Background:
Client was having difficulties at work, primarily with her manager and was seeking resources to assist in this situation. Client comes from a very rough background and is currently working at improving her corporate image, while making something of herself.

Case:
In our initial meeting, the client indicated that she felt that her boss, a very young manager, was very adept in the department she worked, yet completely lacked in people skills and my client felt that she was ready to “give her a good beating.”

Early on, my client began using the metaphor that she in a playground and was “no longer willing to play in the sandbox with her manager.”

I began to use this same metaphor as we moved forward in our sessions and quickly started to see a pattern of the client coming back to the sandbox. After assessing her meta models, it was easy to see that this client was a “towards” individual and in fact hated to run away from anything. So as we looked at the situation closer through subsequent sessions, there was a definite inconsistency in what the client was telling herself and what her actions were saying.

Her choice of words was that she “had left the sandbox and was no longer going to play with her manager.” My analysis was that she had “left the sandbox,” in her thinking, yet the way I explained it to her, “she was still on the same playground on the swings with her eyes and attention fully fixated on the sandbox.” She was definitely having difficulty separating from her manager and would get emotional at the thought as if there was more to the scenario that wasn’t being said.

After running some perceptual patterns on the scenario, the client felt strongly that she needed to help the manager change and this was leading to difficulty in simply walking away.

I ran a time-line with my client to get a better feeling of why she needed to help this manager and the client quickly zoned in on her own mother and the breakdown in their relationship.

It turns out that her mom and the manager had very similar ways of doing things, and since my client hated her mother, she was inadvertently trying to change her manager to give her hope of changing her mother some day.

The client was able to, for the first time, verbalize the similarities and gain a new insight on what was going on at the subconscious level. She now had a choice to make…did she want to stay the course of trying to change the manager or truly disassociate as she originally intended. At least these were the options as she saw them.

I am a firm believer that whoever has the most options has the best chance of finding the right solution, and this is something I openly share with me clients. So as I allowed the client to brainstorm other options she began thinking of the perceptual patterns we used prior. This was when she realized that one couldn’t change another because change comes from within. So she decided that maybe she couldn’t do much to change her manager but she could choose to change her perception.

After this insight, she began looking at some of the conversations and incidents in the past that she had had with her manager and began to see that yes, her manager truly did lack in people skills, yet was actually trying to connect with her and because of her intolerance, she never realized what was taking place.

After this her conversations with her manager began to be more pleasant, and in fact, between two of our sessions together, she actually told off her manager, yet did it in a way that a friend would without fluff or fear and truly connected with the manager on a much deeper level. This is not to say that they are best friends, or ever will be, but she is able to work with her now; and since she loves her job and what she does; things are much better since she can actually stand her boss