Clara was a political campaign coordination assistant who had very low energy. She found that she was tired most of the time. Her work was suffering and yet she did not find the motivation to do anything about it. She was lonely yet could not imagine herself in a happy relationship.
Clara had been to the doctor three times in one week and worried that she had a kind of yuppie flu that no one had yet identified. She did not feel in control of her life. She felt that life directed her rather than the other way round. Clara had some destructive drinking behaviour –mostly unnoticed by her peers as she generally drank alone.
The concept of her life having a purpose was simply overwhelming and, if she was honest, depressed her. She had ended up seemingly by accident in her current job, as her predecessor went on maternity leave and it turned out that no other applicants had Clara's combinations of skills. She had never done any personal development work. She truly believed that she was not a creative person and wondered where things had gone wrong, and if her earlier career dreams were illusions that had misled her in the first place.
Clara had been to a talk on EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) and found that this seemed to bring some relief. Still, she was not clear on where to direct her questions. She came to Turn Up the Courage with little belief that anything could really help her.
Here is what happened:
We soon pinpointed that nothing in her life fed her other than in the form of food! No wonder her energy was so low. At first it was difficult to make headway on anything else than her perspective on her life, yet this work did bring immediate relief. She saw how her attitude had become chronically negative and a way of life.
We started to do some work with EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) to shift her depressed feelings and unearth some of the causes; some very negative programming from her past. A rough time at boarding school when her own family were torn apart by conflicts, had isolated her from her own wider community and left her with a sense of powerlessness. She had not known how to deal with her anger constructively, and was unable to process it. Since there was no obvious place to direct this deep emotion, it got stuck, and she herself became the target. Later in her working life, she consistenly passed herself over in the workplace.
As we shifted her feelings, thoughts and beliefs over serveral months, she began to gain a sense of hope in her life. She explored more of her creative side. In one session she remembered a fantastic talk she gave to some younger pupils at school and realised that her voice was a very important part of her core purpose. She joined a choir to work with her voice and began to engage in more of the debates at work.
When her colleague returned from maternity leave the organisation had seen such a change in her that they offered her a more influential role in the campaign team. She knows that her ability to communicate is her key forte, and envisages taking a public facing role in politics in the longer term. Her ability to process anger has been absolutely key in shifting her identity, impacting all the areas in her life and safe to say that she hardly recognises the person she was before.
