The wellness industry is booming, and honestly, I love to see it. My Instagram feed is a montage of matcha. Pilates classes. Sound baths. Green juice and cute gym outfits. We are doing it all. Supplement collections you could open a stall with. Facials, yoga, padel and a sleep score that decides the day. No generation before us has invested so much in how we look and feel. But the mind is often the last place we invest.
And that matters, because your mind governs every area of your life: your relationships, your family, your career and even your physical health.
When clients sit down in my chair, they often bring a long list. Anxiety. Burnout. Resentment towards a boss after years of people-pleasing. Habits they can’t break. For many, it’s the first time they’ve connected what is happening in their life with what is happening in their mind.
After more than ten years studying the mind and working with clients in private practice, there is one thing I know to be true: our self-sabotaging behaviours, limiting beliefs and fears are not personality flaws. They are coping mechanisms, adaptations often learned in childhood to keep us safe. Left unexplored, they become the barriers between us and the life we want, and they quietly block our success and our wellbeing.
As an idea often attributed to Carl Jung puts it: until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our lives, and we will call it fate.
I once worked with a client I’ll call Emma. She wanted to become a Pilates instructor. She had enrolled on the course and paid the fees. And yet every time she sat down to study, she found something else to do. When she was offered the chance to teach a class, fear and anxiety overwhelmed her, and she found a reason to say no. The night before her exam, she went out and drank until the early hours.
“I want this so badly,” she told me. “So why do I keep ruining it?”
In an RTT (rapid transformational therapy) session, an approach that draws on hypnotherapy, we explored what was happening in her subconscious mind and traced the pattern back to a classroom when she was ten years old. As a child with ADHD, Emma had struggled to read aloud in front of her class and was constantly criticised by her teachers. She left school carrying a limiting belief: I’m not good enough. I’m not a good student. Standing at the front of a studio, being watched and assessed, felt exactly like being that little girl again. Her procrastination was serving an unconscious purpose: protecting her from being seen to fail.
Together, we reframed that old belief and used visualisation to connect her with her future self: confident, capable and teaching in some of the most beautiful studios in London. She rehearsed that identity until it felt familiar, and her mind no longer treated it as a threat.
Twelve months on, Emma is teaching in some of London’s most beautiful Pilates studios and living the matcha and Pilates dream.
Self-sabotage is one of the most common themes I see in my practice. The business idea we talk ourselves out of. The relationship we push away just as it gets close. Self-sabotage isn’t a way of hurting ourselves; it’s a way of trying to protect ourselves. The question is, from what?
Self-sabotage isn’t a way of hurting ourselves; it’s a way of trying to protect ourselves.
In my chair: your self-sabotage audit
If you were sitting with me now, I would ask you to bring one problem. Something you keep trying to change, but somehow never do. Then I’d ask you these questions. Take a pen and answer them honestly.
What do you really want? Be specific.
What do you find yourself doing instead? Procrastinating, overcommitting, picking a fight, reaching for your phone.
What does that behaviour give you in the moment? Relief, control, comfort, a way out?
What are you afraid would happen if you got what you wanted? This is often where the answer lives.
What would you need to believe about yourself to let that change happen?
Once you have your answers
Read back what you’ve written. As you do, remember:
Your patterns are protecting you, not punishing you. Every one of them is meeting a need. Ask what that need is, and how you might meet it in other ways.
Your fear is rarely about the thing itself. The fear of the exam may really be a fear of being seen. Look beneath the surface.
Familiar will always feel safer. The mind is drawn to what it knows, even when it hurts. Discomfort is often a sign that you’re growing, not that you’re wrong.
You may have to outgrow who you’ve been. The life you want might ask you to become someone new, and that is allowed.
Then choose one small step and take it this week. Don’t wait to feel ready; confidence follows action. And if something surfaces that feels too big to hold alone, take it as a sign it deserves deeper support.
So book the reformer class. Order the matcha. Check your sleep score. But this month, make one appointment with your mind. It may be the one investment that changes everything else.
Danielle Parkinson MSc is a mind consultant. From her private practice in Cheshire, she blends integrative therapy and coaching with the latest psychology and neuroscience-informed tools to help clients overcome the mental blocks holding them back. thecheshiremindconsultant.co.uk · Instagram: @the_cheshire_mind_consultant
