As Jim and I delved into the SuccessEsteem coaching program we began to uncover the source of his self-sabotage behaviors. Jim was born in the early 1960s and at that time, it was common practice for the mother of the family to be a full time mother and not work outside the home. Also, at that time, it was typical for the father of the family to work for one company for 20 to 30 years and then retire at age 65. And this was exactly the picture of Jim's family. So as Jim moved into his adulthood he fell in love with and married a woman who wanted a family, but also wanted a career outside the home. Jim wasn't equipped to deal with sharing the daily family responsibilities of cooking, cleaning, taking care of the children, etc., and these differences of opinion ultimately caused his marriage to end in divorce.

Jim also shared with me that he did not like his chosen field of accounting and was very unhappy in his job. The thought of working in this job for 20 to 30 years made him feel physically sick, but he believed that it was his obligation to stay with the job and career in which he had already invested so much time and energy.

Jim had based his entire self-motivation system on an out-of-date lifestyle that was unrealistic for the twenty-first century. Jim constantly compared his actual life to the mental image he had of his ideal "1960s" life and always came up short.

I worked with Jim to create a more updated and effective mental image of his ideal life and helped him create new and more effective ways of measuring his success, but there was also forgiveness work to be done.

For Jim, it was all about forgiving himself! He had secretly resented himself for not being able to live up to his previous internal picture of what a marriage and family "should" look like and he berated and scolded himself on a regular basis and saw himself as a failure.

Forgiveness work is recognized worldwide as an amazing healing power!