Sam’s Story

Sam got in touch when he realised he was self-sabotaging.  He would get to a certain level of success in his workplace, then he would start missing deadlines, not working to his full ability, procrastinating and generally setting himself up for failure.  He found this very frustrating as he wanted to reach senior management level to have access to the training and development options offered there. He wondered what we could do to help him.

This might not seem like a confidence issue, but it IS about how our unconscious and conscious minds work together. In this case, his conscious mind was gung ho and working for that promotion and end goal, but his unconscious was definitely getting in the way.

In this situation, where one part of you wants X and another part is getting in the way – we run the Negotiation with Confidence Kidnappers process (chapter 8 of the book)

The essence of this process is to bring both parts out, work out their positive intent and get them working together to achieve BOTH their positive intents in a constructive way.

At the end of this session, Sam realised his self sabotaging was his unconscious preventing him from becoming a workaholic like his father had.  Sam wanted a work life balance which would enable him to be close to his children in a way his own father had never managed.  With this realisation he was able to negotiate how he would make sure that would not happen, and his unconscious agreed to let him work for that promotion.

We did a couple more sessions to manage some ‘confidence wobbles’ (changing habits is hard!) and within the year, Sam had been promoted and was happy in his new role, studying for his MBA and enjoying his family time too.