Decoding a fail strategy for the Sugar Empire

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Victoria, 32, is a business lady. She owns a waxing salon chain. She also manufactures and sells her own hygienic sugar paste brand for professional sugaring.

When we first met for a management consulting session, her face looked like frozen earth – it was white and tense. Every now and then, she kept her eyes on one point for a long time, although there was nothing to look at there.

Victoria was evidently in chronic stress, but her request to me was not about stress. It was about making even more money…

The Process

I got interested, because I had just started using a specific methodology to decode success algorithms. My mission was to help Victoria understand the way she created her successful business projects before, and then repeat that.

Half an hour into the process, I noticed that all the success stories from her past were actually failure stories (or stress induction stories). I.e., success was only an interim point on the path of her typical algorithm, but it was always followed by a devastating crisis.

I went deeper into the roots of this algorithm to understand the way it was connected to her childhood experience. This gave me access to the universal triggers behind her seductive failure algorithm. Every time, Victoria got seduced by opportunities, found incredible ways to use those opportunities, but in the process she was planting explosives of mistrust and excessive control in the building of her success. Every time, she reveled in her achievement for a month, and then – for reasons she had no idea about – the whole structure got ruined again. In fact, she did it herself, but was never aware about the way she did it.

When I explained what I revealed to her, it was a catharsis. I saw her face change its color in minutes. Victoria was coming back to life – in an emotional sense. I kept explaining (in simple words) the particular psycho-emotional mechanisms behind the process, – but in fact she didn’t need that. She already got it all. Her problem was in the very foundation of her thinking – in the way she thought about success. To her, success was a tool to prove others are only there to take advantage of her.

The transformation

What I had left to do was two things:

1. Train her a different way of sorting things out with the world (i.e. stop proving the world it always uses her);
2. Train her a new algorithm that ends with success instead of going all the way down to failure.

The former turned out simpler. We created a perception frame we called “taking advantage of each other”, i.e. explaining to herself that even if the world is using her, she also uses it in response. In addition, she decided to use one sports simulator at her gym as a metaphor of the “advantage taker” and win over it regularly.

The latter was harder because of the lack of motivation. Victoria needed a different reason to achieve success (or else a different definition of success).

The trick here – and many coaches fall victims of their own bias here – is that we are not there to “empower success” in a commercial sense. If this were the actual goal, people would find their own ways to do it.

Instead, a coach is there to enhance harmony between different aspects of the client’s value system. Commercial success based on a harmonious personality is beneficial for the world and for the achiever. On the contrary, success based on a distorted personality leads to catastrophe.

Together with Victoria, we found the value to dedicate more resources to, and it essentially became her new reason for success.

The outcomes

Our work with Victoria lasted for a week and took about 8 hours in three sessions (the first one lasted 5 hours).

During our third session, I did a transformation validation, i.e. I made sure her motivations have actually changed, and her algorithm now leads to a success that is not followed by a failure.

As a field validation, we launched a joint mini-training based on the positive elements of her algorithm. Her younger colleagues in the industry were genuinely happy to learn her secrets of scaling, promotion, and delegation.

Victoria now owns a cosmetology school and organizes the biggest sugaring contests in her country.

Our main achievements in this business psychology service case:

• Stress relief without a direct request;
• Decoding the failure algorithm with the success algorithm methodology;
• Ecological transformation: instead of breaking the old algo, we built a new one based on a better goal setting.

Almost in no time we have thoroughly analyzed the business and mind strategies that have systematically produced the results I and my company have been observing for years. The tools you have developed and provided to us to improve efficiency keep yielding positive changes.