"You are born to thrive": Meet the Chester therapist helping people to succeed

“The only people I can help are the people that say, ‘I am so sick of being stuck miserable. Can you help me?’”

As an army wife, Cat Williams, 46, has experienced her fair share of emotionally challenging moments.

Spending long stretches of time raising two children in the Canadian Prairies while her husband travelled at length for work, Cat understands the impact of isolation and loneliness on self-confidence.

The psychotherapist and hypnotherapist, who is now based in Chester, has used her experiences as a catalyst for the work she does today on building confidence.

“It was quite influential in my kind of experience of what resilience is,” she said. “What resources do you draw upon when you feel like you’ve got nothing to draw upon, except…your own mind?”

Using innovative techniques, Cat has developed a unique form of therapy focusing on transforming people’s thoughts, emotions and confidence, using elements of traditional cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), psychotherapy and hypnosis. She prides herself on aiming for permanent change in just one to three sessions.

She began her career in physiotherapy, in an NHS orthopaedic hospital in Edinburgh, where she helped discharge patients once they were ready to go home. It was there that she identified the mind-body connection.

“Their physical condition bore very little relationship to how quickly they got home. Because it was all to do with their mindset, the way they were speaking about their injury.”

She soon realised that the patients who wanted to put the work in, were sent home sooner. She became frustrated with the strict protocols she was trained to use.

On the wards, she gained the nickname ‘The Physio Terrorist’ due to her unrelenting focus on helping people to want to get better.

“Unless you’re motivating people, unless you’re focusing on the language you’re using, and how to translate that motivation...this protocol is not going to get their knee better if they don’t want it too,” she added.

In Germany, she decided to retrain as a relationship therapist through the charity, Relate. Once she arrived in Canada she began to work independently as a therapist and published her book.

Back in the UK, Cat moved into strength psychology and clinical hypnotherapy.

She uses a metaphor of a stallion to represent our subconscious mind, which can lead us into procrastination, or make us avoid challenging situations which could, if they go well, benefit or improve us.

She added: “The job of stallion-like mind is not to make you happy, not to fulfil you, it’s just to keep you alive. And the problem with that is it just goes…OK, well, let’s stay stuck then.”

The issue with this mindset, Cat teaches, is that it keeps us stuck in unpleasant situations or emotions, even when we want to move on, because they feel safer and more familiar.

“You are born to thrive…you have to get over that survival instinct of oh, I’ll just sit here and do nothing.”

She uses the example of her recent TEDx talk, hosted by Chester University, as a great example of how procrastination could have led her to miss an opportunity for growth and change.

“We’re not born with procrastination. We have to be honest with ourselves," Cat says. "What is the benefit of the procrastination? It is protecting you from something.

“It is saving me probably from the thing we fear most, which is shame, rejection, humiliation.

“Whatever you’re most procrastinating is the very thing you should probably be doing to get yourself where you want to.

“If you don’t do it then you haven’t got the risk of shame and humiliation,” she said.

Given the data surrounding postgraduate teacher recruitment, Cat’s success story of helping a Geography teacher stay in the profession is particularly important. The ITT census measured the postgraduate teacher recruitment as 38 per cent below target, in the academic year 2023/24.

The client enjoyed her job, and felt she was good at it. However, following a bad experience with a senior member of staff, her self-confidence had completely shattered, leading her to doubt her teaching abilities.

Despite joining a new school, the same doubts kept her on high alert for potential criticism and discipline from her superiors. She was on the verge of quitting teaching for good.

After three hours with Cat, she decided to challenge herself to build her confidence and self-belief. She has since spoke at a nationwide geography conference about how she is helping underachieving children reach high grades in her subject.

The teacher has since admitted that she wouldn’t still be in teaching if it wasn’t for Cat.

She added: “CBT and all this positive stuff doesn’t work unless you understand the root cause of the trauma.

“That’s why I love what I do. It’s like two hours of your life, rapid transformational therapy.”

As a mother, she wishes she had been equipped with this knowledge when she was younger.

She added: “I know I would have been able to reassure myself better. Being a parent is a real challenge on your own coping strategies and your own self-esteem.

“It brings up lots of doubts and fears within yourself. I help a lot of parents for that reason.”

Cat works with people of all ages and learns a lot from children. She explains that understanding children’s feelings helps her when working with an adult who is delving into childhood trauma. And due to her work on confidence, she feels she is a more respectful mother.

“My children are fully intelligent, emotionally aware beings," she said. "They’re not for me to dictate, control or be better than."

Showing her TEDx talk in school assemblies is her next aim, to allow more children and teenagers to have a chance to reflect on their own experiences, discuss their aims and realise any limiting self-beliefs. She wants to change the mindset of young people and build their confidence.

She said: “Those that are the kindest and most compassionate, are the ones that are often taken advantage of by bullies/abusive people and then their self-esteem is crushed. Those are the people I want to hear this message.”

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