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The Career Coach and MindSonar: Inseparable!

August 18, 2013
 
Jantine Wijtsma

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.

 

About the author 

Jantine Wijtsma

Jantine is a freelance HR-consultant from the Netherlands and has been a MindSonar Professional for many years. Organisations hire her on an interim basis to achieve tangible results based on the big picture: Jantine's broad view on the profession.

She works in recruitment, training and development, sustainable work practices, team development, strategic personnel planning and coaching of dysfunctioning employees. In this wide range of HR activities, Jantine has done countless projects, many of them using MindSonar. Jantine's pet subject is contributing to good conversations in companies. She even developed a special training program for that.

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  1. Hi Jantine,

    May I invite you to come to the National Dutch MindSonar Conference, September 24, and present some of your cases?

  2. I’d love to do that, Jaap. But this year I’m not joining the conference, due to my new temporary task in giving HR-advice at Provincie Drenthe. Next year I will be present!

  3. Couldn’t agree with Jaap more. Wonderful post, Jantine. This type of technology could really unlock so many more opportunities for the career coach.

  4. Thank you, Stock7! It is true that measuring metaprograms can contribute a lot to various subjects in jobmarketing, like “how do I make progress in networking”, “how do I make steps in my development in my job”, “how do I cope with insecureness in this fast changing company”, and so on. Let’s use MindSonar more for this kind of questions!

  5. I won’t be able to make it to any conferences either, but is there a good online conference or lecture that we may attend? Saves me on those frequent flier miles.

  6. The coaching supported by Minsonar represents an opportunity to support with high efficiency the coaching process.

    It is equal to having an efficient navigation map. I think Mindsonar is supported in a meaningful way to the coach and the coachee !!

    Excellent work!

  7. As coaches we have great responsibility on the processes of our customers.
    Certainly the potential Mindsonar on these processes because in this case the client gets a more complete picture of how you are thinking. Congratulations

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