The following was originally posted on Medium in 2016 and was updated in September 2020
Leave your baggage at home.
Work is not therapy.
Keep your professional and personal lives separate.
Look forward, not back.
All of the above are common themes in many workplaces, and they certainly have merit. However like most absolutes, they are not practical in the real world.
The whole concept of work-life balance is a flawed. Since when is work not PART OF LIFE? In fact, as a result of the pandemic, work and home are inseparably intertwined for many. The more you start to treat work as an integral part of your life rather than trying to segregate it, the shorter your path to fulfillment and meaning.
Classic coaching models treat the individual at work independently from the rest of their life, and generally ignore or otherwise dismiss the past and focus on the future. As a result the changes affected are incomplete and often short lived. If we do not deeply examine our past to understand how we arrived where we are, then what hope do we have of laying out a path to transform our future? If we cannot connect our emotional ups and downs between what happens at work and what happens outside of work, then how can we possibly achieve a balanced life?
We are all a collection of experiences, some ours, some our ancestors, and we will always carry those experiences with us wherever we go. Deep and lasting personal growth happen when we are able to get at observation level of our own behaviors, understand their roots in our (and our family’s) experience, and connect our future to a transformation of our past rather than some mythical “fresh start” or “clean break”.
A great coach will remove the boundaries between past, present and future and bring down the walls between “work” and “life”. A great coach may not want to be called a therapist, but they had better be ready to help scratch the scabs off of some old wounds to help us understand deep truths about ourselves.
As part of the team at Creative Energy Options I learned the Twi language word Sankofa, literally translated to “go back and get it” to represent the central concept of clear the past to free the present. Find a coach who will help you look back before they help you discover a path to move forward.
Deilen Development 