The CEO that needed to feel less stressed

This story is about Purple Moose, a CEO grappling with the duality of her compassionate nature and her strong executive presence. Each of Wave’s clients is known as an alias to preserve confidentiality. Each alias is granted randomly and is a coloured animal.
Purple Moose came to Wave wanting to feel less stressed in her role as CEO. With this in mind, Wave helped her differentiate what was an acceptable amount of stress considering her position, from what was self-induced stress that could certainly be lessened. By identifying this, she discovered that what was behind a lot of her stress and anxiety, and that was making her role as CEO difficult, was in fact lack of self-confidence.
Going through her first crowdfunding, working on this became even more important. Purple Moose realized that to feel less stressed she had to learn to trust herself more. Herself and her project. Wave helped her dig deeper into the inner blockers with which she struggled. She was running a successful business but somehow she was doubting herself all along the way, which was causing her a lot of unnecessary anxiety, and making things more difficult to handle.
Through reflection exercises such as the worst-case scenario, Purple Moose discovered that behind the stress there was also fear. Fear of not making it, fear of losing it all. An issue with trust, as she defined it, and that she realized was a pattern she was also repeating in her personal life. She was doing a great job growing a business but she had a hard time actually believing it. With Wave’s help, she started contrasting reality with her fears and taking perspective on everything she had achieved and built by herself so far. She understood that these fears were still going to pop up in her mind, but that she could control what her mind paid attention to.
Wave helped her explore the areas where she was not confident and the areas where she felt she was. Sometimes she was confident enough and able to fight her own fears until the point where there was bad feedback on her project. So she worked on taking things less personally so that if there was any feedback that triggered doubts, this wouldn’t shake her self-confidence anymore.
By the end of her coaching, reading from her was like reading from a new person. Stress was there, but she had learned to deal with it differently. Her crowd-funding went well, she was expanding her business abroad and even her personal life was impacted by her change of attitude towards herself. She was still struggling to find a balance between being a sensitive woman and a strong CEO at the same time, but undoubtedly with a different mindset.
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Firmin Zochetto · CEO & Co-founder of Payfit · Coaching Story
Wave has been a great companion throughout both my CEO years and the acquisition process of my company