Why are you still trying to prove yourself to your father?

Sue Reid was seventeen when she was stabbed five times and left in the street to die. Two young lads found her and carried her to a house. The blade had punctured a lung and missed her heart by an inch.

That was the first of three relationships she walked into looking for something she hadn't found at home. She didn't feel loved as a child, so she went looking for love, and it kept handing her people who hurt her.

What she wanted underneath all of it was simple. She wanted to believe she was good enough.

That feeling started long before the relationships. As a girl, Sue wanted to be a doctor. Her parents and her teachers told her she wasn't clever enough, that she wouldn't pass the exams, that she shouldn't even try because she'd only get hurt. They meant it kindly. She heard it as confirmation of something she already suspected about herself. So she did what her dad suggested and went to work in a bank, and every bad relationship after that took her down another notch.

By thirty-eight, her third relationship, the one she married, had ended. She had no confidence left. She thought she'd ruined her life.

I have to change my life. I cannot go on down this road.

That was the turn. Not a program, not a coach, because there weren't life coaches around thirty years ago. She started journaling, at first because a friend suggested she document her ex-husband's behavior in case it ever went to court. She never needed it for court. She needed it for herself. Then came the self-help books, and slow, quiet inner work she did alone, because the one counsellor she tried wanted to talk about the past and she only wanted to move forward.

The part most people already know about Sue is the steady version. Forty-two years in retail banking, a career her father pointed her toward, retired in 2019. What she loved about the work was never the banking. It was meeting people and helping them. And the bank was the one place she felt sure of herself. Sitting with a customer, she was confident. That told her the confidence was in there. She just hadn't found it everywhere else yet.

So we had her on Sacred Business Stories to trace how a shy girl who was told no became a confidence coach in her sixties. The part most people don't hear is that she never set out to build a business at all.

After she retired she trained in NLP and hypnotherapy, thinking she'd help a few people in her community as a hobby. Then lockdown closed that down, so she wrote a book about confidence and put it on Amazon without knowing the first thing about launching anything. She took a life coaching certification with the Jay Shetty school. She tried writing on Medium and got nowhere. Then Phil and a few others she followed turned up on Substack, so she followed them over, and that was the point it started to feel like a business.

It was never me planning. It was a process of unfolding.

Two things stood out in the conversation.

The first was a question a coaching supervisor asked her during her certification, while watching her coach another student.

Why are you still trying to prove yourself to your father after all these years?

She'd never thought of it that way. But she could see it the moment it was said. The whole arc, the bank, the books, the certifications, the lives, had been one long attempt to prove she was good enough. The useful part is what she did with that once she saw it. She didn't try to delete the drive. She let it keep pushing her forward and stopped letting it run the show.

The second was her actual definition of the work she does.

I actually believe everybody is confident. It's the self-confidence, the self-belief, the self-love that you lack.

Sit with that for a second, because it changes what the job even is. If confidence isn't a thing some people have and others don't, then nobody is starting from zero. The work is clearing away whatever taught you to doubt what was already in you. Sue is proof of her own claim. The confidence she had with a customer at the bank was the same confidence she now uses on a live with a stranger. She just had to believe it travelled.

Here's the line she'd give anyone trying to do this online.

Trying to be somebody else only works short term, because your natural self comes through anyway.

The reframe in Sue's story is worth naming plainly. She spent decades thinking the bad years were wasted, that she'd made a mess of her life. The bad years are the business. The trauma, the rock bottom, the climb back, the exact pattern of being told she wasn't enough, that is the raw material she now uses to help other people who were told the same thing. She didn't find her purpose despite the hard parts. The hard parts are what she has to give.

And she started at sixty. The version of retirement she was handed said you stop, you do some gardening, you wind down. She decided the opposite. She wants to work as long as she can, keep writing, keep coaching, and she's building her first course as she goes.

You can find Sue writing at her Substack, Confidence Matters.

She speaks to anyone who got told no early and carried it, who doesn't quite believe in themselves yet, and to anyone who thinks they've left it too late to start the thing they actually want.

Check out the full replay. It's an honest hour.