In this video, the speaker (Piers Cross) explores why leaders who attended boarding schools often self‑sabotage when they experience success or heightened pressure. He links this pattern to early conditioning in boarding schools, where children repeatedly witnessed humiliation and were trained to respond with fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. This creates an unconscious thermostat (the "upper‑limit" problem) that pulls them back to a safe, low‑arousal state whenever they exceed a perceived comfort level (e.g., higher income, better relationships). The speaker describes how mirror‑neuron trauma accumulates over years of observing others being shamed, reinforcing a program that equates success with danger. He offers practical ways to interrupt this cycle: recognizing intensity cues (9‑10 indicating deep‑rooted trauma vs. 3‑4 indicating present‑moment issues), using nervous‑system regulation techniques such as mindfulness, breath work, Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), and Havening (touch‑based soothing). He emphasizes staying with uncomfortable feelings rather than acting on them, allowing the window of tolerance to expand and fostering greater joy and sovereignty. The video also promotes an upcoming free, interactive workshop (next Thursday at 6:30 pm via Zoom) where participants will work through exercises, receive a workbook and slides, and practice these regulation tools to reframe self‑sabotaging behaviors.
Chapters
Okay, welcome. So today I want to offer some reflections about self-sabotage from a perspective of leadership, also boarding school. Why is it that as leaders, ex-boarders, we will often self-sabotage? We get so far, and whether that's in relationships work, with health, and then we self-sabotage. And so I just want to talk a little bit about that today. So in, uh, 8 days' time, next Thursday, 6:30, I'll put a link into the description. I'm going to be running, with the help of Chris Braich and a few others, a leadership workshop around self-sabotage. So we did a workshop a couple of months ago about pressure and this idea that under pressure we often will revert back to our early conditioning. And for us who've been to boarding school, that means we'll often go into fight, flight, freeze, fawn. We'll often go into the dissociating. We'll often go into, you know, running away. Um, one of the ways that we deal with pressure is we self-sabotage. So I just wanted to talk a little bit today. So please do come along even if you don't feel you're necessarily a leader. This is a free workshop. It's a common thing that we do as ex-boarders. And while this is particularly relevant for me as a coach is that quite a few of my clients at the moment are going through quite stressful periods and they are noticing that there is an urge to self-sabotage. And all, all of my clients at the moment are ex-boarders, so I just wanted to talk a little bit about some of the science behind it And, you know, just some ideas here. So Gay Hendricks talks about this idea of the upper limit problem, and the upper limit problem is that once we start to succeed, once we start to, you know, do well, It's almost like we've got the thermostat set at 18 degrees centigrade, and as soon as it goes to 19, it shuts off. So that's the same often in success, is that we're doing well, but suddenly our income increases, or the relationship's doing really well. We've gone above that pattern, we've gone above that, that 18 degrees, we've gone up there, 19, 20. What happens? In a thermostat is the cooling system kicks in and it goes down to 18 again. And that's often what I see with my clients is that, you know, they're doing okay. And I think partly a boarding school thing is this idea of a flatline where we stay at 18. We're really uncomfortable, we go up to 19, really uncomfortable, we go down to 17. And we'll do everything to try and keep ourselves in that same space. Why is that? It's because if you went up into excitement, what happened? You got shamed, you were laughed at, you know, say your football team won, you're like, yeah, or you're, you know, you did really well and they're like, shut up, you, it's like people brought you down to earth. If you got too depressed, too angry, too sad, or cried, it was like, You are laughed at, you are humiliated. So if that didn't necessarily happen to you, this idea of mirror neurons, well, it's happening to those around you. I was talking to a client yesterday who's saying they were there, say, 7 years at boarding school, and it was like probably every day they saw someone being humiliated, somebody who went outside of that window of tolerance, Who was in some way shamed. And I was saying to him that the brain receives more pain than the person receiving that beating or that pain or that humiliation. So we watching, we receive that. So if you think that's happened, if you're there 7 years and maybe you're there in the school 250 days a year, you're talking 1,500+ times that this has happened. So it's a system, it's an unconscious program that's running inside. So when life starts to go well, maybe we've got this amazing deal we're doing and it's potential of, you know, really, you know, bringing in a lot of money, or maybe it's in a wonderful relationship and it's going really well. Suddenly, the default pattern comes in, and it kicks in, and it goes, you know, and it's all to do with safety, really. It's like, this is dangerous. We go outside of that norm, it's, this is dangerous. And so, the heating system goes, kicks on if it goes low, or the cooling system kicks in. And for us, that means... We'll do some of the following. You know, it might be we shut down emotionally. If we're getting too close to someone, we put the wall up. We'll say something rude. We'll feel irritated around them. Now, the thing is, and this is kind of partly the solution, is it's okay to feel irritated. It's just not okay for us to act upon it. It's to feel that, to anchor back into the body, feel that, feel irritated. That's okay. What I was saying to a client last week, and I was kind of really resonating with this myself, is, you know, if you have an issue and it feels a 9 or a 10 in intensity, 9 or 10 in intensity out of 10, That is a sure sign that it's something to do with earlier in your life, whether that's early adulthood or early childhood. If it's a 3 or 4 in intensity, in my opinion, well, that's present moment. Okay. And it's— I've talked about this idea before, it's like the iceberg. In the present moment, the issue happens, you know, you're doing quite well. But it's happened so many times that it feels like this huge immovable object. But in the moment, it's just a small piece of ice on the surface. It's just attached to all of this weight. And so one of the things we can do is mindfulness. We can breathe, and it might be we tap. I do the EFT. Might be the Havening. Which is just stroking from the top of the shoulders down to the bottom, and it's just regulating the nervous system. Again, touch, you know, Havening has 3 different parts: stroking the hands and also the face. This has been scientifically proven Proven just to calm the nervous system down, so we might do one of these. So this is just kind of some of the ideas here is you know this is why we self sabotage is that it's like we've learned that it wasn't safe, it was dangerous to you know because I think often when we We've we've got something that is it's new. It's like might be a new deal, new relationship, changing your health. You know, one of the things is it's uncertainty. It might be a lack of emotional security. It might be insecurity there. Might be a lack of control. Might be some fear. And in our nervous systems as ex-borders. That basically tells us it's dangerous, and this is— that's not good, uncertainty. And so what we will do is one of our nervous system responses will come in. So it'll be— it might be dissociate, you know, it might be perfectionism, it might be workaholism, might be being hyper-independent. You know, and a lot of these, when we are wanting to succeed or we're wanting to, you know, to follow through on something, we need help, we need support, we need to let go of control, trust other people, but as ex-boarders, we've learned actually control keeps me safe, being hypervigilant, and doing all the things on my own, it keeps me safe. You know, emotion is unsafe, and so we sabotage, we sabotage these things. So next week, what we're going to do is we're going to work through some exercises. What are some of the ways that you self-sabotage, and some of the ways that you can start to To reframe these, and to go, oh, this is a new way of dealing with it. So I think one of the things that I found really helpful with something like self-sabotage is just regulating the nervous system. That it's gone into the fight flight freeze form. It's like. It might be just to breathe. I want to react, I want to say this thing, and it's like, no, no, I'm just gonna sit here, be with this, not gonna go anywhere, not gonna run away from this, not gonna deny this. Now you're gonna face this. And if it is a 9 or a 10 in intensity, know that it's nothing to do with the present moment. It's about childhood, it's about early adulthood. Earlier times in your life. And by staying with it, it starts like a coil starts to unwind, and you realize, I could sabotage this, but actually I could just sit, go for a walk, feel better, and actually keep on with the path. And, you know, I certainly found that with the documentary. It's— I could have quite easily sabotaged. Same with the work I do with the podcast. It's like, there's times when it's tough, been tough, and it's like just wanting to give up. And actually, it's no, no, feel, grieve, whatever I need to process, stay with it. And then, like the river, it moves. And what happens is that window of tolerance it opens. The more you do it, it opens more. And the flip side is you might feel more grief, but you feel more joy. That was one of the things Joy Sharerian says in my interview with her, or, you know, whether that was the one we did in London with her. And it just starts to open. We become more— life can flow through us. We can move into more joy. I was speaking to a client this morning who's saying, I've just got so much energy now. It's lovely to see. And it's like standing in his sovereignty. So yeah, so please do come along to this webinar and come and join us. And you know, it's at Eventbrite that you can log on. It'll be on Zoom, and through doing that you'll get the workbook, you'll get the slides. And yeah, it's about an hour and a quarter. We'll be We'll be doing it, and it— the way I will be running it, it's more like a workshop. It's not going to be just a lecture. You'll actually be, you know, you can print up the workbook, you can actually do the exercise, so it will be helping you to change and to start to move this around. So yeah, if you have any questions, please do let me know. And yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much for your kind words, your support, and yeah, maybe please reflect any examples that you've sabotaged yourself, and maybe it's relationship, work, or something like that. And yeah, I'd love to hear your stories, and thank you for your courage and sharing. Okay, take care.
