You already understand the pattern.
And it's still there.
You can see it happening. Sometimes you can even predict exactly how you'll respond.
You've thought about it, perhaps talked about it, and tried to change it. Yet when the familiar situation arrives, something in you responds in the same old way.
What if the problem isn't a lack of understanding?
What if there's something about the way you see yourself, or what you believe must be true, that you haven't yet been able to see?
That's where our work begins.
And if you can't yet put a name to it, only a sense that something keeps getting in the way, that's a good place to start too.
Understanding hasn't been enough
I work with people whose patterns don't stay private: senior leaders whose habits shape the people around them, those in Christian leadership, and coaches and counsellors whose work depends on seeing clearly. Most of them are very good at what they do. Many have explored their childhood, read the books and tried the techniques, and can explain why they do what they do more clearly than I could.
That explanation is worth having, but it hasn't changed what happens when a senior colleague looks disappointed, or when a decision has to be made and the evidence won't settle. You know where the pattern came from. What you haven't yet been able to see is what keeps it running now.
Something you believe about yourself is holding it in place
A senior leader came to me because he couldn't make an important decision. He had all the information he needed. The arguments on both sides were reasonable, and he'd been through them many times, with colleagues and on his own at two in the morning. More analysis wasn't helping, and he was beginning to wonder whether he'd lost his nerve.
I asked him what a responsible person does before a decision like this. He answered quickly, as though it were obvious: a responsible person doesn't move until they can see how it turns out.
Once that was said out loud, the paralysis made complete sense. Nobody can see how an important decision turns out before they make it. He had set himself a condition for acting that could never be met, and he'd been experiencing the result as indecision. We stopped asking why he couldn't decide and started asking when being responsible had come to mean being certain. That was a very different problem to work on, and a far more useful one.
Patterns like this are rarely irrational. The manager who can't delegate may believe that being responsible means personally preventing every mistake. The person who keeps seeking approval may experience disagreement as a threat to belonging. These are possibilities, not diagnoses, and the actual belief will be different for each person. What they share is that the belief feels less like a belief than a plain fact about who you are, which is why it so rarely gets questioned.
You can't examine an assumption you don't know you're making.
I tell several more of these stories in full, over a short series of emails. If you'd like to read them before deciding anything, you can find them here.
That belief can be found, tested and changed
The Traynar Method™: change at source.
My work begins with one question: what makes this response necessary to you? Its history may matter, but knowing where something came from doesn't necessarily tell us what's keeping it in place today.
I listen closely to the words you use and to the places where your account of the problem doesn't quite fit. I watch as well as listen, because people often show me something has landed before they're ready to say so. We're looking for something that holds up when we test it against your own experience. Once we find it, we examine whether it's still true, where it applies and where it doesn't, and what it may have been protecting. Sometimes that changes how a situation feels almost immediately. Sometimes it brings competing intentions into view that need more work.
Not everyone arrives knowing what the problem is. Sometimes someone you trust has suggested we meet, and you're successful by most external measures but something doesn't feel quite right. That's a perfectly good place to begin. We might start with what matters to you and the qualities you already recognise in yourself, and that usually shows us what deserves attention.
Either way, the aim is the same. I'm not trying to give you a better way of fighting yourself. I want to change what makes the old response seem necessary in the first place.
Meet Ian Traynar
Before I coached anyone, I spent thirty years as an osteopath, much of it with people who came in about one thing and turned out to be dealing with something rather different. The place that hurt wasn't always where the trouble started, and it took me longer than I'd like to admit to learn just how misleading the obvious can be.
I've been coaching since 2014, mostly with people who are very good at what they do and have run out of patience with one particular thing about how they do it. My work also includes Spiritual Direction, where listening carefully to what someone is experiencing matters rather more than arriving with an answer. I listen for small things, like the word someone keeps coming back to, or a conclusion they've reached about themselves without noticing they reached it. When something doesn't add up, I'll say so, and I would much rather you argued with me than agreed to be polite. I can be wrong, and finding out where is often useful.
What I won't do is nod sympathetically while you explain a problem you've already explained to yourself a hundred times. You know that explanation well by now. I'm more interested in what it's been leaving out.
Start here: The Undercurrent Investigation
Bring the thing that matters most.
This is 75 minutes of real coaching, and I'll coach you exactly as I would someone I've worked with for months. I won't spend it finding out whether you're a good fit, and I won't explain my method. You'll find out how I work by being on the receiving end of it.
Come with whatever has resisted everything you've thrown at it, or the sense that something is in the way that you can't yet name. I'll be direct with you from the start. If the story you tell me about the problem has a gap in it, I'll point to the gap. If you're asking the wrong question, I'll say so and ask a better one. I'll do it with care, but I won't soften it into something you can comfortably agree with and forget by the evening. Push back if I'm wrong.
If what you want is reassurance, or a pleasant hour talking things through, I'm probably not the right person, and you'd do better to keep your $299. If you want someone to look hard at the thing you've stopped looking at, book the session.
Before we meet, sit with one of these questions. What have you been telling people about this problem that isn't quite the whole truth? Or, if you'd rather, what would have to be different by the end of our conversation for it to have been worth four times what you paid? You don't need to send me your answer. Just bring it with you.
Afterwards, we'll talk honestly about whether going further makes sense, and if I think something else would serve you better, I'll tell you that too.
If we go further: The Undercurrent
The Undercurrent is 12 weeks of private coaching, which is long enough to do one piece of work properly. Once we've identified what we're working on, you'll describe it in your own words: where the difficulty shows up, what usually happens, and what you'd notice if something had genuinely changed. We come back to that description as the work goes on.
I'm not particularly interested in whether you leave a session feeling clearer. I'm interested in what happens the next time the old situation arrives. Perhaps you make the decision without the hours of rehearsal, or disagree with someone important without it feeling like a threat to the relationship. Perhaps the change is something nobody else would notice that matters a great deal to you. I can't promise when a shift will come or what form it will take. What I can promise is that we'll do the work carefully and honestly, and keep testing it against your actual life.
We meet weekly for 60 to 90 minutes, online. Between sessions you can reach me by voice note, WhatsApp or email, because a pattern that shows up on a Tuesday is often more useful than anything we could plan.
What happens at the end of 12 weeks is something we decide together. For some people that's the end of the work, and a good one. Some carry on for another 12 weeks. Others step away, stay in touch through my newsletter and emails, and come back when something new comes into view. None of that needs deciding now.
When this isn't the right work
This isn't the right place to start if something has just happened and what you need is time, support and somewhere safe to take it. It also isn't the right work for addiction, or for a condition that needs clinical care. If I think that's what is in front of us, I'll tell you, and where I can, help you find someone better placed.
Your investment
The Undercurrent Investigation: $299
One private coaching session of up to 75 minutes. If we both decide to continue into The Undercurrent, the $299 comes off your first payment.
The Undercurrent: $4,000 for 12 weeks
Pay in full, or in three monthly instalments of $1,334.
The next step
You don't need another explanation of why you're stuck. You need a chance to see what you haven't yet seen.
Bring the problem you've been living with, or the uncomfortable suspicion that something important is happening beneath the surface, and I'll bring my full attention and a willingness to challenge what needs challenging.
Book The Undercurrent Investigation
If someone who knows my work suggested you get in touch, or you'd like to meet me before deciding anything, write to me directly and we'll find a short time to talk.
And if you're not ready for either yet, that's fine. You can read the stories first, and come back when it feels right.