Every new level sends a devil to your door. One of them followed you there. Telling them apart is the difference between six months of work and six years of it.

Something changed for you and you can probably name the day.

The day the offer landed, or the business became real, or you moved country, or someone left, or someone arrived and the whole shape of your life reorganised itself around them.

Here’s the crazy thing, if you really think about this, the circumstances changed on that day. BUT in reality Yyou didn’t.

You’re still running the version of yourself that was built for the life before, and there’s no update notification, no moment where the internal catches up with the external and announces itself. Months later you’re still waiting to feel like the person this is happening to.

That gap has a name and a shape, and there’s a question that sorts out what to do about it. I’ll get to the question. First, lets break this down….. and as always where did my inspiration come from… it came from a graduation call for our latest Masters of NLP graduates and you’ll see why this is so pertinent.

The line everyone reaches for is only half the map

Someone always offers the same phrase…. and this is the phrase that was shared on the call

New level, new devil.

How many of you have heard that saying before and just blindly agreed with it? OR if you have never heard it before… accept this as my gift for you today 🙂 This saying might be true, infact it is true ….but

It also can’t explain the interesting bit, which is why the same feeling keeps showing up wearing different outfits.

There are two devils in this. The saying only got round to naming one.

One of them belongs to the room

This one is genuinely new. It came with the situation, the way a smell comes with a house you’ve just moved into, a a new car, or even new shoes….

You haven’t done this before, so of course you feel underqualified. You are, briefly, in exactly the way that every person who has ever stepped into anything was underqualified for about eight months and then wasn’t anymore.

This one knocks. You can hear it coming.

The other one was already in your bag

This one never knocked because it never needed to. It came through the door with you, unpacked itself into the wardrobe, and it’s been living in the house since long before you had a house.

It’s why the feeling is familiar even when nothing else in the room is.

You can change employer, industry, country, time zone, language, relationship, and none of it gets left behind. Nobody at any airport anywhere has ever charged you excess baggage for this and they really should.

You’ll know yours by how consistent it is. It was there in the first job and it was there in the fourth, it was in the relationship you walked away from and it’s in the one you’re in now. Two decades of costume changes while you treated every appearance as a fresh problem needing a fresh solution.

For some people it’s the running commentary about luck, the one that says right place, right time, someone who happened to like you, and none of it really counts. For some it’s needing to be the most prepared person in every room forever, which looks brilliant on paper and is exhausting to actually be. Mine talks about the fear of success, and has done since I was about nineteen, and I’d love to say I’ve sorted it but mostly what I’ve done is get faster at recognising its voice.

Same devil, just a different suit on it each time.

Getting them mixed up is what actually stalls people

Getting stuck usually isn’t about resources, which is the odd part. People get stuck precisely because they’ve got enough going for them to apply the wrong solution for years without anything ever breaking loudly enough to force a rethink.

Two ways to get it wrong, and they go wrong in opposite directions.

The first is treating the one from your bag like it’s new. Discomfort shows up, you assume it belongs to the situation, so off you go and get equipment. Another qualification, another framework, someone to advise you, a course with a certificate at the end that’s absolutely going on your profile the moment it lands.

And relief does turn up, for about a fortnight.

Then it’s back, because you handed a self concept problem a skills solution and those two don’t speak the same language. This is how someone ends up with a wall of credentials and the exact same knot in the stomach they had at twenty six. The knot was never short of evidence. It’s seen the evidence. Wasn’t interested.

The second way is treating the new one like it came with you, and this one is meaner. You walk into something genuinely unfamiliar, you’re clumsy at it for six weeks, which is the correct amount of clumsy because that’s simply what six weeks looks like. But instead of filing it under learning curve you file it under character.

There it is. Knew it.

Four questions that sort them

Before you spend money or energy or another six months fighting the wrong one, put the feeling through this.

Have you felt this exact feeling before, somewhere else entirely? If yes, it came with you. New situations don’t manufacture old feelings, they just switch the light on.

Whose voice is it in? If there’s an accent in there from your past, a parent, a teacher, someone who had authority over you at twenty two, a fifteen year old version of you, this isn’t about the situation. You’re in the archive.

Would getting better at this actually fix it? Sit with that properly. Say you woke up tomorrow completely competent at the hardest part of it. Does the feeling go quiet, or does it just move to a different room in the house?

What happened last time you tried to solve it? If the answer is a fortnight of relief and then straight back to where you started, you’ve already run this experiment. The results are in and you keep rerunning it anyway.

Two devils, two completely different responses

The one from the room wants equipping. Information, reps, a bit of time, someone further down the road who’ll tell you the truth rather than the encouraging version. It dissolves on its own schedule, so mistaking it for a character flaw just means suffering through something that was going to sort itself out regardless.

The one from your bag wants interrupting. You cannot out perform it. Achievement doesn’t evict it, achievement just hands it a wider audience to be anxious in front of.

That one has to get named out loud, caught while it’s happening, and answered somewhere underneath performance. The question stops being about doing this better and starts being about who you’d have to be for it to lose its vote. Slower work, less satisfying, and the only version I’ve seen hold.

Try this for a week

Keep a log. Nothing fancy, notes app is fine.

Every time the discomfort shows up write down what you felt and where you were, then one question underneath.

Have we met?

Give it a week and see what you notice.

Most of what you write down will belong to the room and will be gone by the middle of next year. A small stubborn handful won’t be. That handful has been with you longer than anything on your CV.

The devils keep coming, and that’s the good news

Something new will always turn up at the door. That isn’t a fault in the system, it’s what a new level is. If nothing is knocking, there’s a decent chance nothing much is changing.

What’s optional is spending another decade fighting the wrong one.

The one from the room is a stranger, so learn its name, put the work in, watch it turn into a colleague.

The other one already knows your name.

What I still don’t know is the timeline. Not what to do about it, that part I’m clear on. Whether it ever actually goes quiet, or whether the whole thing is just getting quicker at spotting it in the doorway. If yours has ever properly left, I’d like to hear how.

Till next week

Stay awesome

Prajesh