About 2 years ago, Hari and his wife decided to start a family and last year (December 2011) they were blessed with a baby boy. However, since then Hari’s work and marital life has been going steadily downhill. In fact for the first time in his working career, he was rated as “Fair” in his annual appraisal for 2011-12, a stark difference from his usual ratings of “Very Good” or “Outstanding”.
Hari was at a complete loss on how to reverse this downhill slide. One of Hari’s friends suggested that Hari try working with a Coach. His friend had had a positive intervention by a Coach and had benefitted considerably. Hari had never worked with a Coach before and was sceptical of the whole process. However, having tried out a few options on his own, and not succeeded to any significant degree, he agreed to work with a Coach despite his scepticism.
Desired Outcome
Hari articulated his goal as:
How to cope with the work pressure and balance personal life?
His desire was to regain his professional credibility, standing and competence and also recapture the halcyon days of matrimonial bliss.
Approach
Hari reached out to me in early April, 2012 to understand what Coaching entailed and what could be the likely outcomes. I spent the first two sessions (pro bono) explaining what Coaching was all about, its boundaries and the Coaching Process. Thereafter, while Hari’s scepticism did not diminish, his overriding need to have the issues resolved took precedence and he agreed to 6 Coaching sessions, which were later extended by another 6 sessions.
I started by asking Hari to recollect when things started to go downhill. He narrated that his wife had a difficult pregnancy and during the third trimester, she needed to be taken for frequent check-ups. Despite the support of the extended family his wife felt, and he concurred, that he needed to be accompany her for all her visits to her doctor. Often this needed to be done during working hours and it resulted in Hari having to be away from work for nearly half a day at a time. As a result of these absences, the backlog of work started piling up and he began missing deadlines and slipping on commitments. On several occasions, having missed a deadline or slipped up on a commitment, in his anxiety to catch up, Hari felt compelled to set unrealistic time lines for his team and himself. In his own words Hari said “he was programming himself to fail again and again”. In order to catch up with pending work, he started working late in office and also during week-ends. Since it was a stressful time for his wife, she neither appreciated nor encouraged his working late or working from home.