E185: The Subconscious Basement (and Why I Take You There Anyway)

Most leaders I meet do not have a competence problem. They have a pressure problem and it is being powered by something older, quieter, and more persuasive than any plan on your calendar. When you keep telling yourself to delegate more, speak up more, or get more strategic, but nothing truly changes, it may be because you are trying to fix the main floor while the basement runs the house.

I walk you into what I call the subconscious basement: the part of the subconscious mind that stores what feels safe, what feels risky, and who you believe you need to be to stay okay. We unpack how outdated beliefs can show up as micromanaging, overexplaining, holding back in meetings, or driving yourself and your team at a cost you cannot sustain. You will hear concrete leadership examples, plus the key insight that hits hard: the very behaviours you use for safety can create the overwhelm, low accountability, or invisibility you are trying to escape.

We also dig into the saboteur framework and why I listen for the protector behind the pattern. That controller or hyperachiever is not a flaw, it is protection and once you see what it is trying to prevent, you can finally choose a new response. I share how my free saboteur discovery session works (book yours here), and learn about how deeper intuitive, somatic-style guidance can help you meet fear without getting swallowed by it, so your intuition sharpens and your decisions get clean. 

If you want leadership that creates results without burning you out, press play, share this with a leader who feels stuck, and subscribe, rate, and review so more people can find the work. What do you suspect is in your basement?

Transcript

Welcome And What We Do Here

Cynthia Jamieson 0:05

Welcome to Uncharted and Unfiltered, The Journey Back to You. I am Cynthia Jameson, your host, and this is where we break free from the noise and dive deep into what truly matters. You. If you're tired of the shoulds, the expectations, and the pressures to fit into a mold that doesn't serve you, you're in the right place. This isn't a podcast about easy answers or sugar-coated advice. This is your invitation to reclaim your path, embrace the unknown, and become the bold, unapologetic version of yourself that's been waiting to show up. It's time to get unfiltered. Let's get started. Hello, hello, hello, hello, and welcome. If you are new to me and my work, welcome, welcome. I am really glad that you found your way in to my corner of the internet. And if you have been here for a while, welcome back. It is so good to have you here with me again. Wherever you are listening from today, whether it's out for a walk, in your car, or just taking a few minutes to yourself, I'm really glad you're here. This is a space where we have honest conversations about leadership and not just what it looks like under the surface, we go underneath that to the patterns, the pressure, the things that don't always get said out loud, but shape how we show up every single day. And my intention every time I record one of these episodes is that you leave with something that helps you see yourself a little more clearly and encourages you to think about your leadership and your life a little differently. And I've been super excited to record this episode for you today because there is something that I do in almost every coaching call. And I wanted to share it with you because it is one of those moments that changes everything. So, what is it that I do? I invite people into what I call the subconscious basement. And when I talk about the subconscious basement, there's actually real science behind it because the subconscious mind is simply the part of you that is operating outside of your conscious awareness, but influencing how you think, how you feel, and how you lead. It is where your brain has stored what's safe, what's not safe, who you need to be in order for you to stay okay. And the thing is, your brain doesn't update that automatically. So you can be in a completely different stage of your life with more experience, more capability, more awareness, and still be reacting to something that you've learned and experienced years ago. And here's what I know to be true. For most of the leaders that I work with, it is the first time that they've ever explored or given voice to the subconscious basement out loud. The fears, the thoughts that are underneath that, what's deeper than that, the things that they have been organizing their lives around, not because they're not self-aware, but because they have been conditioned not to go there. We have been taught to stay upstairs, to manage, to perform, to lead, to optimize, but no one teaches you how to go downstairs and actually look at what's running the house. And to be fair, you can build a pretty successful life up there. Or and even though that's true, you can build a pretty successful life up there, it doesn't always feel the way that you thought it would. Now, because staying upstairs sounds nice in theory, it's important to really understand your subconscious isn't trying to hold you back. Many of us think that is the case, but in actual fact, what's happening is it's trying to keep you safe because that's its job and it's operating based on outdated information. So let me share some examples with you because it shows up in very specific ways. And as I share, you might recognize yourself in some of them. That's okay, it's not a problem, that's the whole purpose. Maybe not the exact situation, but the pattern underneath it. So I will give you an example. I worked with a VP of finance recently, and on the surface, this individual is incredibly sharp, strategic, high performing. And upstairs, the conversation sounded like I need to be more strategic. I need to delegate to my team more, I need to focus on creating and developing more executive presence. And all of this is true. But downstairs, the fear was that if I'm not the smartest one in the room, I lose my value. So you can start to see how when that was running in the background, it didn't make this leader feel as though they could do what they needed to do. And somewhere along the way, that got wired in their subconscious mind as if I am not the one who knows, then I am not valuable. That's not strategy, that's meaning. So what happens? They overprepare, they micromanage, they stay in the weeds, not because they lack capability, but because something underneath is saying, don't let go. This is not safe. And none of this is conscious, by the way. No one wakes up and thinks, today feels like a great day to overfunction and burn myself out. And yet, here we are. We can just look around at leaders in rules, in organizations across the globe, and see that to be true. Another client of mine, director of operations, upstairs, sounds like I need my team to step in. I need better accountability. I'm frustrated with the lack of ownership that I see. But downstairs is this belief if I push too hard, they won't like me. So instead, this leader overexplains, softens the message, picks up the work themselves, and the whole time is wondering while they're exhausted. I see this all the time. I had a high potential leader on track for promotion, and upstairs, I want more visibility, I need to speak up more, I want to be seen as a leader. But downstairs, the subconscious programming is what if I say something wrong? And they realize that I don't belong here. There was real fear here. So they stayed quiet. They waited. They didn't put their ideas and their thoughts forward. They held back the very thing that would move them forward. And then, and I thought it would be good to just give you a variety of different types of leaders, there are the senior executives that I work with that have had decades of experience. And upstairs, it sounds like I'm just trying to navigate complexity. There's a lot of pressure right now. But downstairs, if I slow down, everything will fall apart, I will lose control. So they can't have that. So they keep pushing, they keep driving themselves and their people, holding everything together at such a high and incredible cost to themselves. And this is what I mean when I say most leaders don't have a capability problem. They have a pattern underneath that that keeps them operating in overdrive. And every pattern made sense until it didn't. Because at some point you made a decision about what something meant. You've judged it as good or bad, or right or wrong, and we take action from that place, and you've been living from that meaning ever since, even if it's no longer true. And I know this because I lived it. Listen, I was exceptional at staying upstairs. That's why I know you can build a whole life up there, and it's not, you know, high functioning, responsible, the one people would count on, the go-to person who would get it done on a Friday at six o'clock, whatever it took. And underneath, I had my own set of patterns running. I had to get it right, which meant that I spent a lot of energy not trying to not get it wrong, and that I had to hold it together for the team, for the family, for HR, for the community. The way we do one thing is the way we do everything. And for me, what that meant is that letting go wasn't safe. And it looked like leadership and it felt like pressure and it was getting rewarded. So of course it didn't feel like it was safe enough to stop. And when I went downstairs in my subconscious basement, I realized nothing was wrong with me. But I was leading my life from beliefs that were no longer true. So all of that to say, until we go downstairs, you will keep trying to solve an emotional pattern with a strategic solution. And it will never fully land. Another way to say this is just because you put new siding on a house doesn't change the structure or the bones of the house or its foundation. And here's the part most people miss. The very thing that you are doing to stay safe is the thing creating the pressure that you are trying to get out of. The VP who was holding on to everything, they're creating the overwhelm they say they don't want. The director avoiding hard conversations, they're creating the very lack of accountability that is frustrating them. The high potential leader that is staying quiet, they are reinforcing the invisibility they are trying so hard to break out of. And I want to be super clear like this is not a judgment. This is how the human operating system works when it is trying to protect you. That's the loop. Because you are not reacting to what's happening. You are reacting to what you've already decided it means. And it's efficient. It's not effective, but it is very efficient. And it is the self-fulfilling pattern. And you cannot solve that upstairs. And the reason I take my clients there intentionally is because if we don't, you will spend your entire life running from something that you will never actually turn around and face. And you will call it strategy, you will call it leadership, you will say, This is just how it is, or this is even worse, this is who I am. But underneath there's something else running the meeting. And this is why in my work as a coach, I love to work with the saboteur in Sage framework. That's where this framework comes in. Because I'm not just listening for what you're saying, I am listening for which saboteur is running the show. What is it trying to protect? What is it trying to achieve, ascertain, and what is it costing you? And what is it that you're making it mean? That controller, that hyperachiever, that hyper-vigilance part of you that says, stay on top of everything or something will go wrong, and that means I'm a failure. Those are not flaws. They are protection. But protection is outdated, and that will run your leadership and your dreams into the ground. And that is why I have started doing something called the saboteur discovery session, because for most people, before we ever go to the basement, we need to see who's running the house, right? And in that session, in under an hour, which is free, we are not trying to fix anything. There is nothing that has gone wrong here. We are not even coaching in a traditional sense. We are purely looking at which saboteur is the most dominant for you. What is it trying to protect? And what is it costing you in your leadership and in your life? And what people say at the end oftentimes is, I didn't realize how much this was driving me, nor how much it was costing me. But I think that's so beautiful because once you see it, you can't unsee it. You now have knowledge, you have awareness, so that you can then make another choice. And from there you get to decide, do I keep managing this upstairs? Because managing it upstairs can look really, really good. You just get better at explaining it, you get better at justifying it, you might even build a whole leadership philosophy or a whole identity around it. And it's basically redirecting the main floor. Not redirecting, redecorating, redirect, redecorating the main floor. There is redirecting of the furniture, right? While the basement is doing whatever the hell it wants. And here's the thing: there is a lot of very, very good coaches who will help you rearrange the furniture upstairs. They will help you optimize, they will help you communicate better, they will help you refine a strategy, and that work has value. It just doesn't touch what's actually driving it. It doesn't actually create the transformation, the breakthrough that you need to create a sustainable change in a pattern, in a habit, in a way of thinking. And that is not the work I do. Coaching will help you see the pattern. And I am the coach who will sit with you and say, let's go downstairs. Let's see what's really running the show here. Again, because once you see it, you can't unsee it. And I want to also talk about another layer of work that I do where we don't just see it, where we go into it. And I've mentioned this before on the podcast. As an intuitive method guide, I create space where you are not just talking about the fear, but we go on an intentional descent down to the subconscious basement, not to fix you, not to analyze you, but to meet the part of you that has been holding that fear in place. And I want to say something really clearly here. It's not as scary as you think it is. In fact, the anticipation of it is almost always worse than the experience itself. I have never had someone come out the other side and say, well, that was worse than I imagined. It's usually the opposite. So when we go there together, two things happen. One, we see the dominant fear clearly, and we can we reconnect you to your own intelligence about it. Because that part of you is not random. It's protecting something, usually a version of you that got separated in time. And often what we uncover isn't just the fear. It's the meaning that you made about yourself in the moment, all of the actions that you take as a result of the meaning that you made. And once you see that clearly, you get to decide if that meaning still holds. And for some of my clients, this is the first time that they've actually felt that, not thought about it, but truly felt it. And when that happens, we are not trying to get rid of the fear. We are changing your relationship to it. We are reintegrating that part back into the whole. And in that moment, the fear loses its charge. And this is the work of bringing what's been in the dark into the light. We're just opening up the door of the subconscious basement to take a peek down there. Because there's always two sides the fear and the wisdom underneath it, the love aspect of it. And I will be honest with you, a lot of people stay on the surface because it's safer, because it's more comfortable, but because it keeps them light. But I'm not here to tidy up the mess in a burning building. I am here to walk you out of it. And what I have come to trust deeply is that people are far more capable of this depth of work than we give them credit for. And you do not need to be ready in the way that you think you do. You only need to be willing. My job is to create the safety, to regulate the space, to walk with you into the underworld without ever pushing you further than you're ready to go. And part of that is holding a belief in you that you might not hold for yourself, because when you're in it, it can feel very real for you, very, very convincing, like this is just who you are. And the entire time I'm sitting there seeing something else, someone else. I'm seeing what's possible on the other side. I'm seeing the dreams, all those aspirations that you hold for who you are as a human. And on the other side of that descent, you don't become someone new. You don't become a better version of you. You return to what was always there, a truer version of you, whole. And part of my role in this deep work is not buying into the version of you that your fear is trying to convince you is true about you. And from that place, your intuition sharpens, your leadership changes, your decisions get clean. Not because you learned another strategy, but because you are no longer being run by something that you are afraid to look at. And once you see that, see the meaning, start to realize, oh, you're not stuck. You've just been loyal to something that made sense once. So I want to leave you with this. What's in your basement that you have been organizing your life around without actually turning the light on? And if something in this episode has landed for you, that's not accidental. That's usually the doorway. And if you want to explore it, whether through coaching or through a method session, I would love to meet you there. I will put a link in the show notes for a saboteur discovery session. It's free. I offer that and I can send you a link, just let me know. And if you do book a session, I can then take that as notification consent, if you will, which is really important to me, to send you a link so that you can complete the assessment. And I will be notified when you uh complete it. That's if I send you the assessment myself, and we would work together. Together from there. It is the most powerful, incredible work that I have ever done. I feel so incredibly privileged to be able to create and support my clients with their growth. And it's been very, very powerful seeing them be able to create new realities, new relationships with themselves, new ways of trusting themselves and having their own back. And that to me is the most powerful work that I could ever do, especially when I bring my awareness to what's happening on the world stage, leadership-wise. The thing that keeps me up at night is how many beautiful human beings are being distracted by what it is that they get rewarded for inside of systems that haven't looked at those reward structures in a very, very long time and continue to reward people for achieving results. And that can be amazing. But there is a way to achieve results that feels good, that doesn't feel like pressure. And there can be good pressure, um, pressure to awaken, pressure to like not all pressure is bad, but also there is much pressure happening out there in the world stage that is quote unquote bad, that does not feel good, that is creating to and leading to all of the burnout that we're seeing. And that pattern, unless and until we interrupt it and change it, is disconnecting people from their own intuition, from their own hearts, from their own minds, from their own bodies. And that keeps me up because there's a real cost there. And that's the mission that I'm on to change from a leadership perspective. So having said that, I want to say thank you, thank you for being here with me today. I hope something here landed for you, and I wish you an incredible rest of your week. Take care, and I'll see you soon. Goodbye. I hope that you're walking away feeling more aligned with your true self, more confident in the choices ahead, and ready to leave the safe path behind, knowing you've got everything you need within. Remember, the journey to you isn't about finding one perfect direction. It's about trusting yourself enough to explore all of it. If you're ready to dive deeper, join me for the next episode and don't forget to subscribe so that you never miss the next step on your path. I invite you to join my mailing list at www.cynthia JamesonCoach.ca, where we'll deepen our relationship and you can claim your copy of your inner compass, a guide to charting your course to authenticity. Until next time, stay unfiltered, stay true, and most importantly, stay you.