How One Coach Transformed Her Relationship With Self-Image Reconstruction

This is a composite story drawn from patterns across many practitioners doing self-image reconstruction work. The specific details are illustrative; the arc is real.

Miriam had been a leadership coach for eleven years when she started to notice that something wasn’t adding up. Her clients’ results were strong — genuinely strong, the kind that produced referrals without her ever asking for them. Her peer colleagues regularly charged rates 40% to 60% higher than hers for comparable work. And yet when she reviewed her calendar each quarter, she’d raise her rate, then find a reason to hold the increase for “this client” and then the next, until the year ended with her rates essentially unchanged.

She’d done significant personal development work. She had a therapist she trusted. She’d been through several coaching certifications and had done the mindset modules in each. She understood her pattern intellectually in significant detail. What she couldn’t figure out was why the understanding wasn’t changing the behavior.

The Pattern Recognition

The moment that shifted things for Miriam wasn’t dramatic. She was reviewing notes from a client session — a session where a client had described a transformation that Miriam had helped facilitate — and she noticed something happen in her body as she read. A brief constriction. A slight pulling-back.

She’d been tracking somatic responses as part of her own practice, so the noticing was available to her in a way it hadn’t been years earlier. And what she noticed, with some surprise, was that reading her own client’s positive account of the work they’d done together produced a subtle threat response rather than simple satisfaction.

She stayed with that observation for a few days before it yielded its content: the client’s description of transformation required Miriam to claim, at least internally, that she had been the author of something genuinely significant. And something in Miriam’s nervous system treated that claiming as threatening even in the absence of any external witness.

The Childhood Connection

Miriam’s family history wasn’t dramatically difficult. Both parents were present and loving. But her mother’s depression had created a household where emotional weight was distributed unevenly — where Miriam, the older of two children, had learned to be the stable one, the competent one, the one who didn’t add more difficulty to a household that already had enough.

Being the stable one meant not claiming. Not claiming needs, not claiming recognition, not claiming too much space. The competence was real and praised; the claiming of the competence was subtly discouraged. Miriam had learned to produce excellent results while keeping a specific posture: humble, slightly smaller than the results, always attributing the success to the client rather than to her own work.

This posture was wise in the original context. It had allowed Miriam to be seen as helpful rather than as a burden. In her adult coaching practice, it had become the mechanism through which her rates stayed at 2015 levels in 2025.

The Behavioral Turn

What Miriam did next was simple and felt significant: she designed one specific behavioral commitment for the following week. She would quote her full intended rate — the rate she’d been holding as “maybe next year” — in the next new client conversation, without any of the preemptive accommodations she usually offered.

The conversation happened. The client accepted the rate without negotiation. Miriam’s dominant somatic response was not triumph — it was a complicated mixture of relief and something that felt almost like disorientation. The thing she’d been predicting would be difficult had been, entirely, not difficult.

She logged the evidence. The next new client conversation, she quoted the same rate. Accepted. The third, the same. By the fifth, the rate was simply what she charged.

What Changed — and What Didn’t

Six months after that first behavioral commitment, Miriam’s rates were substantially higher. Her client roster had evolved — some older clients at older rates had transitioned away, replaced by clients at new rates. The transition had been less disrupting than she’d anticipated.

What hadn’t changed: the somatic response in certain types of conversations. The brief constriction still arrived in high-stakes claiming moments. The self-concept still generated the occasional “this client is going to ask for a discount” prediction before those conversations.

What had changed: the constriction was smaller, recovered faster, and no longer produced the behavioral accommodation it used to produce automatically. The prediction arrived and was noted as a prediction — “there’s the old template running” — rather than acted on.

Miriam described it as having developed a working relationship with the pattern rather than having eliminated it. The pattern was still there. She was no longer run by it in the same way.

The Community Dimension

The piece Miriam identified as most surprising in retrospect was the role of her peer community. She’d expected the behavioral practice to do most of the work — and it had done significant work. What she hadn’t expected was how much of the internal shift happened through the experience of claiming in the community and having the claiming met with genuine engagement rather than withdrawal.

“It was one thing to know intellectually that my work was worth the rate,” she said later. “It was a different thing to claim it in front of peers who knew me and have them nod and say ‘yes, that’s right.’ Something in me that had been waiting for that permission for years finally got some version of it.”

The self-image reconstruction, for Miriam, was a three-part project: the behavioral practice that gathered evidence, the community that provided the relational permission she’d been waiting for, and the somatic work that allowed the evidence to register in her body rather than being filtered out immediately.

The Abundance GPS Skool community is where this three-part project happens for practitioners at Miriam’s stage — and every stage. Come take a look.