A successful professional life is not complete without a prosperous personal life. The former must not be achieved at the cost of the latter. Having helped hundreds suffering from burn-out and work-related exhaustion around the world with her life and business coaching, she is now in Qatar.
Leading a prominent women’s forum, Evridiki Iliaki is now concentrating her energies on building a support group “by women for women in need.”
Taking the reins of How Women Work (HWW) in June last year after the group’s founder Caroline Zeitler left Qatar for good, Illiaki has not only put this content driven and engaging initiative back on track, she is expanding its vision.
HWW primarily was a group formed in 2009 to support women find work, grow and succeed in Qatar. Through its networking conferences, seminars and training workshops, HWW has helped more than 7,300 women find success.
Iliaki, the head of HWW, is determined to take it a notch up. She is incorporating wellness workshops into the organisation’s yearly calendar as she feels it is essential to “bridge the gaps between professional and personal success.”
On the side, she is working to create a support group for helping women who, she says, have approached HWW in great numbers facing multiple domestic issues.
“We, in fact, started this group in October last year and mainly focus on giving free counselling to women in need. Now, we are conducting the wellness and success workshops with the aim to generate funds for establishing our women’s support group,” Iliaki tells Community in an interview.
Coming from Greece, and having studied and researched counselling psychology for more than six years in the United Kingdom, she is a certified life and business coach with over 15 years of experience. She has started the ‘Hippocrates Success and Wellness Programme’ in Qatar which is a series of four seminars starting October this year.
The seminar provides people with techniques and tools, including the visualisation and breathing techniques that they can utilise to find a balance between successful personal and professional life. The funds generated from the registration fee from these seminars would go towards funding the Women’s Support Group, says Iliaki.
“We have been getting a lot of messages and calls for help from a lot of women through social media and the friends of our HWW family. Most of these women needing help are Asian women and they often face various problems in family matters and personal issues that are affecting them,” says the HWW head.
She says they were not expecting that many women to come to them with such problems. And HWW was not expecting to get involved in these issues as its original aim is to help women with professional growth.
However, seeing the magnitude of the problem, Iliaki says, they have decided to form a specialised group within HWW which other women can consult whenever they are in need.
“It must be a specialised group that can professionally help women facing any problem. I am a life and business coach and have some experience with non-profit work, but I am not specialised in such issues. Also, we are busy with our work and it is hard to spare this much time for such tasks,” says the HWW head.
She plans to form a specialised support group which has at least two to three psychologists and experts on family issues, abused women, violence and family issues that are connected to the cases that HWW is coming across.
“We also need some public sector officer who can say they are here for us. We should give these women support, but we should also give a practical solution to them,” says Iliaki. For now, she and another colleague are giving counselling through social media which Iliaki says is not enough.
There must also be practical support for these women. For instance, these women must be able to find help in cases where they are stuck in Qatar and require visas or logistic support to leave the country. The support network she plans to establish should be able to help women in such instances.
Iliaki says they are getting about 4-5 cases of women in different problems every month. For now, she says, the women that HWW help find success in Qatar are coming forward generously and helping the group to support the women in need.
“It means that an invisible support group exists and is helping women around these issues. Yet, we need to make it professional and specialised in this case,” says Iliaki. She can help with evaluating the cases from the psychological perspective, but some expert has to take it further from there.
Iliaki is hopeful that HWW would be able to form this group with the help of its partners and through the success of their wellness seminars.
This year, it is about success and wellness, says Iliaki. “If women do not feel healthy in both body and mind, success will not come basically,” says the HWW leader, explaining the importance of the issue.
“I had the burn-out myself 15 years ago and since then I have met a lot of successful women like Ariana Huffington from Huffington Post, for instance, who acknowledge that no success is worth your health. No money, no fame, nothing can match good health,” says Iliaki.
“If you are not well, and if your health is in danger and if the stress creates problems that are chronic and cannot be fixed, then it is not worth it,” observes the wellness expert. She says in Doha, a lot of women often complain about not being able to quickly find jobs, but she has observed they are ignoring their personal well-being in the pursuit of jobs.
Through the seminars, Iliaki explains how different clinics and health experts from around the globe have recognised the gravity of the issue and are already taking steps to fix the problems related to work load and stress related to work.
‘Something is going wrong here and we are trying to find out what is that and then fix it. Together as a family at HWW, we are going to support the women and fix the problems,” says Iliaki.
She has noteworthy work experience since 1997 in three areas, educating, inspirational speaking and counselling adults facing various life challenges. Iliaki has been helping people for years to acquire better inter-personal, problem-solving, negotiation and persuasion skills.