Why You Need to Get Personal in Your Workplace Coaching Sessions

When companies sponsor coaching support as part of their professional development, I find that coachees often arrive with a belief that they have to keep their sessions limited to professional topics. As much as we may try to compartmentalize our “work” and our “life”, our personal and professional personas are inextricably interconnected. They occur in parallel and impact one another. Here’s why we need to normalize discussing personal topics in our professional coaching sessions:

VUCA affects everything

VUCA - the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of our modern world - doesn’t limit itself to professional and personal silos. The effects can permeate through all areas of our work, health, relationships and more. If we’re facing immense challenges at home, it’s difficult to prevent them from affecting our ability to be fully productive and focused in our work, and vice versa. To learn to manage our responses to VUCA, we need to hold the full picture to understand how it’s affecting us and how these parts of our lives relate to one another.

Resilience boosts you

Coaching helps you strengthen and expand your window of tolerance— the stronger your window of tolerance (aka the ability to observe yourself and self reflect on your emotional and intellectual states), the better your ability to perform at work and at home. Building your resilience can help improve your overall mental wellness, improving your ability to handle setbacks and recover from them quicker and more fully. You will be better equipped to face any kind of adversity. There are many different ways to cultivate resilience and your coach can help you discover and implement the ones that will be most effective for you.

Relationship skills are universal

Chances are that if you find challenges in your personal relationships, similar themes will emerge with your professional ones. Tackling relationship challenges through coaching will help you cultivate skills that are beneficial across the board. Learning positive ways to diffuse tension, reduce friction and nurture connections will improve your relationships in all facets of your life, likely bringing greater contentment and satisfaction along with it.

Wisdom is multidimensional

A coach can help you mine for learnings about yourself and identify themes that appear across all dimensions of your life. The coach’s external, informed perspective can help you discover your deeper patterns of thoughts and behaviours that may be creating blockers. Whether you’re exploring professional or personal challenges, what you learn about yourself can be applied to future challenges, ideally helping you unpack them sooner and more effectively.

You’ll only leave if you’re meant to

Some employers worry that if members of their team participate in coaching, and personal topics come up in their session, they may end up discovering they’re meant to do something else, elsewhere. I’ve found that it’s rare for someone to suddenly realize their truth and leave. More often than not, they discover how they can shift their perspectives to manage their work and their work relationships better. If they do leave, it’s usually been on their mind for some time and has likely impacted their output at work. If someone does leave, it’s usually the right thing for the company too and creates space for someone who is a better fit for the role.

To truly grow and thrive, try creating space for your personal life in your coaching conversations. Of course, to really be able to open up and discuss the full picture, you need to be working with a coach that you trust. I would love to be that coach for you. Learn more about my executive and leadership coaching and how your professional and personal lives can benefit.