‘Nigel’s’ brief went something like this –now approaching her 40th birthday, his wife (who we will call ‘Nigella’) had for the last dozen years been a ‘fantastic’ full-time mother to their three children who were all now at private school. So now she had more time on her hands, she felt the need to ‘exercise her grey matter’ and was toying with the idea of returning to the workplace but lacked the self motivation and confidence to do so. He had put her in touch with a few of his PR contacts, but she hadn’t followed through.
He went on to describe Nigella’s intelligence, her passionate and effective fundraising for charity, her love of the gym and a glass of wine, and her early career as a marketing exec in a City bank (where they had first met each other). In a nutshell, here was a man who clearly cared about his wife’s wellbeing but was seemingly frustrated about his inability to provide a solution for her dilemma. So, he had defaulted to type and had decided to throw money at a solution – hire me to sort it out for him!
How bloke-ish is that? He cared enough to help, he’d listened just enough to ‘diagnose’, he’d sought to provide a solution, failed, so was buying her something instead.
Now, although Nigella’s challenge was not unusual to me, I wanted to know if Nigel’s diagnosis was accurate. Just how keen was she to get a job? Would she appreciate/did she need an intervention from a coach? If so, she seemed the sort of lady that was more than capable of contacting one of her own choice. Was there something he hadn’t told me about her or that he wanted me to find out about her? (In which case was he better off hiring a private detective?). Or was it a case of the diagnosing doctor Nigel needing to heal his dashing self?
I explained that meeting Nigella, without her buy-in, would be self-defeating . This was a lesson learnt from my childhood –whenever my adolescent sister was ill in bed, my mother used to call the doctor (Dr Steeds who had played rugby for England and whose cold hands were the size of snow shovels) but never used to tell my sister he was coming to examine her until his head (complete with cauliflower ears) popped round her bedroom door.
How that used to infuriate, let alone embarrass her! She may have been lying there unwashed, in a dirty nightie, even with a hangover for all I know, but I also know she used to resist his examinations and to this day has a mini complex about all things medical (and possibly rugby players).
To kick off with, I suggested a meeting with Nigel which he duly arranged for the following day, mid-morning at a City juice bar. From his pinstripe suit and monogrammed signet ring, to his foppish hair and vice-like handshake, Nigel embodied the mental picture that I had previously built up of him. Athletically built, in his mid-forties, he was a senior trader in an Icelandic-owned stockbroking firm with a substantial six figure salary (which ‘duly covered his day to day living expenses’) and an unfeasibly large annual bonus which allowed him ‘to really live’.
Within 45 minutes of blusteringly engaging company, I gleaned all I needed to know about his lifestyle, his values, his ambitions – but little about his wife. He suggested a further meeting in a couple of days time, and then a couple more the following week, each at a time of day when I would expect a hungry broker such as he to be trading his cashmere socks off.
Massive mortgage, school fees,shooting syndicate fees, a love for boys toys (especially those with wheels attached – even his recently purchased sit-on lawnmower sounded like a pimped up combine harvester), glamorous holidays, weekends at the Monaco Grand Prix, Ascot, polo etc... Nigel was grateful yet self-effacing in his description of his lifestyle. He often talked of ‘what was expected of him’, people’s ‘perceptions of him’ and his duty to ‘provide the best opportunities in life’ for his family who he clearly adored.
...So when Nigel finally gathered himself to tell me that he had been made redundant 3 weeks previously due to the collapse of the Icelandic banking system and hadn’t yet had the heart/nerve/balls to tell his wife, the extent of the damage that this had caused to his self-esteem and pride became apparent.
Nigel was the real life urban myth. He was still carrying on his daily routine, commuting most mornings on the ‘red eye’ train, staying overnight in London a couple of days a week to ‘entertain clients’ and returning home on the other nights just in time to tuck his youngest child into bed (it transpired that he had two children at private boarding school, not three).
He explained he was ‘simply not equipped’ to spend quality time with his family in the evenings because he was ‘knackered’, and at weekends he was networking or letting off steam.
Clearly then, Nigel was Nigella and ironically enough, Nigella may well need to return to the workplace pdq whether she wanted to or not. Over the coming weeks, Nigel and I became good friends (as well as coach and client). Beneath his armadillo-like shell of bravado was a sensitive man who proved receptive to most things I could throw at him and whose situation taught me buckets about the human condition. I started off by calling him ‘Tim’ (as in ‘nice but dim’) and he called me ‘Poof’ (because he thought I resembled one of the ‘4 Poofs and a Piano’ from the Jonathan Ross show– told you Nigel was charming didn’t I?). Knowing him better, I re-named him ‘Hyacinth’ (as in ‘Bouquet’ on account of his obsession with keeping up appearances).
Humour was a key element to building a bond of trust between us, so much so that he still texts me dodgy jokes such as, ‘Iceland goes bankrupt then manages to set itself on fire – it’s got insurance scam written all over it!’. My personal take on this subject is if an act of God (eg a volcanic eruption) occurs at the exact location where consistent immoral or avaricious behaviour takes place (eg Iceland, home of a most dodgy, high risk, unviable financial market), then can we expect certain members of the England football team to spontaneously combust on the pitch during the World Cup? Or a certain politician to be drowned by a tsunami emanating from his (our) moat?
Even in a depressed market, Nigel knew he was eminently employable but realistically could expect to downgrade his turbo-charged spending. Like many men I know, he just wasn’t honest about his personal spending – the overnight stays in London tended to involve expensive food, booze, roulette tables, private clubs.
The boys toys were a tad over-indulgent, the cost of which were conveniently shielded from his loved ones. It’s not that he was deceptive, more like he was meeting his need for significance through material rather than emotional means.
What he needed to do at this crossroadsin his life was to start being honest with his family, establish what his values were and then realign his behaviour towards those values.
On the one hand, honesty involved telling his wife that he felt inadequate as a father and that he wanted her to show him how to engage his children in activities and conversations that were mutually rewarding; it also involved broaching the subject of whether she would be happy to take a part time job to cover the shortfall in his future income (which she was delighted to do, especially as it meant that Nigel would have to increase his family and domestic duties!). On the other hand, he had to conduct some tough exercises to establish what he stood for:
• If he were to die today, would his last thoughts and feelings be of contentment and satisfaction? • Would he be happy with the way that he had conducted his life, with the things he had left behind? • Was he proud of his achievements in all areas of his life – work, relationships, family? • Who did he love and when did he last tell them? • Who loved him and when did he tell them how much he appreciated their love? • What was he grateful for, and who had he let know? • What was he proud of and when did he last tell them? • What was he excited about and when did he share it? • Who did he trust and when was the last time he let them know? • Who did he respect and when was his last action to demonstrate this?
It was exercises like this that allowed Nigel to move closer to his real self, and further away from his ‘Hyacinth’ self. It’s gratifying to know that he is happy for me to write about him in such a public way too, evidence of a shift away from his previous mindset.
Nigel remains in the City, paid less but valued more, and with more desire to spend time at home (albeit without some of his boys toys). Nigella is flourishing in her part time job in the charity sector – well, she was always going to wasn’t she?!
