Facing up to 50

Margaret was approaching her 50th birthday and having a crisis of confidence about her perceived value in the business.

Facing up to 50

Posted by Dianne Lowther on

The challenge

Margaret (not her real name) was the Compensation and Benefits Manager of a large international company. She was approaching her 50th birthday when we first met and having a crisis of confidence about her perceived value in the business and was worried that her career would be over when she turned 50. She also had 2 teenage sons and a husband who found it hard to handle her frequent business trips that left him in charge of the family home.

The effect

Margaret's loyalties were conflicted and she was beginning to feel very stressed. She loved her work and enjoyed the opportunity to travel to other countries and discover how the company's central principals played out in different cultures. At the same time, she was aware that her family missed her when she went away and was concerned that it put an unfair level of responsibility on her husband. She wanted to be there for her family but also wanted to continue to develop her career. Her biggest fear was that if she scaled back in any way she would be seen as 'past it' by her younger colleagues.

Solution

We worked through a programme that focused on Margaret’s personal values relating to work and to family life. This entailed several sessions where we explored what was really important to her and explored the reasons why each of them mattered to her. We then checked how well her values fitted together and looked for conflicts between work and family life being expressed in her values. By identifying and resolving conflicts in her values she was able to create a congruent plan for the future and stop worrying.

Result

She continued to be a client for a long time after her personal coaching was completed, because the confidential nature of her work meant that she lacked a peer group to bounce ideas off and found that a coach was the ideal person to fill this gap. She eventually moved to another company in the same sector as HR Director and when her new company acquired the old one she became HR Director of the combined Group

Dianne Lowther
Dianne Lowther

nlp for business, nlp for work, executive NLP, people skills for IT Professionals