References

Last Friday Luisa came to me for a coaching session. She entered the room, let the door close behind her and immediately burst into tears. She was shaking all over. Her knees were so soft that she could hardly walk. I took her hand and gently led her to the nearest chair where she sat down. Sobbing, she told me that she simply could not go on anymore. How could she manage all these things, she lamented. I should show her the way out of her hamster wheel.

When she had regained her composure, she described the incident to me in more detail: "Time just races by and I simply can't keep up with my tasks. All I see is work and have no life any more - and above all, I have no strength!" She said that she saw these looming mountains of tasks in her mind's eye already while she was getting into her car to drive to work. When she got there, she slapped her hands over her head each time because the pile had grown even higher overnight. A desk was already unrecognisable, she reported. "Just go again" were her only thoughts, she told me and continued: "Completely demotivated, I sink down on my chair and grab the top of the pile when suddenly the phone rings. It's the boss's secretary. She wants me to come to the board meeting in two minutes. The chairman has a few questions that need to be answered immediately. What can you do? So, just as demotivated, I get up from the chair I fell into not a few minutes before and reach for my bag, looking for my next tranquilliser: the cigarette.

As I bend down to my bag, I am attacked from behind and hit my head on a sharp edge...In minutes, my body crashes to the floor and it becomes dark night. I can't see anything anymore, I only feel several things falling on top of me, then I'm gone... Time passes... Very quietly I hear a phone ringing from afar. All I can see is black. The signal gets louder and louder and comes closer. Slowly it becomes brighter again...Oh, that's my phone! Why am I lying on the floor?!, I wonder. I dig through the mountain of files covering me and reach for the phone. Now I realise what happened: probably the loop of my bag got caught and made the pile of papers collapse. The hole punch I put on top of the pile of files to weigh it down must have fallen on my head and pushed it to the nearest edge, which then knocked me unconscious. I don't know how that happened and how long I was lying there," she reported, still totally confused.

Silence replaced the sound of her voice and she dabbed her cheeks dry with her handkerchief.

"Are you feeling better now?", I asked her after a while. She nodded. I nodded back and looked at her intently, "How can I help you?" "I have to somehow cope with all the tasks," she replied. Since she was head of the legal department, the quality of her work was already suffering. Damage to the company was imminent as legal disputes could not be handled properly. She additionally saw the danger that banks would cancel loans and that the board would have massive problems because of her. She also did not want the supervisory board to have to intervene. Somehow she would have to manage it all, she thought.

"Are you ready?", I asked. She nodded. I guided her and she wrote down all her todos among themselves. Then we sorted her tasks by area and sorted them again. Next to the todos, we wrote down how long she guessed she spent time on the task and how many times a week/month/year she had to do it. After an hour, all her tasks at work were recorded and colour-coded by priority. It came out that the company was short of staff and she was doing the work for three employees. She sank back in her chair and looked at her list.

"When you look at your list of tasks, which ones can you bundle or combine?", I asked her and she took another pen and drew connections. Suddenly the sheet was all colourful and her eyes widened. "How beautiful that looks!" she grinned. I nodded. "Can you write down your bundled tasks again in an abbreviated form and cross them off your original list?" She eagerly set about the next task and you could feel her getting into the flow. You could read from her body language what a satisfaction it was for her to cross off those tasks and make them smaller. We checked the duration of each task and set a time limit for a lot of them.

I gave her the tip to identify the three most important tasks for the day and carry them out at the beginning of the day. She went home with the reminder to bundle up the tasks.

A week later she came back to my coaching with a smile on her face and sat down in her chair elated. She reported that she was getting about 20% more tasks done in a day. She is so relieved and can breathe more deeply and calmly. The mountains are not as threatening now as before and she can see the table again, she said. Her colleagues had already commented that she was already much more stable and confident walking around the office. However, there was still one problem...

She stared sadly at the floor and all joy abruptly disappeared from her face. Her piles of tasks were no longer growing, but she was at her limit. We carefully went through her list again and wrote everything down. Confident and hopeful that things would get better, she took the list to her supervisor and the human resources department a few days later. They realised her critical situation and Luisa applied for support.

Today, she has an assistant who helps her and gives her a lot of relief. Luisa is happy going to work and can enjoy her success. As they are stronger together than alone.

Adriane, in her mid-30s, who has been working as a mediator and group compliance officer in a company for several years, came to me because she was afraid she would soon end up in burnout.

She sat down and first asked me to call her daughter, because she was worried whether she would find her already prepared food in the fridge ... When the daughter said that everything was OK, she was reassured and we devoted ourselves to our conversation ...

She told me that she had problems taking too much responsibility. She took responsibility for things that were not really her responsibility because she thought that otherwise it wouldn't work. She wanted to be a role model and felt guilty when she saw that something needed to be done and no one was doing it. Then she did it, she said.

She was bad at setting boundaries for herself and voluntarily took responsibility for the whole project's success rather than just part of it. Then she noticed how her energy dwindled more and more and she became gradually more frustrated.

Her performance was already suffering and the quality of her work was declining. She knew very well that if she would not do something against it soon, she would slip step by step into bad thoughts and depressions until her over-responsibility and her thirst for action would plunge her into a deep hole and burnout.

And the consequence would be that she would be out of action for weeks or even months. This would cause enormous losses and damage to the company. In the coaching session, I looked with her for possible causes of her over-responsibility. She discovered that she had been brought up to believe that you have to give your all in your job, otherwise you would be a scoundrel and would exploit society. It had been these inhibiting beliefs from the culture that fuelled her fear of losing her job or the fear that she would be liable for damages. Her thoughts kept circling around the fact that things had to be done properly.

Furthermore, we examined together the situations in which she took on too much responsibility and in which situations she did not show over-responsibility. The over-responsibility situations always occurred when it came to time-critical projects, projects that were essential for the survival of the company. She always felt frustration and pressure. She was tense and overwhelmed. Feelings of powerlessness and anger mixed together. Above all, she was then angry at her colleagues because she felt that her colleagues were not competent enough and would not take responsibility for the company. They were so lazy and slow and she kept asking herself why things were not progressing here. What would be so difficult about carrying out a project in an orderly manner, she didn't understand. There was always a back and forth, she reported. And no one wanted to take responsibility for the success of the project.

The situations in which she did not display over-responsibility were situations in which she took on administrative tasks and routine tasks; tasks or issues that were not hers at all e.g. secretarial tasks. In these situations she felt ease, calmness and relaxation. We investigated whether there were also situations in which she took on healthy responsibilities that were good for both her and her colleagues. These were situations involving changes in the law that could result in managerial liability. In these, she always informed those who were responsible for in the other departments and pointed out to them that they should implement the measures themselves. She always kept herself informed about current issues in her area of responsibility in order to stay up to date and to identify risks at an early stage. These were all topics that piqued her interest, that she enjoyed and on which she concentrated and focused. She was always excited to see what was new and how the law would develop. So she recognised the difference between a healthy and an unhealthy acceptance of responsibility. From that point on, she was able to recognise when she had reached the limit of taking on too much responsibility and shifted her focus more onto the tasks where she took on a healthy responsibility. She called these tasks tasks with a role model function, because she could achieve a better quality there.

Then we looked at her beliefs and the motivation that led her to over-responsibility. We critically examined both and questioned her thoughts on this. She realised how unrealistic her thoughts were and that her job was in no way at risk. This gave her relief and peace in her heart.

Today, she is able to distance herself well, has no guilty conscience and can leave tasks to her colleagues that belong in their area of responsibility. She has learned to better manage her sense of responsibility and to use it purposefully and in a healthy way.