The CEO that needed to reconstruct his narrative of failure and success

This story is about Mango Parakeet, a CEO in need to build healthier personal routines to reconstruct his narrative of failure and success. Each of Wave’s clients is known as an alias to preserve confidentiality. Each alias is granted randomly and is a coloured animal.

Mango Parakeet started his ride in the midst of a difficult and challenging fundraising context. Being outside of his comfort zone, he lacked confidence in his abilities to successfully and urgently handle the low cash flow his company was going through. Together, the client and Wave deep-dived into their working environment around managing data (and other various blockers the client highlighted as being hurdles to him progressing with the fundraising). During this investigation, some other difficulties emerged - namely, Mango Parakeet’s struggle with neglecting their physical health, especially by frequently overindulging in food and drink.

As the client continued to share many details about this problem and seemed to engage less with the original topic of the fundraising round, Wave proposed switching their focus to his personal routines. Quickly agreeing, they embarked on a better understanding of the client’s unhealthy relationship with food, drink and partying - and Mango Parakeet began to realise the connection between his mind and body, realising how strong an influence these overindulgences had on his professional life. Picking up on his struggle with consistency - something he had shared, but also evident through a few weeks of missed sessions - Wave also highlighted the importance of sticking to the weekly routine of coaching together.

They explored the specific triggers of Mango Parakeet’s unhealthy behaviours, done through multiple rounds of impactful questions and deep reflections. By asking whether it is really the life he would like to live - for himself, but also as a business partner, a husband, and for his future self - Mango Parakeet began to have some incredibly strong realizations, understanding the deeper motivations for him to be in the vicious cycle he had found himself in.

Mango Parakeet and Wave deep-dived, and by continuing to ask the right questions, they slowly started to close the loop. Together they questioned his relationship to success and began to reframe different elements of his lifestyle. Wave pushed the client to highlight what exactly it was about his current lifestyle that he enjoyed so much - what values did they represent, and how could he continue to live up to them in a non-destructive manner? By pushing him to re-position himself, he was able to find ways to fulfil his desire of connecting with others and manage his stressors more sustainably.

With his new perception of success, the client’s priorities changed to focusing on self-driven deeper reflections, continuing weekly journaling after the ride with Wave, and continuing to strengthen his personal routines. The new version of himself, as he said, was one that understood that good things take time and that there are no shortcuts to success. By having focused on his coping mechanisms throughout his personal life, we were able to reconstruct the client’s narrative of failure and success, and as he said, untrap him from a 10-years-old way of thinking.