Signed Off Sick During a Disciplinary? How to Protect Your Mental Health

When everything at work is happening to you at once, it is hard to see what you can actually do anything about. This is where one of my clients was a few weeks ago. Suspended, multiple processes running at the same time, signed off sick and emails arriving from their employer that were making them anxious just by landing in the inbox.

Through our coaching sessions, they started to figure out what was actually in their control. Not the outcome or what their employer did next, but how they were spending their days and how they were responding to the situation.

They decided to deal with emails on their own terms. Not ignore them, but open them when they felt ready rather than the moment they arrived. They were automatically moved into a separate folder and they gave themselves a time in the week for anything related to the situation, and outside of that it did not get to take over everything else. This may sound like a small thing to, but it took a massive weight of the client’s shoulders.

It also helped them to have someone who understands the processes and why the employer is doing what they’re doing and communicating the way they are doing. Being told that something is just process may not always be helpful, but it’s there and even if it feels like it’s taking over you, for some it helps to think it’s just stuff that’s there running in the background while you do your best to focus on you, what you’re good at, what skills to improve on, get out and go for walks, as well as seeing people that make you happy and who are not attached to this awful process. 

They kept doing the things that kept them well. Not because it fixed anything, but because it meant they were in a better state to deal with what came next and it made them feel more like themselves and like getting their identity back rather than being the process at work.

None of it changed what their employer was doing, but it changed how they were experiencing it, and that is not a small thing.

If you are in a similar position and want to work out what you can actually do, I offer confidence coaching for people who are trying to move on from difficult situations at work, and if you are going through a process that seems unmanageable, let’s have a chat as I may be able to help you. Book a discovery call here.

On a final note, if you are going through something similar, there will be days that are worse than others while going through a process, but we also have bad days when life seems to be going great and they all pass, but it helps to accept it knowing things will become better.