Counseling Professionals to Balance their Personal and Professional Lives

HonnolDCounseling works with many successful professionals who need to change their job, or even their profession, in order to achieve a meaningful personal life:

• “The job pressure is never-ending.  I have no free time, even on weekends.”
• “I have no time to exercise.”
• “I don’t even know what my personal interests are any more.”
• “I have no energy for personal life.  I just wish I could stay in bed.”
• “I can’t make social plans, because I always have to cancel them.”
• “I’m depressed at work, so I’m also depressed at home.”
• “My wife has totally withdrawn from me.  I never see my kids.”
• “I haven’t had sex with anyone but myself in ten years or more.”
•  “I have feelings for the guy in the next office. I keep listening for his voice.”
• “This coworker on the trip . . . We were always working late at night . . . .”
•  “The only thing I look forward to is taking that first drink when I get home.”
• “I’m having difficulty managing my time.  I’m always running behind.”

Many factors may account for your distress at work.  Some reasons for your unhappiness may have little to do with your job.  If you do not address these issues, you will carry your dissatisfaction to the next job, or to a new career

Drawing on a unique dual background in business and psychology, HonnolDCounseling helps professionals understand the reasons for their compulsive preoccupation with work and the distorting effect of this work compulsion on their personal life.

HonnolDCounseling will assess your workplace issues in the context of your life, to determine if you might be experiencing a personal problem rather than a work problem:

• Many professionals seek refuge at work because of unhappy personal lives.
• Professional ambition and success rarely bring sustainable happiness, when personal lives are empty or dysfunctional.
• Addictive behaviors (such as alcohol abuse) can cloud a professional’s judgment and impair performance at work.
• Unhealthy or compulsive work patterns are often learned in childhood, and are then recreated in an adult’s personal and professional life.

HonnolDCounseling draws on the tools and perspectives of psychology, helping professionals improve their work/life balance by gaining:

• Insight into the motivations and forces operating at work;
• Access to feelings that underlie these motivations;
• An awareness of family dynamics that propel obsessive work patterns;
• Tools for managing anxiety, guilt, and “super-responsibility”;
• Knowledge of the options available in setting time and work boundaries;
• A sense of autonomy, freedom and personal authority to design a relationship with work that preserves and enhances personal life.

 
If personal unhappiness is “contaminating” your work, the focus for consultation with HonnolDCounseling may need to be deeply personal.  It makes no sense to advance in your career, seek a new job, or change your career, if you will carry your personal unhappiness into the new position.  HonnolDCounseling can help you determine the source of your unhappiness, identify the critical issue, and address it where it is.