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How you are at home is how you are at work

Updated: 2 days ago

...your earliest experiences are the key. Make both areas of your life more comprehensible and satisfying.


We exit childhood with all its invisible markings, falling into a phase that will go on forever, in which we are expected to adult. (It has become a verb). Adulting is hard and for good reason. Those invisible markings, our characteristics, foibles, strengths (admired) and supposed weaknesses (not admired so much), buttons that are activated at every reminder or repeat of childhood experiences, go with us all the way. We can do something to reduce their power, and or enable us to catch them before they fall at our feet at the worst moments we could possibly imagine. All of our relationships are affected, wherever we are, whatever we are doing, whoever we are with. This means we take them to church or wherever we get married; to sports matches, to social gatherings, to our parenting, and we take them to work. We all do.


In this piece I concentrate on that singular aspect of work life, and its entanglement with all of our relationships.

Managers are often not naturally imbued with skills and attributes required for working well and effectively with people they are charged with managing. It becomes an awkward hit and miss affair punctuated by dodgems, deceit, delusions, and ending with anxiety and stress.

If we note that there are few managers who naturally savour the responsibilities of that most important piece of their work, and add that generally organisations do not provide manager training, we have a distinctly lose lose situation, which nothing in the structure, and no-one in the organisation is equipped to confront.


When I was in full time work, the most wished for change was to receive regular feedback, while getting more money in the pay-packet was a couple of notches down, according to a survey conducted here, in New Zealand - sorry, no reference in my mind, just that specific detail. Instead, if we were lucky-ish performance reviews were fitfully and awkwardly carried out. That, or the stomach drop call to the normally incommunicative and inaccessible boss’s office for ‘a little chat’. That call tends to suggest you are about to hear something that will not enhance your self esteem or general happiness, or be likely to improve your performance, productivity, or motivation. In short, relationships between managers and ‘their people’ are far from heroic. In short, performance reviews are poorly, rarely, or never done in vast numbers of workplaces. Often managers are appointed just because they have stuck around long enough and conscientiously toed the line, or occasionally are new whizz kids brought in. Not only are they clueless about the people managing part, they are certainly not trained to do regular performance reviews, or to schedule and prioritise them. And as for regular feedback at the end of the day, that is an almost unheard of piece of workplace interaction. The capable people managers are a salve to the lucky minority who benefit from their skills, attention and invitation to dialogue.


It is not ill will that stops the useful interactions between managers and their people. It is embarrassment, wrapped up in the fear of relational intimacy which, as noted above, they bring from home to work. They have been dragging it along since childhood, and our responses are also dragged along since our childhoods. This unfortunate trail of circumstances then gets represented and unwittingly expressed in a one on one meeting where the manager erroneously imagines it is their role to deliver and the other’s to simply take it, when a free and open dialogue would work wonders.

Everyone suffers from the unhappy-ish work situation. Both parties go home that evening with subterranean blues, possibly anger that they are unaware of until it is unleashed on one or other members of their household. A bad day at work (often) causes a bad evening at home, with potential to multiply the number of bad days tomorrow. Children bewildered and afraid of the disturbances between their adults, or that they were the direct recipient of, go to school, and the other adult starts their day enervated and preoccupied with a disturbed or riffled previous evening. I am using the example of the fading two adult and some children household to demonstrate the unintended spread of equally unintended bad feelings through people, over hours and days and nights.

Esther Perel (estherperel.com for books, podcasts, games) frequently reminds us that the quality of our lives depends on the quality of our relationships. The common denominator in all our interactions with others is, guess who? That’s right. Me, myself, I. Wherever I am, whoever I am with, whatever I am doing.


Many people want to live better quality lives, and require guidance that is not necessarily characterised as therapy. They are looking for or unaware of the possibility of gaining conscious alignment of, and balance in the various aspects of their lives. They consciously or unconsciously long to achieve that, and cohesion between work and play, work and relationships, work and family, work and hobbies or passions or a delicate interplay between all of those. They may also seek some serious creative practice or wish to spend time in creative pursuits, just for example. This underlying or out there wish is one of the key niggles in our lives.



In that longing, we often have tender areas that we do not necessarily want to share with colleagues and acquaintances, or even closer friends or family. Maybe there was an irreparable disagreement with a manager, a long period of illness, burn out, or redundancy, difficulties in a romantic or domestic partnership, loss of interest in the job, desire to change jobs, workplace, or location. Any of these factors, and many more common circumstances leak into our whole life, affecting everything. And vice versa: difficulties in our personal lives deeply affect our working lives.


It has seemed to me, since I was a worker in large organisations, and sometimes a trade Union delegate, the reluctance of managers to manage people stems from lack of awareness and lack of training, and also the fear of delivering what is conventionally perceived as bad news in a context which has been viewed as a top down prerogative. This is the fear of intimacy. It is as palpable in workplaces as in homes. We are required to face another person and assess in a democratic way, how things are going. Whichever side of the diad we are on, our critical parent or teacher, our former bad experience of close discussion, or being blagged, bullied, unheard, overlooked, unrecognised, not allowed a voice, come surging forward. We do not know that is what is happening at the time, unless we have done some work, examined our psycho-emotional landscape. Or, we are that rare being who grew up in a household where our full range of feelings were acceptable to our adults, and those adults held us, literally and figuratively in our perfect imperfection.

Inviting a colleague of ‘lower rank’ into your office creates an intimate situation. And there is the fear right there. No-one taught the manager to give guidance, to speak kindly and positively, to invite the innovation, or confusion, or cracking under unrealistic workloads and deadlines to be expressed. It is all out of power balance, when it could be a regular, normal, dialogue without stress or the strong negative connotation that frequently precedes the sit down.

Employees get dumped on in a squishy sour tasting meeting, that induces anxiety, self doubt, resentment, and mistrust, and those feelings are bound to hang around in a cloud of increasing darkness and smelliness, even if hastily swept under the carpet until the next hastily brought together ‘review’.


When we compare the workplace experience with personal life, maybe personify each, and get them to talk to each other, the notion of compartmentalisation for survival comes undone. We simply are not able to sustain separate containers for supposedly different parts of our lives. If we try, sooner or later the edifice falls apart, because there is a huge amount of pretence built in to that kind of separation, and pretence begets stress more than any other product. We deceive ourselves as we attempt to keep part A of our life from touching all the other parts. We seek to protect against seepage, the sogginess that causes collapse of the foundations and a certain leaning or collapse which eventually becomes noticeable, if not to ourselves, then to the people around us.


Sometimes we need therapy to get back up, and sometimes, if we decide to stop the pretence, and admit that there are not any borders within our system, meaning here the system which is our whole life, we have time and energy to reach out for help or support from friends, family, colleagues, or structures in our employment that take care of us in those difficulties.

Life coaching could be the happy territory that lies outside the borders of counselling or therapy or employee assistance programmes, some of which cargo common knowledge of your difficulties; the last, certainly. It can feel like walking around with a sign on your back reading HR approved my employee assistance sessions, or worse still my manager made an offer I couldn’t refuse to get employee assistance.

Often coaches are trained counsellors, but coaching is not counselling, and it is not therapy. Most mainstream psychotherapeutic methods rely on intellectual capacities and therefore a great deal of talking. Talking does not access stored pain, which is why clients get locked into months or years of sessions, often with very little movement or ‘improvement’, and the trauma/pain remains locked in. I use a transformative therapeutic way of clearing blockages deriving from relational ‘stuff’, and life coaching, as two distinct offerings.


Family Constellations is a trauma and resilience informed therapeutic modality that relies on movement or transfer of energetic and somatic ‘information’. In other words it facilitates connection with the felt sense. Big shifts can be made in one or two sessions dealing with an issue. We can clear unhelpful patterns we learned unconsciously in childhood, and that we bring into all of our adult relationships. It has the capacity to clear secrets, shame and other blockages in our life flow, bringing peace, understanding, acceptance and compassion to our lives. Each constellation is a brief, effective intervention. For many issues one session is enough. It is compatible with other therapies.


Life coaching on the other hand, is a practical experiential pathway designed to enhance development. It has specific customised goals, and involves a lot of cognitive work. Intuition is involved, of course, but it is not a therapeutic device or occurrence, even if the results are beneficial. There is no deliberate use of therapeutic devices built in to a coaching pathway. Depending on a range of factors a person may decide to ‘do’ some therapy before starting a coaching pathway. Indeed I would recommend one or two constellation sessions before coaching sessions in a lot of cases to maximise the benefits of coaching. Life coaching groups work well, too. Many life experiences shared and compared makes for warm, rapid processing and integration. My thirteen years as a teacher of English to foreign adults using accelerated learning methods demonstrated the truth of that in every moment of every teaching day.


I facilitate private life coaching pathways for individuals, and for interactive group sessions. Groups may run for a day, or multiple sessions on multiple days, depending on need; in person or online, all with a mix of sub-group work, plenaries and individual work. Printable materials enhance the process. The engagement is integral to learning and development. Register your interest via the Contact Us button on my website, or via email to receive a call to discuss your needs.


‘The way out is in. ‘Tich Nhat Hanh

copyright Karen Sole




manawa = heart breath emotion


karensole@manawafamilyconstellations.com drop a line to arrange a workable time

Karen Sole is a member of the International Institute for Complementary Therapists, and of the International Systemic Constellations Association (isca-network.org), and a member of ANZCI, the Aotearoa New Zealand Constellation Incorporated. She took her first training from Yildiz Sethi yildizsethi.com of familyconstellations.com.au. Karen's profile can be found on the above organisational sites. She participates in monthly professional supervision, facilitator member constellations of ANZCI, ISCA, and informal international groups of experienced credentialed facilitators.


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