| Case Study: Job Problems By Antonio Dondolini During my work as a Coach, a person with job problems came to me. He could not stay on the same job for more than 1-2 years. After this period of time he resigned. The reason of the resignation was not connected to his performance. He was very professional and his bosses were very happy about him. The problem was that he got tired of his job very quickly. After a short time he found it flat, repetitive and he needed to change it. This permanent changing of jobs was not economical for him. In fact every time he changed a job, he had to start again with the economic problems and the possibilities of growing in his career. He would have wanted to have more stability and this desire was confirmed when we started working on his goals deeply. From the information gathering I realised there were not important problems regarding his convictions and the identity. Neither the Time Line presented particular dark zones or particular problems connected to his childhood or growth. But, I realised that the fact of getting tired of the repetitive situations was typical also in other aspects of his life. He often changed his girlfriends; he did not have the same car for more than 2-3 years, he frequently changed his clothing style, haircut, etc. All these things make me think that the situation was connected to his meta programs. So I started extracting his meta programs by means of an accurate interview. Two very significant aspects came out from the questions:
-The “Toward / Away From” meta programme was absolutely “Away From”. He used to motivate himself by escaping from the negative situations. He considered not only his job but all the situations in general repetitive because of the combination of this two meta programs. His reaction was escaping from them but without looking for situations that could offer him diversity and variety. We set up the following sessions so that we could identify a job where he could find that variety. Up to that moment he had only work as an employee. He identified a goal in a job as a craftsman. It was a job he felt capable of doing and that would have allowed him to be varied and creative. The client prepared his goal in detail planning it accurately. So we worked on the “Toward / Away From” meta program. The person had to learn how to use the “Towards” meta program in order to find a motivation in his new job. We worked with the swish patterns to cancel the reference to “Away” and replace it with “Towards”. So we installed the new meta programme in the client’s Time Line. We only changed the meta programme (by using the swish pattern and the Time Line) in the working context without changing the other contexts. In fact, the client wanted to change only this one but he did not want to change his lifestyle (emotional context, car, etc.).Then we worked on his values. We extracted his scale of values and we put those related to the creativity and self fulfilment at the top of the list to reinforce the new “Towards” meta programme. In order to do this, we used the submodality and the inter-mapping with the prevailing values. The new scale of values was more ecological than the previous one. I did not find any contrast between the values so we did not have to work on parts. Finally, regarding the “Matching – Mismatched” meta program we worked on the dissociation, by creating a series of strong anchoring that would dissociate the client every time he gets bored at work (also in this case only in the working context because of the reasons above mentioned). The dissociation would have helped him to mitigate his “Mismatching”. Working on this meta program more deeply did not seem ecological because a simple variation from “Mismatching” to “Mismatched/Matching” seemed to be enough after verifying the “Time Line” in the future. |