How Coaching Helped a New Law Firm Partner Achieve Work-Life Balance
By Gillian Hyde, Chief Psychologist, MD and Executive Coach, Psychological Consultancy Ltd.
Promotion to a senior leadership role at a top law firm is a huge career milestone – but it can also bring unexpected pressures. Recently, I had the privilege of working with a newly appointed City law firm partner who wanted to not just succeed at work, but to genuinely enjoy the next 20 years of his life, professionally and personally.
In this article, I’ll share insights from our coaching journey, exploring the practical strategies that helped him reshape his work life balance.
The challenges
When we first sat down together, the partner was clear on one thing: he wanted balance. But achieving it required addressing three interwoven challenges:
- Settling into the partner role: Despite earning the title, he felt uneasy in his new position, unsure if he was meeting expectations.
- Start-of-week anxiety: Every Monday morning, he was gripped by a sense of dread – feeling overwhelmed before the week even began.
- Trust and delegation struggles: He found it difficult to hand over work to team members, which left him overloaded – straining his relationships with colleagues.
Unpacking the anxiety
In our first session, he opened up about the emotional weight he carried into each new week. Mondays felt overwhelming, even though he knew the feelings were irrational.
Rather than try to simply push through, we focused on targeted strategies to break the anxiety cycle – including ways to distract himself from intrusive worries and tools to reframe his thinking at the start of each week.
These strategies included:
- Changing his work schedule to come into the office on Mondays, rather than working from home, and interacting with colleagues face to face as a way to distract himself
- To list the positive qualities associated with his self-critical nature – such as striving to improve – and to repeat these to himself
Understanding personality patterns
A key breakthrough came when we explored his Hogan personality profile. The results revealed strong ‘anxious overachiever’ propensities – something he instinctively knew but hadn’t fully articulated.
This aligned with our earlier discussions, offering deeper insight into his self-critical tendencies. He recognised that while he could manage these characteristics, their impact could never be fully eliminated.
While he had some awareness of these traits, he lacked the framework to articulate them. Recognising his tendencies for worry, anxiety, and self-criticism, he felt he had learnt to try to step back and avoid being consumed by them. We explored strategies to help him sustain this balance, to keep his mindset in this zone, and be kinder to himself.
Building trust and delegation skills
Lastly, we tackled his challenges with trust and delegation. He realised his hesitation to delegate to less trusted team members limited workload sharing as well as negatively impacting on his relationships with them.
We developed strategies to build trust, including committing to spending time training those associates that need it the most, to increase their skills. strengthen relationships and foster collaboration.
The impact of our non-directive executive coaching?
By the end of our coaching engagement, the partner had not only developed a deeper understanding of himself but had also built a practical toolkit he could apply every day.
In his own words:
“I learned a lot about my own personality, and also strategies which I now deploy almost every day and find to be of great assistance both professionally and personally.”
For me, this is the true power of non-directive coaching – guiding clients to uncover insights and develop solutions that are both personalised and sustainable.
If you’re interested in exploring how PCL’s targeted or non-directive executive coaching can help you or your organisation, get in touch – I’d love to start the conversation.