Moving on from a Workplace Grievance or PIP: How Coaching can help you reclaim your Career Confidence

If you have recently been through a PIP, a disciplinary, a grievance, or a redundancy, you are probably not looking for a framework, but for someone who gets it.

These processes are designed to feel formal and procedural, and for most people that is exactly how they experience them from the outside. From the inside, they are exhausting, consuming, and deeply personal in a way that nobody really prepares you for. You go through the meetings, you get the outcome, and then you are supposed to carry on. Go back to your desk, or start the job search, or move to the next role, and most people do just carry on, or at least try to carry on. What they also carry, often without realising it for a while, is a version of themselves that is a bit quieter than before, a bit more hesitant and maybe not quite as confident as before.

That is what a knock to your confidence actually looks like in practice. It is not always dramatic, but you may be second-guessing a decision you would previously have made without thinking twice. It is the way your stomach dips slightly whenever a manager asks to have a quick word, and it can also the job application you started and then closed, because you could not quite make yourself sound as good on paper as you used to believe you were.

Coaching does not fix those things by telling you they are irrational, because they are not irrational. They are a completely understandable response to what you went through. What it does is help you examine them properly, understand where they are coming from, and work out what you actually want to do next.

A PIP tells you your performance is not good enough. Even if you disagreed with every word of it, even if you hit every target and came out the other side, some part of that lands. Coaching gives you the space to separate what was happening in that workplace, with that manager, in that particular moment, from what you are actually capable of.

A disciplinary, even one where you are cleared, leaves a residue. You were investigated and your conduct was questioned. For some people that is the first time something like that has ever happened to them, after years or even decades of a clean career, and the dissonance between who they know themselves to be and what that process implied about them is genuinely hard to sit with. This is something we work on directly.

A grievance is complicated whether you raised it or had one raised against you. If you raised it, you did something brave. You named something, put it in writing, and then had to keep showing up while it was investigated. Even when the outcome is the right one, it rarely feels like a clean resolution, and if one was raised against you, you may have felt blindsided, frustrated and had almost nowhere to put any of that. Either way, there is often something unresolved that does not just dissolve when the process closes.

Redundancy is its own particular kind of difficult. Logically, you know it is a business decision. Emotionally, being told your role no longer exists can feel like being told you are no longer needed, and those two things are very hard to keep separate, particularly when you are trying to sell yourself to the next employer while still processing the last experience.

What the coaching I offer actually involves is worth being specific about, because I think people sometimes assume coaching is just someone asking how you feel. That’s not now it works, and instead we work on what you want, not just what happened. That means getting really clear on where your confidence has taken a hit and what beliefs about yourself have formed as a result, challenging the ones that are not serving you, and building a much more accurate picture of your strengths and what you bring. We use structured goal-setting to give the sessions direction, and we work on the specific situations where you feel your confidence most, whether that is speaking up, managing up, interviewing, or just getting through a working week without dreading it.

The coaching I offer runs across three sessions over 4-6 weeks depending on what we need to work with and how much time you need between sessions to get there. It’s 3 sessions and includes check-in time between sessions for when something comes up or you just need a sounding board before the next one. I hold an Advanced Certificate in Life Coaching accredited by the Association for Coaching, alongside my CIPD Level 7 and Mental Health First Aider qualification, and over a decade of HR and employee relations experience. This means I am not just a coach who has read about workplace processes. I have spent over a decade managing them, which means I understand exactly what is happening on both sides of the table. 

If any of this sounds like where you are right now, I would love to talk. You can find out more about the coaching package here and also read testimonials from clients I have coached, or book a free discovery call if you want to speak before you commit to anything.