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KAKawal AroraRelationship & Leadership Coach

Workplace Relationships

Monday Blues!!

The knot arrives on Sunday evening, and it is telling you something more specific than you think.

22 September 2017·Kawal Arora·3 min read

Almost everybody has had a stretch of Sunday evenings with a knot in the stomach. It is common enough that it has become a joke, which is unfortunate, because treating it as universal stops people asking the useful question.

The useful question is: specifically what?

When I ask clients to be precise about what they are dreading, the answer is almost never the work. Nobody dreads spreadsheets. What comes back, reliably, is a person or a relationship. A manager whose mood determines the week. A colleague with whom something unresolved sits. A Monday meeting where they will once again not say the thing they think.

Occasionally it is the absence of a relationship — a job with no one in it who knows them, which people underestimate as a source of dread.

This matters because the generic diagnosis produces generic solutions. Work-life balance, a holiday, a new job. Sometimes those help. Frequently the person changes jobs and finds the knot back within four months, because they carried the relational pattern with them.

The specific diagnosis produces something actionable. If the dread is one unresolved conversation with one person, that is a coachable, solvable problem, and it is usually resolvable in weeks rather than years.

So next Sunday, when it arrives, do not label it Monday blues and go and watch something. Ask what exactly am I anticipating — and keep asking until you get to a name. The answer is more useful than the mood.


Written by

Kawal Arora

ICF Certified Coach, Mars-Venus Relationship Coach, Licensed Emotional Intelligence Coach, NLP Practitioner and Organisation Development Coach. Based in Hyderabad; working with clients globally.

More about Kawal

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