Sumi Kotze
Free workbook

Every transition writes a story about who you are.

It arrives in less than a second, and it doesn’t feel like a story. It feels like the truth. This workbook is how you catch it.

Something changed, and you’re not who you were on the other side of it. You’re functioning. You’re managing. And underneath it, you react to things you used to let go.

That reaction isn’t where it starts. This workbook takes you to where it does.

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Sumi Kotze

It was hardly ever just the moment.

A message is shorter than usual. Your child does not listen. Someone seems distant. A plan changes.

And in less than a second, your mind creates meaning. Not neutral meaning. Personal meaning.

This means I am not important.

This means I am failing.

This means I am too much.

This means I have to protect myself.

That meaning becomes a story. Once you are inside the story, your body starts responding as if the story is reality.

That is why telling yourself to calm down does not work. Your body is not responding to logic. It is responding to the story it believes is happening.

The reaction begins with meaning.

Sumi Kotze

Four sections, and the space to answer honestly.

This is not a guide to calming down. Telling yourself to calm down does not work, because your body is not responding to logic. It is responding to the story it believes is happening. This workbook is how you find the story.

01 · The Recognition

The moment before the spiral, and why it moves too fast to catch.

02 · The Shift

The layer between what happened and how you reacted, and how to see it.

03 · The Practice

Five steps you can use on a real moment from this week.

04 · The Reframe

What becomes available once the story has a name.

Four sections, room to write, around thirty minutes. Something you will come back to.

This is for you if:

This is not a crisis resource, and it is not therapy. It is a thinking tool for a woman who is already doing the work.

Sumi Kotze

I did not learn this in the hardest moment of my life. I had already built it.

I spent nearly a decade studying how meaning is made and unmade in the human mind, and eight years in training that taught me the half insight cannot reach.

Then my son was born at thirty weeks, in a country that was not mine, in a room where I could not understand a word being said. I felt the panic arrive, and underneath it I caught the sentence my mind was already writing: he is going to die, and I will never get to be a mother.

I could not change the situation. What I could do was refuse the story.

Twenty-eight days in the NICU, and that was the work, over and over. Notice the story. Regulate. Choose again.

He is four and a half now. He does jiu-jitsu, he runs track with me, and he hikes with me.

I work with women in the middle of a transition that took their identity apart. Every one of them arrived with a story the transition had already written about her. None of them had agreed to it either.

Certified Master NLP Practitioner. Master Timeline Therapy Practitioner. Trained through an ICF-accredited coach training programme. Ten years of coaching, around 250 people.

“I listen to my mind and body when I know I’m crossing boundaries and stop.”

You give insights that I can use later to assess my feelings through an unfiltered lens instead of my experiences. You’ve helped me practice establishing and standing firm on my boundaries, and I feel so much better as a result of putting this into practice. Thank you for improving my life in a long-lasting way.

Beth

You can’t change what happened. You can refuse what it means about you.

Before the behaviour, before the emotion, before your body braces. There is a moment where the story gets written. This is how you find it.

Please enter your first name.
Please enter a valid email address.

Sent straight to your inbox. Unsubscribe any time.

It is on its way.

Check your inbox in the next few minutes. If it is not there, look in promotions or spam, and drag it to your main inbox so the rest reaches you.

Read it when you have thirty quiet minutes. It works better slowly.