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Navigating change: return to work coaching
Jayne Ruff | 20.7.22
Reading Time: 5 mins
+ TLDR:
There’s no doubt that the return to work after parental leave can feel confusing and – at times – chaotic.
Our return to work coaching offers an objective perspective to help you re-connect with your personal identity and navigate change across each important life area with greater confidence and clarity. We’ve shared some words from our clients to help bring to life the value our coaching approach has brought for them, which includes:
1. Providing greater clarity on what’s most important to you
2. Offering quality thinking time towards your work-life goals
3. Supporting continued personal development & growth
This is unsurprising when you consider the significant life changes new parents experience in a relatively short period of time. Even with the best laid plans in place, the return to work will often throw practical and emotional curveballs – from navigating nursery absence to feeling like you’re failing to meet expectations at home and at work.
These whirring thoughts, feelings and emotions that often accompany the practical challenges of returning to work can get in the way of paving a successful path through change. With work and home life now even more intertwined, it’s often hard to step back and see the best route forward.
Our return to work coaching offers an objective perspective to help you re-connect with your personal identity and navigate change across each important life area with greater confidence and clarity. We recommend coaching sessions before, during and after periods of leave, but there’s still plenty of benefit in having these conversations at any point in the change journey.
We’ve shared some words from our clients to help bring to life the value our coaching approach has brought for them.
Provides greater clarity on what’s most important to you
At the heart of our coaching approach is the importance of identifying and tuning into personal values. We will work with you to unearth what matters most to you from a work-life and a home-life perspective, creating a personal framework that will act as your compass when navigating the various twists and turns working parenthood presents. This supports confident decision-making, helping you to feel more empowered and less guilty about the work and home life choices you make.
““Parenting point provided me with some much-needed direction at a time of change. The transition from being a stay-at-home mum to having children start school is daunting. The sessions allowed me to start taking steps towards the next stage in my life. They provided me with the tools to make positive changes to allow the relationship with my family to flourish. I feel like I’m better equipped to manage what life throws at me and it has given me the confidence that I need to move forward.””
Offers quality thinking time towards your work-life goals
Too often in life greater focus is given to the urgent over and above the important. This tyranny of the urgent prevents us from seeing the bigger picture and can lead to feelings of overwhelm and eventual burnout. Our coaching helps to create headspace to think about the return to work you really want and need, as well as the wants and needs of your team and wider organisation. This encourages more effective prioritisation of actions that will ultimately support the achievement of meaningful work-life goals.
““Before returning to work after maternity leave with my first baby, I was unsure of what to expect. I knew work would feel different and I should probably dedicate some time to thinking about what that might look like but because I had never been through it before, I didn’t have the tools to prepare myself mentally for the shift to becoming a working parent. I found it so helpful to have somebody who could help me navigate the feeling of ‘I know this is about to be a big change in my life, but how do I prepare?’
At first, I was really focused on the emotional aspect of leaving a baby at nursery but then my coaching sessions progressed to helping me navigate shifting my working pattern and covering very practical ideas around how to optimise my days as both an employee/colleague and parent. The Parenting Point coaching has helped me with the bigger mindset shift around being a working parent, how to juggle everything, and provided some much smaller but equally impactful tools I can implement to make my days that little bit easier.””
Supports continued personal development & growth
The return to work after a period of leave can be a great opportunity to re-set any unhelpful habits and behaviours that may have been holding you back. Our coaching will encourage you to step outside of your comfort zone – little-be-little. We’ll explore how to best use your strengths and the unique value you bring – at work and at home. We’ll also clarify what success really looks like for you and encourage regular celebration of small wins to support positive change momentum.
““I found the prospect of returning to work totally foreboding. I felt underprepared and scared! I knew the return to work would bring up a lot of new and pre-existing challenges for me. It seemed like a high stakes’ thing, and I wanted to give myself the best chance of turning it into a positive time of growth.
Jayne approached the sessions with total professionalism and empathy. She is extremely effective at melding the pragmatic, practical stuff with the therapeutic stuff, which is great for the tricky emotional business of getting back to work. As a result of the coaching, I felt confident and positive about returning to work. And I built some strategies to manage the mum guilt.”
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More on Parenting Point’s coaching
We are a small team of psychologists and experienced leadership coaches, each with a personal understanding and empathy for the challenges and opportunities of working parenthood.
We coach parents seeking practical and emotional support in balancing the time and energy demands of working parenthood. We also work with parents looking to identify and achieve their next career move and establish a meaningful and fulfilling work-life balance in this new chapter.
We will work with you to define the specific aims and desired outcomes of your coaching session or programme. Our coaching style is energetic, compassionate and positively challenging, with a focus on developing the right mindset to support work-life balance.
We can incorporate targeted emotional intelligence and personality psychometrics into coaching programmes to help build a deeper-level understanding of personal strengths and potential development areas relating to current and future goals.
With a focus on enhancing self-awareness and building psychological strength, we encourage the development of new thinking habits and behaviours that will have a long-lasting positive impact at work and in life.
For more information, please contact jayne@parenting-point.com
““I would really recommend Parenting Point to anybody who is a working parent or about to become one. There’s no doubt that the experience of work pre-baby and post-baby are two very different realities and having somebody to guide you through that change is invaluable.””
Jayne Ruff – Chartered Occupational Psychologist & Founder of Parenting Point.
Parenting Point exists to give everyone the self-belief that they can flourish as a parent and a professional by positively aligning both worlds. We help parents find their meaningful and fulfilling work-life balance through practical, psychology-based workshops and coaching. We work with organisations to create positive and inclusive performance cultures that support and encourage the growth of working parents.