is to feeling effective and confident at work.

My client, who will be designated as Ruby for this blog, described the perfect cycle of self-sabotage. Imagine Ruby talking to you now, as she talked to me during our conversation around her 'wheel of life', she would be saying something like this:

“I do not lead my life a balanced way. When I am tired, overworked and neglecting myself, I ignore the symptoms until I reach close to burnout. I believe that this makes me inconsistent at work, this inconsistency in turn, undermines my confidence in my decision making and my relationships with others. I end with a head full of negative self-talk, part of this is what I think others must be thinking of as well as my own negative judgements about myself. I can pull myself out of it but I do not want to keep on being trapped in this cycle. I want to be proactive.

I now recognise that regular self-care, catching myself earlier in the cycle of negativity, would help me to be more effective, efficient and consistent at work as well as happier in my personal life.”

These insights for Ruby came out of completing the wheel of life reflection, goal setting and action planning tool. The wheel of life is commonly used by coaches and mentors when working with individuals who are experiencing high levels of dissatisfaction with life. You rate different areas of your life on a scale of 0 - 10, where 10 is the score for high satisfaction.

The visual impact of Ruby’s completed wheel just screams out at you.

Here are her satisfaction ratings:

• health - 1
• fun and recreation - 4
• significant other/romance - 3
• family - 9
• friends - 5
• career - 7
• physical environment - 8
• personal growth - 6
• money - 7

Visualise that plotted on a pie chart and you have Ruby’s wheel of Life.

So, her priority and action plan for becoming more effective at work, is to have a more balanced life by ‘getting a life’ - excuse the slang! She feels that an overall satisfaction rating of eight would bring her life into balance.

She is going to give more priority to exercise in a way that she enjoys and finds motivating, focus on developing friendships and leisure time.

In our next session, we will focus on her negative self-talk using the cognitive behavioural coaching approach of reframing.

Please get in touch if you would like to work on your life balance with me as your coach.

Self-coaching

You can also have ago at using it yourself by downloading the tool from my website at www.nottinghamcoachingcentre.co.uk/CoachingBlog.

Charmaine Roche at Lifeflowbalance Coaching and Consulting.

Helping you realise your potential for transformation!