When stress hits, old defenses take over – overexplaining, people-pleasing, perfectionism, interrupting, even going silent and shutting down. The APPs MAP helps leaders understand these patterns and begin the inner work to reclaim calm, confidence, and choice so they can show up authentically and powerfully.
Facing and Embracing the Parts of Yourself You’d Rather Not See to Restore Wholeness, Confidence and Resilience
Ever cringe at someone’s weakness or beat yourself up for feeling “pathetic”? Jung called it the Shadow. Parts Work calls them Exiles. Facing them can feel unbearable — but it’s also the path back to real confidence, resilience, and wholeness. Through a fictional coaching conversation and the story of a sprout rising from ashes, you’ll see how even the parts you most resist can open the way to growth.
Imagine a compass guiding you in life, not just to “survive” but to live deeply, meaningfully, and resiliently. The HeartRich Resilience Compass is designed with nine interconnected facets, each representing an area of your inner world and a suite of principles and processes or skillsets we can learn.
When you learn to turn these ‘Dials of Influence’ from the negative, destructive side toward the positive, life-affirming side, you begin to embody your truest self. You no longer react out of fear, avoidance, or survival; instead, you consciously choose your responses, acting with intention, clarity, and heart.
Is Stress Changing Who You Are? It’s highly likely that the toll of chronic stress is silently reshaping you, and without understanding how to manage it, the risks to your wellbeing, family life, and leadership effectiveness are only growing.
I would like to share a model to help explain what might be happening, from a neurophysiological perspective, called the Window of Tolerance.
“In the relentless pursuit of success, many high-achieving executives wear their burnout as a badge of honor, not realizing it’s a complex condition that can be rooted in trauma, as well as cause it.”
At the heart of this issue lies the High Achiever’s Dilemma: being in perpetual pursuit of achievement, while continuously increasing one’s standards and expectations of themselves, and no matter what they achieve and accomplish, they never feel “I am enough”. There is a void where there should be a natural sense of worth, self worth and ‘Good Enoughness’
