I had a coaching call recently that I felt was better to share the transcription rather than writing about it. Sometimes the real conversation lands harder than any explanation I could give you.
Client: “I don’t understand why I keep doing this. It’s stupid.”
Me: “What’s stupid?”
Client: “I wake up at three thirty every morning. Work until seven at night. Seven days a week. I’ve been doing this for thirty years. I have a team now. I have assistants. I’ve tried delegating, time-blocking, all of it. Nothing works. I just fill the space right back up with more work.”
Me: “When did this start?”
Client: “College. I was working three jobs, commuting fifty minutes each way just to afford tuition. I thought it would end after I graduated. But it never did.”
Me: “What would have happened if you hadn’t worked that hard back then?”
Client: pause “I wouldn’t have made it. There was no one helping me. I had to do it myself or it wasn’t getting done.”
Me: “Right. So you did. And you survived. And then you kept doing it for three more decades. You’re being too mean to yourself. I just want you to accept that this isn’t stupid. This was survival. You’re working through the automated armor you built to protect and provide for yourself because you didn’t have anybody doing it fucking for you.”
Client: “Wow. That’s a big sentence. I literally felt a jolt in my whole body on that.”
Me: “This is what I mean by automated armor. It’s not a character flaw. It’s a protection pattern you developed when you actually needed it. The problem is your system doesn’t know the threat is gone. So it keeps running the same program.
Here’s the thing about survival patterns. They work. That’s why they stick around. Working yourself into the ground in college kept you fed and enrolled. Controlling everything you could as a kid in a chaotic house kept you safe. Being hyper-responsible earned you praise and belonging.
Your nervous system remembers this. It doesn’t care that you have money in the bank now or that your team is solid or that you could take a day off without the world ending. It just knows that this behavior kept you alive once, so it’s not taking any chances.
And then you judge yourself for it. You call yourself stupid or broken or weak because you can’t just stop. But that judgment is just creating a second layer of resistance. Now you’re fighting the pattern and fighting yourself for having the pattern.
The irony is that the same patterns that got you here are now the ones keeping you stuck. The armor that protected you is starting to feel like a cage.
But you can’t take off armor you can’t see. And you definitely can’t take it off by beating yourself up for wearing it.”
It was an enlightening conversation for her, and I trust that it’s doing the same for you. So here’s what I want you to sit with this week. What pattern keeps showing up in your life that you’ve been calling a problem? What behavior do you keep judging yourself for that maybe, just maybe, was survival at some point? What armor are you wearing that you can’t see?
Take a minute. Get quiet. Ask yourself what you built to protect yourself that you’re still carrying around.
live freed,
Jordan
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