Is Your Struggling Personally affecting Your Workplace Performances?
Susan Catherine Keter, Transformational Life Coach, Nourish and Flourish Live
Employers/Employee Dilemma
You are qualified, competent, hardworking, and committed to your job, yet you continue to struggle with workplace performance, relationships, confidence, boundaries, decision-making, or managing expectations.
Efforts to improve or even change workplaces may bring little lasting relief because the root cause may not lie in the work environment itself.
You may often feel overwhelmed, arrive late to work, or find yourself taking on responsibilities that aren’t yours. Speaking up can feel difficult, leading you to avoid conflict, you over commit, or struggle to say no to unreasonable requests.
Over time, these patterns can quietly impact your productivity, workplace relationships, and overall job satisfaction. Left unaddressed, they may hinder career growth, increase stress, and erode confidence.
The dilemma is whether these workplace challenges are actually symptoms of deeper, unresolved personal experiences. Childhood programming, historical trauma, and early relationship patterns can shape how people respond to authority, handle conflict, seek approval, set boundaries, and perceive their own worth.
As a result, what appears to be a professional performance issue may in fact be an expression of unresolved personal struggles. If personal challenges are affecting your performance and relationships at work, identifying and addressing the root causes can help restore balance, strengthen collaboration, and support healthier, more sustainable workplace dynamics.
Case Study: When Being Too Helpful Becomes a Career Liability
Jayne (not her real name) was a competent and dedicated employee whose desire to help everyone eventually threatened her career.
1. The Employee Who Could Never Say No
Jayne faced several challenges at her workplace. She had difficulty declining requests from colleagues who frequently asked her to assist with their assignments. Jayne would accept additional tasks even when she was overwhelmed by her own responsibilities.
Her willingness to help gradually became a pattern. She found herself completing other people’s assignments, attending to requests from colleagues, and sometimes taking on responsibilities that even her supervisors expected her to handle.
Consequently, she struggled to complete her own professional duties as stipulated in her job description. Her workload increased, her priorities became confused, and her performance began to deteriorate.
The situation continued until her supervisors summoned her to explain why she was failing to meet performance expectations. Her supervisors warned her that continued under performance could lead to disciplinary action.
2. Misunderstood: Helpful, Someone Who Pleases People or Under performer?
The situation attracted mixed reactions from colleagues.
Some sympathized with Jayne, describing her as kind, generous, and always willing to help. Others were less sympathetic, dismissing her as a pushover and someone who pleases people, who allowed others to take advantage of her.
Jayne herself was confused and frustrated. She wondered why she was being criticized when she was constantly busy helping the very people who were now contributing to her difficulties. She felt she was being punished for being helpful.
What she did not understand was that her inability to distinguish between helping others and sacrificing her own responsibilities was becoming a serious professional weakness, putting her job at risk.
3. The Workplace Intervention That Did Not Work
Human Resources (HR) intervened and gave Jayne an opportunity to explain her workload. She was asked to document the tasks she was undertaking, including assignments that were not part of her official responsibilities.
The review revealed that she was spending considerable time helping colleagues and even attending to tasks that belonged to her supervisors. Her own duties were consequently being neglected.
HR advised her to prioritize her job description, manage her workload, and stop routinely taking responsibility for other people’s assignments.
The advice appeared reasonable. However, a few months later, Jayne’s performance had deteriorated further. The HR intervention had not produced the expected improvement.
Management began considering more serious measures, including demotion or redeployment to another department.
At this point, Jayne realized that she needed help. She had received instructions on what to change, but she seemed unable to put them into practice.
4. Looking Beyond Workplace Behavior: The Role of Transformational Life Coaching
Jayne reached out to a transformational life coach.
During their initial conversations, the coach identified a recurring pattern: Jayne struggled to establish personal boundaries and had an overwhelming need to accommodate other people’s demands.
The coach wanted to understand why saying no was so difficult for her. Was it fear of rejection? A need for approval? Fear of confrontation? Or something deeper?
Rather than treating the behavior as an isolated workplace weakness, the coach explored Jayne’s personal history and the experiences that might have shaped her responses to other people.
5. Discovering the Childhood Connection
As Jayne shared her life story, a significant pattern began to emerge.
She had grown up in a family environment where her opinions and personal choices were rarely valued. Her parents were highly demanding and expected unquestioning obedience.
They often issued instructions rather than engaging their children in discussions or allowing them to make age-appropriate choices.
Saying no was not an acceptable response. Questioning instructions or expressing a different opinion could attract disapproval, criticism, or punishment.
Over time, Jayne learned that pleasing others was a way of avoiding conflict and maintaining acceptance. She often prioritized the tasks her parents and other family members gave her, even if it meant doing her school work late at night after other family members were already asleep.
Jayne became accustomed to putting other people’s needs ahead of her own, even when doing so was personally costly.
As an adult, this pattern followed her into the workplace.
Requests from colleagues and supervisors triggered familiar responses. She found it difficult to decline, even when she knew that accepting additional responsibilities would compromise her own work.
What appeared to be excessive kindness was, in part, a learned survival response: the need to please others to feel accepted and avoid disapproval.
Her childhood experiences had influenced how she understood authority, responsibility, approval, and personal boundaries.
6. How Historical Trauma and Its Impact on Workplace Performances?
Jayne’s experience illustrates how unresolved childhood adversity can influence adult behavior and impact workplace performance.
Historical trauma, in this context, refers to the lasting emotional and behavioral effects of difficult past experiences. These may include persistent criticism, emotional neglect, controlling parenting, rejection, intimidation, or repeated violations of personal boundaries.
Not everyone who experiences difficult childhood circumstances develops these patterns. However, for some people, early experiences can shape beliefs and coping behaviors that continue into adulthood.
At work, these patterns may manifest in different ways:
- People-pleasing: Constantly seeking approval and struggling to disappoint others, with attempts to say ‘no’ making one feel like a bad person.
- Poor boundaries: Accepting responsibilities beyond one’s capacity or professional mandate.
- Fear of authority: Finding it difficult to question instructions, raise concerns, or express disagreement.
- Conflict avoidance: Remaining silent about unfair treatment or workplace problems to avoid confrontation.
- Perfectionism: Feeling compelled to perform flawlessly to gain approval, avoid criticism, and feel like a good person.
- Low self-confidence: Doubting one’s abilities despite having the necessary qualifications and experience.
- Difficulty delegating: Believing that one must personally attend to everything to remain valued or accepted.
These behaviors can affect productivity, teamwork, leadership, decision-making, and career development.
The important distinction is that the employee may understand what needs to change intellectually yet still struggle to change the behavior because its roots are deeper than the immediate workplace situation.
As we say in trauma healing, the huge heavy gorilla – the subconscious mind – always wins against the small monkey with its chatter chatter chatter – the conscious/reasoning/rationalizing mind.
What we learn in our prenatal and postnatal stages is often internalized as subconscious programming that has significant influence in our lives in later years. That is why it is important “to train a child in the way he should go, and he will not depart from it”.
7. Transformational Coaching Journey: Learning to Establish Boundaries
The coach helped Jayne recognize the connection between her earlier experiences and her present-day behavior.
Through guided reflection and coaching conversations, she began to understand that she was no longer the child who had to agree with every demand to avoid disapproval. She was an adult professional with the right to make choices, manage her workload, and establish reasonable boundaries.
The coaching process focused on helping her:
- Recognize the beliefs and fears influencing her decisions.
- Understand the difference between being helpful and accepting inappropriate responsibility.
- Develop confidence in expressing her needs and professional priorities.
- Learn to decline additional assignments respectfully and assertively without feeling like a bad person.
- Communicate her workload and negotiate realistic deadlines.
- Prioritize her official responsibilities without feeling guilty.
- Build healthier working relationships based on mutual respect.
Changing these behaviors was not easy. Jayne had spent many years responding to people in a particular way. Establishing boundaries initially felt uncomfortable, especially when dealing with colleagues and supervisors.
The coach provided continued guidance and support which included proven tools for bringing about change at the subconscious level and also followed up on her progress. Together, they discussed practical workplace situations and developed appropriate ways of responding to requests without being rude, confrontational, or unnecessarily apologetic.
It took several attempts, but gradually Jayne became more confident.
8. The Transformation: From People-Pleasing to Professional Confidence
As Jayne learned to say no when necessary, she began to regain control over her time and professional responsibilities.
She became more deliberate about evaluating requests before accepting them. Instead of automatically agreeing, she learned to ask about priorities, deadlines, and the implications for her existing workload. She did not immediately say ‘yes’ to requests but asked for time to assess her workload and determine if she was in a position to help.
Jayne also discovered that setting boundaries did not mean becoming unhelpful or selfish. It meant helping others without compromising her own responsibilities, which helped them also to take responsibility for their own work.
Her performance improved significantly. She became more focused, organized, and confident in her professional decisions.
The disciplinary warning she had received was eventually withdrawn, and she was later promoted to another department in recognition of her improved performance.
What began as an apparent workplace performance problem had revealed a deeper personal pattern that needed attention.
What Can Employers and HR Professionals Learn from Jayne’s Experience?
Jayne’s experience raises an important question: Are organizations sometimes too quick to discipline employees for behaviors they have not taken the time to understand? Are organizations sometimes too quick to dismiss employees who could have been assisted to improve?
Performance management is essential. Employees must be accountable for their responsibilities, and organizations have legitimate expectations regarding productivity and professional conduct.
However, disciplinary action alone may not address the underlying causes of persistent performance difficulties.
Before concluding that an employee is lazy, incompetent, difficult, or deliberately uncooperative, employers and HR professionals may benefit from exploring other contributing factors. Some struggles require referral to transformational life coaches rather than ending at regular performance coaching.
A supportive approach can include:
- Looking beyond the performance figures: Understand the circumstances and behavioral patterns contributing to the employee’s difficulties.
- Encouraging open conversations: Create a safe and respectful environment where employees can discuss challenges without automatically fearing punishment.
- Considering professional coaching: Where appropriate, provide access to workplace or transformational life coaching to help employees develop self-awareness as well as critical life skills such as self-confidence, communication skills, and healthier boundaries.
- Strengthening supervisory practices: Ensure that workloads, responsibilities, expectations, and reporting relationships are clear.
- Promoting psychological safety: Encourage employees to raise concerns, disagree respectfully, and seek clarification without fear of humiliation or retaliation.
- Recognizing when specialist support is needed: Where experiences involve significant unresolved traumas or mental health concerns, coaching should complement—not replace—appropriate support from qualified mental health professionals.
Why Workplace Coaching Matters
Traditional performance management often concentrates on what an employee is doing wrong. Coaching can help explore why certain behaviors persist and what may be required to change them.
A good coaching process does not excuse poor performance or remove professional accountability. Instead, it helps employees understand themselves, recognize limiting patterns, develop practical skills, and take responsibility for their growth.
For Jayne, the breakthrough was not simply learning to manage her time better. It was understanding why she found it so difficult to protect her time in the first place.
That distinction made all the difference.
A Final Reflection: Are You Addressing the Symptoms or the Root Causes?
Sometimes, workplace struggles are just but the symptom of a deeper problem. Employees may be dealing with excessive workloads, poor supervision, bullying, discrimination, unclear responsibilities, or unhealthy organizational cultures. These circumstances must be addressed directly.
But sometimes, the workplace becomes the setting in which unresolved personal experiences and traumas are manifested.
An employee who cannot say ‘no’ may be struggling with childhood conditioning. Someone who fears criticism may have grown up in an environment where mistakes were never tolerated. A professional who constantly seeks approval may have learned early in life that acceptance depended on pleasing others.
Recognizing these connections does not mean blaming parents, excusing harmful workplace conduct, or assuming that every performance problem originates in childhood. It means understanding that people bring their life experiences, beliefs, and coping patterns into the workplace.
What manifests in the here and now may be masking a deep network of unaddressed roots of childhood conditioning that the individual does not even understand.
Career success is not determined by professional qualifications and technical competence alone. It also depends on self-awareness, emotional maturity, healthy relationships, confidence, and the ability to establish appropriate boundaries.
Workplace coaching can provide an important pathway towards that growth.
Sometimes, the most valuable intervention an organization can make is not simply to tell an employee to perform better, but to help them understand what is standing in the way of their performance.
Call to Action
Are you experiencing challenges in the workplace that are affecting your performance, relationships, or career growth? You do not have to navigate them alone. Through our workplace coaching program, we can work together to identify the underlying issues, explore practical solutions, and help you build a healthier, more fulfilling professional experience.
Get in touch with us:
- WhatsApp: +254 724 378 980
- Email: Susan@susancatherineketer.com
