For twenty years she introduced herself as someone who hates selling. She’s brilliant at her actual work, and she was sure this was simply how she was wired... something she’d be managing forever.
On a call recently, we followed that feeling instead of just accepting it. I asked her body where “I don’t want to do this” actually lives, and we traced it back, past the business, past every job she’d ever had, to a kid picking up phone calls that should never have landed on her.
What happened on those calls was traumatizing and tender, so I won’t share details to protect my client’s privacy, but it was serious enough to file in her mind as phone = danger.
So every discovery call, every follow-up, every coach who ever told her to just pick up the phone and ask for the sale lit up an alarm that got installed decades before she had anything to sell. Her system was doing its job perfectly. It was just protecting her from 1989.
We dissolved the loop. And what she said afterwards got me:
“Now I can figure out whether I even like sales... instead of whether I can survive the phone.”
Then we asked the younger version of her, the one who’d spent all those years bracing at every ring, what she wanted to do now. She just wanted to call her friends for fun.
Twelve years of this work, and that part still gets me every time.
The patterns running your business decisions are rarely about your business.
💜 Abi