Laura
Managing overwhelm at work
Laura is an administrative assistant at a large nonprofit corporation. She contacted me for help in prioritizing and completing tasks more efficiently. She had gotten into a pattern of working on the weekends (without pay) to complete tasks she hadn’t accomplished during the week. She noticed a pattern of being easily overwhelmed by the constant inflow of action items and retreating into nonproductive habits, such as surfing the web or reorganizing her email folders.
We started our work together with me being present with Laura while she worked through a backlog of filing and email. This provided real-life examples of where she gets stuck. I was quickly impressed by Laura’s resourcefulness, conscientiousness, organization and excellent interpersonal skills, but I noticed that she became bogged down when a project was complicated with competing priorities or was particularly tedious. Laura explained that she got caught in an inner struggle of rationalizing why it made sense to delay the work, while at the same time berating herself for not just doing it.
Coaching revealed several underlying beliefs and perspectives that caused Laura to set unrealistic expectations for herself. She is working to reframe her perspectives and be more realistic and self-compassionate.
Our work together has also helped Laura increase her awareness of her sensory sensitivities and processing modalities. She uses this information to adapt tasks so they are less aversive and more interesting. We also found ways to make her work environment more appealing. All of this increased her motivation.
Laura is seeing improvement in several areas:
- Email management
- Managing interruptions
- Project planning and breaking things down into manageable steps
- Utilizing a task list
- Project wrap-up and follow-through
- Reframing tedious tasks to make them more interesting
- Making recurring tasks routine
- Delegating
- Prioritizing
Now Laura rarely works nights or weekends. When she gets stuck or feels overwhelmed, she takes steps that allow her natural creativity and resourcefulness to emerge instead of retreating into a state of frozen panic. She is much more confident in her job and is beginning to think about what new career options are possible for her.
Names and demographic information have been changed to protect client confidentiality.
