There’s a moment in every coaching relationship where you see it – that a-ha moment when someone realizes they’ve been operating on outdated software for years. 

1. The Pattern I Keep Seeing

I’ve lost count of how many high achievers sit across from me with the same presenting issue: “I always feel stressed and anxious. I need help with managing my work-life balance.”

But work-life balance is almost never the real problem. It’s the symptom of something much deeper.

When Janice first reached out in March 2025, she described what I hear constantly – unclear career path, no energy for hobbies, feeling drained by work. She also said something that I hear from many clients: “I feel like I need to do everything and be responsible for everything.”

That’s where we start.

2. What’s Really Happening Under the Surface

We spent our early sessions doing what I call “belief audits” – I wanted to understand more deeply about my client’s psyche and what are the origin stories that have been running their lives, often for decades.

For Janice, they all traced back to a simple equation learned in childhood: struggle = stress for parents = bad. 

From this space, she learned to be independent, not need help, be perfect, and avoid being “fixed.” It worked brilliantly, right up until the point it didn’t. It reminded me of a quote/book I like by Marshall Goldsmith called ‘What Got You Here Won’t Get You There’.

When we let our old survival patterns lead us, what tends to happen is the invisible drift. The quiet, gradual shift that pulls us further away from the life we want to lead and the person we want to be.

1. There was identity drift: She had moved so far from her own center that she could no longer tell the difference between what she truly wanted and what she learned to perform. The capable, self-sufficient Janice had become the only version she knew how to be, and she’d stopped questioning whether that version needed to evolve. 
2. There was emotional drift: There was a baseline of anxiety running in the background that she’d stopped registering as something worth addressing because it was so familiar. She wasn’t managing her emotions so much as suppressing them and calling it composure.
3. There was behavioral drift: She was doing everything, holding everything, carrying everything. Unfortunately, it was not from a place of genuine choice, but it had simply become her default. She described feeling like a “janitor” at work. She genuinely believed that asking for help meant she was weak.
4. Last but not least, there was relationship drift: Her relationship with her boss got impacted because she couldn’t stay regulated during a heated conflict. The very walls she’d built to protect herself had started cutting her off from the people who mattered most.

This is the invisible tax of high achievement: You get very good at winning the game, but you forget to ask whether you’re even playing the right one.

3. The Work That Actually Changes Things

People sometimes expect to see a sudden breakthrough after working on themselves. However, in my experience that’s rarely how it goes.The shifts I see are mostly small and quiet – accumulating slowly, almost invisible at first, until one day you realize you’re showing up differently.

For Janice, we worked primarily with this framework called Internal Family Systems. The core idea is simply that we all carry different “parts” of ourselves.

It could be the anxious part, the perfectionist part, the people-pleaser – but the gist is that each one developed at some point to help us survive. The goal isn’t to get rid of them – but for us to understand them while not letting them take the driver seat.

In IFS, that wisest self is called the Self but I often refer to it with clients as the CEO, because I think this language tends to land better in terms of understanding. The CEO isn’t the one who has all the answers. She’s the one who can hold everything without being overwhelmed by any of it.

When Janice was triggered by a situation at work that echoed old experiences of being taken advantage of, we could trace exactly what was happening. 

1. Her Manager part wanted to be methodical, go through proper channels, even though it felt frustratingly slow. 
2. Her Firefighter part was louder: remember what happened last time, we need to act now, we need to protect ourselves. 
3. Her CEO (her grounded, clear-eyed center) was nowhere to be found, buried under the noise of the other two.

A month later, something similar happened at work. However, this time Janice said:

“I understand why a part of us still feels triggered. This shows me where I can do more inner work. I see now that it is part of the work of getting better.”

I remember pausing the session when she said that as it was a pivotal moment. In a moment of real activation, she was able to stay curious instead of collapsing into shame. 

She hadn’t said I failed again or why can’t I just get over this. Instead she said: This is information. This is the work.

The CEO had shown up.

4. The “I Failed” Story

One of my favourite things in coaching is watching someone rewrite a story they’ve been carrying for years, right there in the session, almost by accident.

Janice had a chapter she’d filed firmly under failure. I think many of us have those. For Janice, she saw that period that she was working overseas as a chapter that was simply bad. Her narrative was that: “I couldn’t handle it, I failed.”

In one of our November sessions, I invited her to look at that chapter through the eyes of a few different parts of herself that we discovered during our sessions together. 

• What would the part that craves new experiences and connection say about it? 
• What would the part that cares deeply about her career and what she’s building say?
• What about the quieter part – the one that just needed some space to figure out who she was becoming?

Each part had something different to offer. After she sat with it:

• The first remembered the friendships, the adventures, the particular aliveness of being somewhere unfamiliar. 
• The second pointed out that the experience was on her CV, and had probably been a factor in landing her current role. 
• The third recognized it as the chapter where she’d discovered coaching where something that now matters enormously to her had first taken root.

Then she said: “Huh. I guess good and bad things can exist together.”

She described it as a weight lifting from her shoulders, which is exactly what it looked like from where I was sitting.

These are the moments I do this work for.

5. What I’ve Learned About Change

As mentioned above, the beliefs that got you here won’t necessarily get you there. Janice’s “never ask for help” strategy served her for a long time BUT it also made her lonely and exhausted. 

The question worth asking isn’t whether an old belief is good or bad, but whether it still fits the life you’re actually living.

Triggers are information. Janice’s old response to feeling activated was a shame spiral; her newer response is curiosity. That shift, even though it sounds small, is most of the work.

Making the unconscious conscious is the whole game.

Once Janice could see her Manager part and her Firefighter part and her CEO more clearly, she had something she didn’t have before: a choice. Before that awareness, she was simply reacting – convinced that her reactions were just who she was.

Good coaching, in my experience, mostly asks better questions rather than offering better answers. What are you making this mean? What’s the alternative interpretation? What kind of hard do you want to choose? The answers, almost always, are already there.

6. Where She Is Now

Janice shows up differently these days. She is more settled in herself and she even told me that her colleagues and friends are also noticing that her energy seems different. 

She is still ambitious, still someone who works hard and cares deeply but there’s more spaciousness in how she carries all of it.

We had developed for her a playbook on herself which includes an awareness of her drift signals – an internal early-warning system for when she’s starting to slip from herself. 

She can feel when she’s beginning to over-rationalize, when the spiral is just getting started, when she’s about to say yes to something that she actually does not want to. 

The next step is introducing the pause so she catches the drift before it pulls her too far.

She’s practicing discernment over binary thinking where she is letting something be imperfect and acceptable at the same time, receiving feedback without it meaning she’s worthless. 

She’s asking for help, genuinely, without the story that doing so reveals some fundamental inadequacy.

More importantly, she trusts herself more now – in the sense that whatever comes, she’ll be able to handle it,

7. Why I’m Sharing This

I’m not sharing Janice’s story because it’s unusual. I’m actually sharing it because it is so common. It also mirrors a journey that my other clients and I are going through.

So many of us are running our adult lives on operating systems we built as children, in very different circumstances, for very different purposes. 

We keep trying to solve that with better productivity systems, tighter routines, sharper goals but they address the symptoms not the root causes. Hence these strategies usually don’t stick after a while. 

The real work is in becoming aware of what’s actually running underneath and then, slowly and with some patience for yourself, updating the code.

A Note

If you’ve read this and found yourself thinking I should start doing IFS so I can feel better, please know that the framework isn’t the point. 

The transformation lives in the accumulated small moments – the ones where someone realizes that they’ve been believing something that no longer has to be true, and that they get to choose something different now.

That’s the work, it comes with awareness then consistent practice but it is incredibly worthwhile. I remain genuinely grateful to get to continually witness it.

Names and identifying details have been changed. Shared with permission as part of my Coaching Diaries where I reflect on the patterns, insights, and quiet revolutions in my practice.