When Both Parts of You Are Right

Welcome to Episode #176 of NLP Around You.

🧠 Thoughtful Thought

“You are not indecisive. You are two loyalties, waiting to be heard.”

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💬 NLP Quote Corner

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” — Walt Whitman

⏳ One Minute NLP – The Meeting Inside Your Head

You have made the decision. Twice, actually. And you are still standing exactly where you were.

Most people call this indecision. In NLP, we call it a conflict of parts.

A part is simply a cluster of your own behaviour organised around something it is determined to protect. One part wants the bigger role, the visible work, the growth. Another part wants the evenings you already have, the team that already trusts you, the life that already works.

Neither part is being difficult. Every part carries a positive intention, including the one that keeps reaching for the brake.

The trouble begins when you take sides. You label one part ambition and the other one fear, and then you run a meeting in which only one of them is allowed to speak. The silenced part does what silenced people do. It waits. And it reopens the case at two in the morning.

Do this today. Take the decision you keep circling and write two headings on a page: what the yes is protecting, and what the no is protecting. Give each one four lines. Judge neither.

Most people find that the no was never against them.

A part that is heard settles. A part that is ignored takes the wheel.

🔮 Meta Magic – Coaching Chronicles

When Both Parts of You Are Right

He walked in carrying a printed sheet. Actual paper, neatly ruled into two columns. One headed Take it. The other headed Stay.

“I have made this decision four times this month,” Nikhil said. “Twice yes. Twice no. I am probably the most indecisive person you will ever coach.”

He had been offered the head of a new business vertical. Bigger mandate, bigger visibility, eighteen months of travel to build it from scratch. On paper, it was almost word-for-word the role he had described to me two years ago.

I asked him to tell me about the part of him that wanted it.

He sat forward. His voice picked up pace. He spoke about building something from nothing, about the people he would pull in, about finally being measured on what he delivered rather than on how well he managed upwards. Three minutes, no pauses, hands moving.

Then I asked him to tell me about the part that did not want it.

He waved a hand. “That is just fear. Comfort zone. Ignore it.”

“Curious to know,” I said. “What is that part protecting?”

He opened his mouth to answer quickly.

Then he stopped.

The silence ran on longer than either of us expected. He looked down at the two columns on his sheet, and something in his face loosened.

“Sundays,” he said finally. “My father is eighty-one. I drive down every Sunday. It is the only three hours in my week where nobody wants anything from me and I do not have to be impressive.”

He looked up.

“That is not a comfort zone, is it?”

Not fear.

Not weakness.

A loyalty.

Here is what we had both walked past for twenty minutes. He had been chairing a meeting inside his own head in which one part was invited to present and the other was shouted down before it could open its file. So every time he decided yes, the silenced part quietly filed an appeal by midnight.

We let it speak. Properly. We wrote down what the no was protecting, in its own words, without arguing with it once.

He did not decide that day. I did not want him to.

He called on Thursday. He had taken the role, and he had written one line into his conversation with the CEO: travel blocks planned around Sundays, in writing, not negotiable.

“The strange thing,” he said, “is that it took four minutes once I actually listened.”

The part that kept saying no had never wanted to stop him.

It wanted a seat at the table.

So let me ask you…

That decision you keep making and unmaking. Which part of you have you been overruling instead of hearing out?

And what has it been protecting all along?

📖 Hook from the Book

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

🎬 Movie Motivation

“Andar se kuch aur hai hum, aur bahar se majboor.” (Inside, we are something else altogether. Outside, we are bound.)

This line from the movie Tamasha reminds us that the distance between who we are inside and how we behave outside is rarely a flaw of character, and is usually a part of us that has been given no room to speak.

📢 Announcement of the Week

Outwardly Successful, Inwardly Stuck

A free live session for people who have built the career, the title and the life that reads well on paper, and still feel a quiet resistance underneath it all.

Tuesday, 18th August 2026

8:00 PM to 9:30 PM IST

Live on Zoom. No recording.

👉 Register here: https://nlp.w3successacademy.com/outwardly-successful-inwardly-stuck

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