Overcoming Your Inner Saboteur

With Alex Patient 

and guest host Mike Hickman

How often do you feel that you don’t really belong in your role - your self-evaluation is “I’m just rubbish; my reputation is undeserved; any day now they will find me out. ”Do you still feel this, even in the face of evidence that you really can perform the role you are in? Who is this saboteur who is seeking to undermine you? What does it say, feel like or look like? What name do you give it?

Alex Patient formerly led the Performance Insight Division at Nat West. He describes himself in that role as “feeling a fraud everyday.” Two years ago he began his own business as a coach to individuals and groups, a leadership trainer and facilitator. Alex works mainly with analytically minded people in middle and senior management. 

Drawing on his own experience as an analyst and manager, and from his practice as a coach, Alex describes the lived experience of imposter-like feelings including:

• Why “imposters” seek to hide what’s really going on under the surface.
• How wanting to show that he always had “all the answers” made him a less effective leader.
• The false idea that reaching out for help is weakness.
• How liberating and catalysing it is for a senior leader to say “I don’t know.” 

Whilst we explore some of the social, family and structural factors that contribute to people experiencing imposter-like feelings, Alex is clear that more important than understanding the drivers to imposterism is what we do about it. With that in mind, Alex goes on to describe strategies for dealing with these inhibitors including:

• Replacing a default attitude of being defensive with one of being curious.
• Using his coaching skills to help clients “separate out this imposter-like character from who they really are” to make space for more positive aspects of someone’s character to take the lead.
• How to see, at a granular level, what this internal imposter says about you, using visualisation to form a rounded picture of this saboteur to describing in detail situations in which the saboteur shows up.
• What it’s like to experience coaching around exposing your saboteur and the immediate benefits clients experience in doing it.
• We conclude this podcast with Alex describing an approach he uses to allow him, in real time, to put his inner saboteur in its place, subordinating its power to his inner leader.

Tune in to our next podcast as Alex describes the other aspects of his approach to helping people address their inner saboteurs.

Contact Alex

Find out more about Alex’s work on his website PatientMind.

Contact Alex at [email protected]

You can book a free one hour taster coaching conversation with Alex, and enquire about his other services here.

Community First Yorkshire

We are pleased to welcome back Mike Hickman from Community First Yorkshire as our guest co-presenter.

Community First Yorkshire

About Coaching York and the Podcast

The Coaching York Podcast is curated and edited by Geoff Ashton in support of Coaching York’s mission to extend the reach of coaching, to enable more people to live its benefits.

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