Serena is a lively 35 year old who lives with her husband and 12 year old daughter. She manages a small team in a healthcare setting. Recently, an interpersonal conflict with one of her team members resulted in his leaving the team. Serena felt depressed and disappointed, especially having invested much time and energy trying to solve this personality conflict with her team member.
This was only one of a series of problems, which could all be distilled to one central theme: Life isn't perfect. Life is not as I want it to be. Until now, she has tried to meet challenges by studying to understand and learn more: more theory, more methods, a Master's diploma, but this time that strategy didn't seem to work. I felt compassion for her, but realised that learning more was not going to provide the solution to this woman at this stage of her life.
The problem was that she couldn't accept life as it is as a woman in her thirties with a significant responsibility in an organisation. You can be optimistic, but life won't fulfill all your desires. You can try hard, you can try to be perfect, you can try to please everybody, but there will always be a team member or a boss who shows you that there are limits.
Serena hadn't really discovered those practical limits before in her life. Her training had prepared her well for the content and context of her work, but not for the blocks life itself put on her path. When she was challenged in the professional arena, her strategy had been to acquire more training and supervision, but it never seemed enough to meet all the demands in her daily life. She always wanted to “make it better” and took sole responsibility for everything that went wrong or anyone who felt bad in the workplace.
Serena's key issue is the inability to transition from a stage in life in which her task had been to develop by learning from others, in a safe learning environment, to a stage in which she has to learn to carry responsibility from the core of her Self, without relying on other experts: *She* was the expert now in a team that wasn't perfect in an organisation that wasn't perfect in a world that wasn't perfect. Such a transition is not a problem to be solved. It requires a transformation.
This was only one of a series of problems, which could all be distilled to one central theme: Life isn't perfect. Life is not as I want it to be. Until now, she has tried to meet challenges by studying to understand and learn more: more theory, more methods, a Master's diploma, but this time that strategy didn't seem to work. I felt compassion for her, but realised that learning more was not going to provide the solution to this woman at this stage of her life.
The problem was that she couldn't accept life as it is as a woman in her thirties with a significant responsibility in an organisation. You can be optimistic, but life won't fulfill all your desires. You can try hard, you can try to be perfect, you can try to please everybody, but there will always be a team member or a boss who shows you that there are limits.
Serena hadn't really discovered those practical limits before in her life. Her training had prepared her well for the content and context of her work, but not for the blocks life itself put on her path. When she was challenged in the professional arena, her strategy had been to acquire more training and supervision, but it never seemed enough to meet all the demands in her daily life. She always wanted to “make it better” and took sole responsibility for everything that went wrong or anyone who felt bad in the workplace.
Serena's key issue is the inability to transition from a stage in life in which her task had been to develop by learning from others, in a safe learning environment, to a stage in which she has to learn to carry responsibility from the core of her Self, without relying on other experts: *She* was the expert now in a team that wasn't perfect in an organisation that wasn't perfect in a world that wasn't perfect. Such a transition is not a problem to be solved. It requires a transformation.