How to catch stories before they become character flaws

I find the stories in our brain so fascinating. That’s probably why I love my work so much. This week, one of my clients came to me saying that she wanted to continue working through the lack of work-life balance she felt. So we started with a definition of what work-life balance is to her. For her, it was all about work hours. She knew there was a threshold to her ability to work and it capped at 60 hours. 50 was ideal, but anything over 60 is way too much and it would start to impact all aspects of her life. So she started with the idea that if she could just cap her hours and build in rest, she would be fine. 

Then, we started to peel that back. Because even at 50 hours, there were times she found herself up in the middle of the night ruminating or trying to do something she enjoyed on the weekend, only to find herself plagued by thoughts like:

Why am I in this spot with so much to do?

I am frustrated. 

I feel like I am late. 

I am behind and I shouldn’t be.

Why didn’t I just work from 10pm to midnight and just knock this out?

Her brain is trying to exercise control over the situation and re-establish peace, but the process it’s using is just creating more unease. From there, the judge in her brain started to kick into gear and add to the stress with comments like:

You are a workaholic.

You don’t know when to quit. 

You are going to lose everything because you are always working. 

Your mind doesn’t know how to stop.

You have no control.

And therein lies the source of our work, the self-concept from which you operate in daily life. When you haven’t established a strong one and leave that to the outside world to dictate for you, it can be built on lies. Those lies then present themselves in the form of chronic problems. 

In coaching, we contrast that by making conscious choices about who we are and what we value. That means I can choose to value achievement, completion, or ownership at work, and still recognize the moments where I’m going into overuse of a strength at the detriment of my own health or personal relationships. Instead of criticizing myself for that overuse, I can quickly adjust, just like a surfer when they confront a big wave. That moment of adjustment doesn’t have to become a character flaw, it’s simply a moment of awareness that I’m out of alignment. 

What tools do you have in place to catch the stories in your brain before they embed themselves in your character?

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