This post was written by Jantine Wijtsma, a long time MindSonar professional from the Netherlands. Jantine works mainly in career counseling and we hope that she will continue for many posts to tell us how she is using MindSonar in her daily practice.
I do a lot of career coaching for people who have had to call in sick, because they are in an early stage of burnout. Most of the time they have not actually burned out yet, but the condition does relate to them not knowing why their job doesn’t make them feel healthy any more. They don’t feel good, they lack energy, have vague muscle complaints or headaches, things like that.
Anja was like that. She had called in sick due to extreme tiredness but now she was back, working just a few hours a week for starters. Her company asked me to help Anja find her way to “healthy working” again.
Anja was a psychologist with high scores for “external reference”, “people”, and “kinesthetics”. She paid lots of attention to her patients, could feel what the person in front of her needed in therapy, and gave herself up to the whole therapy process. According to her Mindsonar score, Anja had to work on her “internal reference” (is this as good for me as for my patient?), and use more of her high scores on “kinesthetics” and “people”. Both of these are very helpful in her profession, but not if you use them only to benefit the person in front of you and forget all about yourself.
After a few sessions with me as her career coach, Anja had learned how to use her “internal reference” and was more aware of how she could apply her kinesthetic power and focus on people. She also learned about the pitfalls to avoid, and soon she was able to work full time again.
Congratulations with your first post on this site Jantine!
Jantine is a colleague of mine and I congratulate her with her post
Thank you, Jannie! Now your contribution is visible!
Thank you Jaap, for making this possible. I’m looking forward to getting feedback from readers!
It is VERY important that people not let themselves get “burned out” by their job, otherwise everyone suffers. I think it’s kind of neat that whatever company she works for thought it important enough to get her this kind of help anyway…most companies that I know would rather just fire the person. ha ha. I am curious though, if you could give us a vague description of what one would do to help someone get back on track with their career? I’m not asking for all the secrets to be divulged on this technique, but maybe just some helpful hints for readers, or better yet, some smaller techniques we could try at home.
Wow, what an amazing change, I liked reading this post very much cause it shows how this can work in a work place environment in a real situation, there are many people in the situation Anja was and can benefit form this process.
Working with people that way can make people feel very tired, being a teacher for example can have a similar effect if the external reference is to high and there is very little internal reference.
No matter what your job is, if you let it get over you there will be trouble, and when you work with people they will suffer consequences too, cause they will get less and less as time goes on.