Beyond Borders with Senyo M Adjabeng: The Hidden Structure of a Modern Career

A Unique Career Path: Blending HR, Therapy, and Coaching

A casual dinner with a colleague often promises little more than pleasantries and shared professional grievances. Yet, sometimes, across a table scattered with the remnants of a meal, one encounters a blueprint for a career that defies conventional categorization.

Recently, I had the privilege of such a conversation with a respected colleague in Accra, whose professional journey, from Human Resources practitioner to therapist and, ultimately, to an executive coach, offers a profound case study on the evolving nature of work, the courage of reinvention, and the synergistic power of integrating seemingly disparate fields.

Her current mixed practice, which weaves together all three disciplines, is not a patchwork of past lives but a coherent, intentional structure built on a foundation of interconnected human understanding. Our discussion delved into the intricate linkages between these roles and surfaced critical insights into the benefits and challenges of such a composite career, particularly within the dynamic context of Ghana’s professional landscape.

The journey began, as many do, within the established confines of corporate Human Resources. For years, she operated within the systems and policies designed to manage an organisation’s most vital asset – its people. She was adept at recruitment, performance management, and employee relations. Yet, a persistent dissonance grew. The frameworks felt mechanistic, often treating symptoms, attrition, disengagement, conflict, without truly diagnosing the underlying human causes.

“I was applying bandaids,” she explained, “when what was needed was a deeper understanding of the psyche. I could manage the ‘what’ of an employee’s behaviour, but I was ill-equipped to comprehend the ‘why.’” This hunger to understand the root of human motivation, resilience, and dysfunction propelled her out of the corporate suite and into the demanding academic and clinical training of a Therapist.

The Therapist

The transition was not merely a career change, it was an epistemological shift. Moving from the organisational lens of HR, which primarily serves the entity’s goals, to the client-centred lens of Therapist, which prioritises the individual’s well-being, required a fundamental rewiring.

In her Therapist practice, she engaged with the raw material of human experience, trauma, anxiety, personality structures, and cognitive patterns. This deep immersion provided the missing piece from her HR days – a granular comprehension of the individual as a complex system of history, motivation, and emotion.

Where HR policies saw a “non-performer,” the therapist in her allowed her to see an individual potentially grappling with burnout, imposter syndrome, or unresolved personal conflict. This was the first and most critical linkage, therapy provided the foundational science of the individual, the very subject that HR policies attempt to manage.

However, the story does not end in the therapist’s chair. While her clinical work was deeply fulfilling, she noticed a recurring theme among her professional clients. They were not necessarily clinically unwell, but they were stuck. They faced career crossroads, leadership challenges, and a profound lack of clarity about their future. Therapy, with its focus on pathology and healing, felt like using a surgical scalpel for a problem requiring a compass. This realisation sparked her next pivot, into the future-oriented domain of coaching.

“Therapy often asks, ‘Why are you the way you are?’ based on your past,” she reflected. “Coaching asks, ‘Who do you want to become, and how will you get there?’ It’s a partnership focused on potential, not pathology.”

The Executive Coach

It is here, in the fusion of these three disciplines, that her unique practice found its powerful voice. Her work is no longer a sequence of separate services but an integrated model. The linkages are the pillars of this model. Her HR background grants her an unassailable credibility in corporate settings, she speaks the language of KPIs, organisational culture, and talent strategy.

She understands the systemic pressures and political realities that her coaching clients navigate. Her therapist training is the bedrock of her effectiveness, it allows her to discern the difference between a skills gap and a limiting belief, between a communication issue and a deeper personality-driven conflict. She can hold space for a client’s emotional turmoil without conflating it with a clinical condition requiring therapy, a boundary she maintains with ethical rigour.

The Benefits of a Composite Practice

The benefits of this composite practice, both for her and her clients, are immense. For organisations in Ghana, she offers a rare breed of consultancy. She can design a leadership development programme (leveraging her HR and coaching skills) and also provide confidential, therapeutic support for executives under immense stress (leveraging her psychology credentials), understanding how one directly impacts the other.

For individual clients, her guidance is holistic. A professional considering a career change is not just guided on updating their CV (HR) or setting goals (coaching), they are also supported through the identity crisis and familial pressures that such a shift can trigger in a collectivist society like Ghana’s (psychology).

This ability to address the whole person, within their organisational and socio-cultural context, is the model’s greatest strength. Furthermore, this integrated approach is uniquely suited to the nuances of the Ghanaian, and by extension, the African professional environment. The strict, sometimes artificial, separation between the “professional self” and the “personal self” is less tenable in cultures where community, family, and social obligations are deeply intertwined with individual ambition.

Challenges of a Mixed Practice

Naturally, such a path is not without its significant challenges. The primary hurdle is perpetual boundary management. “I have to be meticulously clear, with myself and my clients, about which hat I am wearing in any given interaction,” she notes.

In a single day, she might transition from a therapy session with a client dealing with anxiety, to a coaching session with a CEO, to an HR consultancy meeting with a corporate board all back to back. The mental and emotional shift is demanding. There is also the challenge of public perception and education. Potential clients sometimes struggle to distinguish between the services, expecting therapeutic work in a coaching contract or quick-fix coaching advice during a therapy session. This requires constant communication about the scope, goals, and ethical frameworks of each distinct practice.

The Business of a Mixed Practice

As the dinner drew close to the end because I had to run to catch a final meeting at our regular Cigar Lounge, one question continued to gnaw and crowd my my conscience as I kept wondering, how lucrative, financially rewarding and successful such a mixed practice could be in Ghana.

Based on the colleague’s journey in Ghana, the business model can be defined as a multi-tiered consultancy and professional services practice that leverages the unique synergies of its three foundational disciplines to address human capital challenges at the individual, leader, and organizational levels. Its viability is not a given, but it is a calculated and achievable outcome predicated on a clear value proposition, strategic market positioning, and meticulous operational management.

The core business of this practice is the provision of bespoke, high-value interventions that conventional, siloed service providers cannot offer. It operates across three primary, and often interlocking, revenue streams. The first stream is organizational consultancy, rooted deeply in HR expertise but profoundly enhanced by psychological insight. Here, the practice does not merely design performance management systems, it designs them with an innate understanding of human motivation, cognitive bias, and the psychological impact of feedback.

It advises on corporate restructurings not just from a legal and procedural standpoint, but with a clinical understanding of change management, collective anxiety, and grief within the workforce. For a corporate client in Accra facing high talent attrition, this practice would not simply recommend better pay scales; it would diagnose the cultural drivers of disengagement, coach managers on empathetic leadership, and provide a safe outlet for employee concerns, thereby addressing the issue at both a systemic and a human level.

The second revenue stream is executive coaching and leadership development. This is where the psychology and coaching credentials converge most powerfully. The service sold here is not generic advice but transformative guidance for senior leaders. A CEO struggling with strategic delegation is not just given tools, the practitioner explores the underlying psychological drivers, such as a need for control or a fear of being sidelined, that are rooted in past experiences.

The business offering is the acceleration of leadership effectiveness through a methodology that is unafraid to delve into the deeper mechanics of behaviour and belief. This is a premium service, commanding fees significantly higher than those of a coach without psychological training, because the value delivered, of impacting the performance of an entire organization through its leader is immense.

The third stream is therapeutic services for professionals. This serves a dual business purpose. Firstly, it is a direct source of revenue from individual clients. Secondly, and perhaps more critically for the sustainability of the model, it acts as a foundational layer of practice that informs all other work.

The deep, ongoing work with individuals in a therapeutic context continuously refreshes the practitioner’s understanding of the human condition, ensuring that their organizational and coaching advice remains grounded and relevant. It is the research and development wing of the enterprise, paid for by its own clients.

Crucially, the business depends on the practitioner’s rigorous ethical boundaries to ensure these streams do not unethically cross; a coaching client is not a therapy patient, and vice versa, but the wisdom gleaned from each domain enriches the other. Ultimately, the sustainability of this mixed practice hinges on its ability to consistently demonstrate a return on investment that is tangible to its clients.

Financially and structurally, building a mixed practice requires entrepreneurial resilience. Unlike a salaried HR role, this model demands business development, marketing, and the uncertainty of variable income, a reality that deters many professionals. In Ghana, where the fields of coaching and therapy are still maturing, the onus is on the practitioner to build their reputation and client base from the ground up, often without the established referral pathways of more mature markets.

Our dinner conversation was a powerful reminder that the most compelling career paths of the 21st century may not be linear ladders but intricate, self-designed lattices. The journey from HR to psychologist to coach is not a story of abandonment but one of accumulation and integration. It demonstrates that the deepest expertise often lies at the intersection of disciplines.

For professionals feeling trapped in a singular definition of their role, her story is an invitation to look for the connections, to identify the adjacent possible, and to build a career that reflects the full complexity of their skills and passions. It is a testament to the idea that the most valuable capital we possess is not a job title, but a diverse and deeply understood portfolio of human knowledge, applied with intention and integrity.