Some things are easier to see in someone else's life.
Sarah was a senior manager, sharp and trusted, the kind of person a director relies on. She had done some therapy and understood where her hesitation came from. Even so, every time a director role came up, she held back just enough to stay where she was. “I lack confidence,” she admitted to me. “I'm at the same level I was five years ago.”
I asked her how capable she was, on a scale of one to ten. She said seven. Then I asked how capable someone would need to be to take the director's role. She said at least a nine, maybe ten.
Those two numbers told us more than five years of trying had. I'll tell you what they showed, and what happened next, in the first email.
If you've landed here from Ian's website or been reading about the Traynar Method and want to see it at work before deciding anything, this is a good place to start.
If you've spent years trying to change something about yourself, you've probably had plenty of explanation already. You may know where your pattern came from and what sets it off, and yet still find it running exactly as before. More explanation rarely helps at that point. Sometimes what does is watching the same thing happen to someone else, from far enough away that you can see what they couldn't.
That's what these emails are. Each one carries on a story about someone I've worked with: a senior manager who kept stepping back from the job she was ready for, a trader who knew exactly what to do and couldn't do it, a soldier who left the army after twenty-two years and felt there was nothing underneath the uniform, and others who understood their pattern perfectly well and still couldn't shift it. A story usually unfolds over several emails and pauses at the point where something doesn't add up, which is generally where the interesting part begins. When one story ends, another begins.
Along the way you'll see how I work: the questions I ask, and what tends to happen when someone answers them.
Each person got stuck in a different way. One had quietly decided how far she was allowed to go. Another had a part of him that had been working hard to protect him for decades, at considerable cost. Someone else had spent twenty years becoming very good at something he had never thought to name. Read enough of them and you start to see how people get caught, and you may recognise where you do. None of these people found it easy, and most had tried for years first.
Names and identifying details are changed, and now and then two people's stories are combined to protect them. The patterns are real.
One story at a time.
You'll hear from me most days, for as long as you find the stories worth reading. You can reply to any of them and I'll read it myself. You can also leave whenever you like, with one click and no hard feelings. Now and then I'll mention how to work with me. Not often, and never in a hurry.
Who's writing. I'm Ian Traynar. I spent thirty years as an osteopath and have been coaching since 2014, mostly with senior people whose patterns travel through the people they lead.
If you already know there's something you want to work on, you don't need to wait for the stories. You can read about the Undercurrent Investigation here.