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Summary

Systemic Stress: Success & Failure in a Recession
© Martyn Carruthers

Online Coaching

Your relationship decisions and emotional reactions determine whether you despair or prosper during downturns and recessions. Increase your adaptability and flexibility. Don't let financial recessions suck you into emotional recessions. We help people manage emotions and improve relationships.

Survival & Collapse Coaching ... Financial Maturity ... Financial Coaching

Coaching in a Crisis

A recession is a difficult time for most people. How can you survive economic recession while avoiding emotional recession? First, stop punishing yourself! Stop sabotaging your recovery, your health and your life! Second - change your emotional reactions. Third - improve your relationships. The longer you wait - the worse you can get. Then seek opportunities from a basis of inner strength - not desperation.

Bear markets fall. We can help you recession-proof your career and family. We can coach you as you secure your current position, find alternate work before you become desperate, and build an independent income that can prosper during a downturn or slump.

A recession includes widespread job cuts, which impacts household spending, consumer demand, manufacturing and investment. Many people feel like lost children or victims. People become cautious - attempting to limit their expenses, which deepens the decline, which creates more caution ... less spending ... and so on. Economic or emotional depression may feel close.

If you are over-extended or feeling stressed, create support and relief. Give yourself attention. Get adequate sleep. Try avoiding caffeine (especially after 4:00 pm) and getting more exercise. If insomnia is a problem, deal with anxiety and worry. Find simple things that comfort you such as music, children, pets, or watching a good movie. Avoid alcohol, overeating, or using drugs. Eat balanced meals. Take some time off work to meet demands without worrying about your job.

Call some supportive people. A phone call to a good friend or a visit from someone you trust may bolster your spirits and let you let relax. Perhaps call a spiritual advisor for advice, prayer and comfort. Find someone who can help you sort through difficult emotional issues. Join a support group.

Our recession coaching helps people change unpleasant emotional reactions, limiting beliefs and stress. We coach people to change stress-related obsessions and compulsions. If even one member of a family, team or organization changes dysfunctional patterns, other members of that relationship system can move towards health. Welcome to systemic coaching!

Systems theories predict human relationship behavior. Systemic variables both predict and produce behavior; including physical and emotional responses. These same variables can predict and produce both chronic disease and long-term success. We coach systemic change.

The families and organizations who prepared for a recession will likely come out of it in healthy and strong. They will have a better time during a recession because of their planning. Those who ignored the risk of recession but reacted quickly when the downturn began will do better than those who live on hope and prayer, and still don’t recognize how serious the problems are. If and when they do react, it may be too late to do anything except hope for charity or pray for state assistance.

Avoid giving your employer or team members reasons to question your loyalty or allegiance. During a layoff, employers will first terminate employees who are often late, who disturb others or who are not team players. You may wish you had started recession coaching a year ago ... but it's not too late!

Control Stress: Checklist for Change

Are you a recession victim or a recession survivor? Neuroscience predicts that prolonged stress damages your brain, cardiovascular and immune systems. If you feel recession stress, or if you are in danger of it, we can coach you to manage stress, increase your resiliency – and to create, test, troubleshoot and follow well thought out plans.

• Do you only try to do what worked before?
• Do you see the problems and potential consequences?
• Do you try to treat the symptoms rather than the underlying problem?

If you try to fix relationships in troubled times, you are likely to:

• build resistance (to your arrogance)
• waste time trying to analyze people
• be irritated if people don't appreciate your efforts

If we coach your family, team or organization, we help you:

• explore the who, what, when, where, and how
• observe and relate to members in all parts of the system
• investigate system traumas, myths, patterns, rules & bonds
• resolve incongruence between identity, values, beliefs, behavior and environment

Recession Coaching - Communication

You still have all the resources that you had before the challenging times. We can help you use them.

1. We can develop personal relationships with each member
2. We can contact peripheral members, to gather information to gain perspective
3. We may, with permission, explore perspectives of ex-members

Cut-off members of a family, team or organization are often people who broke the rules and were kicked out. Excluded people can give important feedback about the unwritten rules. (As contacting excluded members can upset current members, we first ask their permission.)

Rich or Poor?

Unless you live in a saturated market there are probably alternate positions. What can you do to recession proof your work? Keep your eyes and ears open. Ask your manager, CEO or company owner how things are going and if the organization is stable. Don't just ask if there is anything you can do to help ... suggest what you can do that can benefit your family, team or organization.

Many people do not suffer in a recession. They can become richer if they take advantage of opportunities that poorer people do not seek. We can coach you through these volatile times.

If you hear rumors about cutbacks and layoffs, explore what is true ... don't pass along gossip, however scary. How you ask questions or offer advice may trigger emotional responses. If emotional reactions seem out of proportion to your words, then our systemic diagnosis can identify the underlying emotional causes and as a basis for finding appropriate and effective solutions.

1. After we observe your habits, we can help change them
2. We help you predict the responses to expect, and control your stress
3. We help you communicate your thoughts and feelings in skilful and helpful ways
4. If possible, we initiate the beginnings and endings of talks, phone calls and meetings.

Systemic Recession Coaching

We can take a position in your family, team or organization ... we become guests of your system.

1. We find balance between observing abstract values and specific actions; between observing internal processes and external behaviors; and between being serious and humorous.
    
2. We remain emotionally poised
:

• we avoid taking sides
• we avoid believing criticism about absent people
• we arrange one-to-one coaching as well as group meetings
  
  
3. If we find relationship triangles, we:


• communicate with people who have been cut off from the system
• communicate with people who are important to the senior members
• communicate with people with more or less authority than those present
  
  
4. We help people defuse withheld secrets and hidden agendas that form boundaries between secret keepers and naive members that foster and perpetuate anger and hatred.
    
5. We remain aware of your feelings ... anxiety, sorrow and anger can warn you that you may be getting sucked into transferences or other systemic communication loops.
    
6. We try to use anniversaries, lay-offs and deaths to contact excluded members.
    
7. We are aware of the systemic forces that follow the loss of a member, and how members of a system try to compensate for the missing or dead person.

There are opportunities in a recession. We coach people to survive and thrive. Some steps of our strategy are:

1. build a sense of urgency (with courage, not fear)
2. help leaders or parents build quality relationships
3. recognize deficiencies, set goals and make plans
4. develop visions, goals and strategies with all members
5. encourage participation and cooperation to clean up the mess

Survive a recession - invest in systemic, leadership and emotional coaching.
Do you want to dissolve success blocks and relationship issues?

Do You Want Results?

Plagiarism is theft. Copyright © Martyn Carruthers 2008-2011 All rights reserved.

Plagiarism is theft. Copyright © Martyn Carruthers 1996-2011 All rights reserved. Soulwork Systemic Coaching was primarily developed by Martyn Carruthers
to help people dissolve emotional blocks, improve relationships and achieve goals. These concepts and strategies are for general knowledge only. Consult a physician about medical conditions and before changing medical treatment. Don't steal intellectual property ... ask for permission to post, publish or teach this work.