1:1 coaching for people who can’t leave work at work
How many hours of unpaid overtime
is this job getting from you?
When work isn't working for you it has a way of following you home. You replay conversations when your head hits the pillow. One email can hijack your entire evening. Sunday afternoon already feels like Monday morning. You’re left wondering whether to have the conversation, draw a line, or decide it’s time for something different.
Take a first look at the work problem you can’t stop thinking about.
Is it...
THE SITUATION?
Sometimes
YOUR REACTION?
Sometimes
BOTH?
More often than you'd think
Am I overreacting or is something here genuinely not okay?
After all that thinking, the big questions are still there:
Should I say something or will that just make things worse?
Can I change this dynamic without changing jobs?
What can I actually influence here, and what may not be mine to fix?
How will I know when I’ve tried hard enough and it’s time to consider something else?
Sometimes the hardest part of work isn’t the work...
it’s how we relate to ourselves and the people around us.
It’s hard to see clearly when you’re stuck inside the problem.
Together, we step out of the mental loop that’s keeping you stuck. We sort through what’s happening and challenge the assumptions that may be making it harder to see clearly. You come away knowing what’s yours to work on, what isn’t, and what you want to do next.
The end result is less second-guessing, more trust in your own judgment, more peace when your head hits the pillow, and your Sunday afternoons back.
Ready to Work it Out together?
Start with a stand-alone $49 coaching session focused on the situation that’s taking up too much space in your head.
If you decide to continue with the 3-session sprint, your $49 applies toward the $299 Work it Out sprint package.
“Cynthia has this remarkable ability to see straight to the root … and help me understand why I was struggling in the first place.”
Sharron
Senior Instructional Consultant
Work Stories, Worked Through
Real coaching stories about the problems that follow people home—and what changed when we worked through them.
Real coaching experiences, thoughtfully combined into composite stories to protect client privacy.
When your boss is living rent-free in your head
It started as a boss problem. Her manager questioned her decisions, wanted updates on everything, and could react unpredictably when things didn’t go the way she expected. At work, she found herself carefully choosing her words, anticipating what might set her boss off, and trying to stay out of the line of fire. But the workday didn’t end when she logged off. She replayed conversations. Rehearsed what she might say next time. Wondered whether she had handled things badly. A short email could send her down a rabbit hole of What does she mean by that? Is she angry? Did I do something wrong? She came to coaching wanting to figure out how to deal with her boss. As we worked through it, another question emerged: How much responsibility had she taken on for managing her boss’s reactions? That didn’t mean the boss’s behavior was okay. Some of it genuinely wasn’t. But trying to prevent every bad reaction had slowly made her boss’s moods the organizing principle of her own behavior. We started separating what belonged to whom. She could control how clearly she communicated. She could set limits. She could decide how much explanation was enough. She could address a problem directly. She could not guarantee that her boss would like any of it. That distinction changed things. The boss didn’t magically become easier. The real shift was that every interaction stopped feeling like a referendum on whether she had done something wrong. She became more willing to have the conversation, hold the boundary, and let someone else have their reaction. The goal wasn’t to stop caring. It was to stop letting someone else’s reaction make the decision for her.
When saying yes to everything stops working
She was the person people could count on. Need someone to pick something up? She would do it. A colleague was overwhelmed? She’d help. Something needed to get done quickly? Give it to her. Being capable and dependable had served her well professionally. Until it didn’t. Her workload kept growing, and she was increasingly frustrated that other people seemed to have more room to breathe. She knew she needed better boundaries, but every time she considered saying no, the guilt showed up. What if they think I’m difficult? What if I disappoint someone? What if a good employee should be able to handle this? So she kept saying yes—and then resenting how much she had taken on. At first, the obvious goal was to get better at saying no. But simply handing her a few boundary scripts wouldn’t have solved much. We needed to understand why saying no felt so loaded in the first place. She began noticing how quickly she treated someone else’s request as her responsibility. We looked at what she actually valued, what she wanted her work and life to have room for, and whether every “yes” was consistent with those values. Slowly, the choices became less binary. She didn’t have to become someone who stopped helping people. She could say not right now. She could ask what should come off her plate before taking something new on. She could let another person be disappointed without immediately rushing in to fix the feeling. The biggest change wasn’t that she became great at saying no. It was that she stopped treating her own limits as something she had to apologize for. She was still generous. Still conscientious. Still someone people could depend on. Just no longer at her own expense.
When you can’t tell whether it’s the job—or you
By the time she came to coaching, she knew she was unhappy. What she didn’t know was why. Maybe the job was wrong. The culture wasn’t great, she didn’t have much autonomy, and she rarely felt recognized for what she contributed. But another possibility kept nagging at her: What if I’m the problem? She had struggled with other jobs, too. Maybe she was expecting too much. Maybe she needed to be more resilient. Maybe changing jobs would simply mean taking the same problems somewhere else. So she went back and forth. Stay and make it work? Speak up? Change careers? Look for another job? Try harder? The more she thought about it, the less clear she became. We started pulling the problem apart instead. There were things about the workplace that genuinely weren’t working for her. Pretending otherwise in the name of “working on herself” wouldn’t help. But there were also patterns worth paying attention to—second-guessing herself, avoiding certain conversations, waiting for certainty before making a move, and sometimes turning a difficult situation into evidence that she was somehow failing. Once those two things stopped being tangled together, she could make a much more useful assessment. What would she want to change if she stayed? What was actually within her influence? What wasn’t? And if nothing changed, was this still a place she wanted to be? She stopped trying to answer the impossible question Is it the job or is it me? Sometimes the answer is: there are things happening around you, and there are things happening within you. Both are worth understanding. From there, the decision about what to do next became considerably clearer.