As a career coach, I often work with people who are afraid to lose their job. Looking at the economical situation in Holland, this is a real fear. But how to handle this fearful feeling of insecurity?

Barbara, almost 58 years old, came to me because she didn’t know how to act in her work situation anymore. Her employer told her to look for a different position inside or outside the organization. She was working there for more than 20 years.

Her most significant meta programs were ‘reactive’, ‘away from’, ‘external reference’, and ‘mismatching’. Also kinesthetic had a high score.

In the sessions Barbra showed the behavior that matched the profile. She was constantly stressed and mentioned what could go wrong. She didn’t take action at work, apart from asking a whole team of people around her what to do. She asked advice from me as a career coach, from a psychologist, from the HR-manager at her company and someone from the works council.

She totally fell into the pitfalls, matching her profile. Her high kinesthetic score made here feel everything that happened, she was not able to develop a vision on her future, nor to say the right things to herself to handle the situation. She was still working, though now and then she called in sick, overwhelmed  by her feelings.

You can imagine she was deeply shocked and wasn’t able to climb out of the stress all by herself.

I did a lot of exercises with her to let her associate in different meta programs and asked a lot of solution focused questions. What if everything turned out better than she expected? What if she decided by herself what was good for her future? What if she said to herself: “I have enough in me that can help me decide? I also did an timeline exercise to discover when her less helpful meta programs were installed. This was very helpful to her, as well as the discovery that she had a lot of people around her to support her. She wasn’t aware of that, using the meta programs “mismatching” and “away from” too much.

During our sessions she became a little bit more at ease. A bit more convinced that sooner or later there would be a solution. Her humour came back bit by bit, and she was able to look at herself instead of being overwhelmed by her feelings.

We finished, and some weeks later she let me know she quit the job to get the rest she needed. And that she was at ease with her decisions.