Liz Bell says the first reflex is to blame competence, somebody’s own or the organization’s. Six weeks of counselling and six months away taught her what that reflex hides.
For five years Liz Bell was responsible for volunteer mentors across Devon, Cornwall and Dorset, talking them through other people’s stuck moments and placing them where the work would stretch them. She missed the signs in herself.
“In 2012, I didn’t recognise the warning signs of burnout, I simply reached the point where, one day, I couldn’t make it into work.”
The reflex when a capable professional stalls is to look for a competence failure, hers or the organization’s. Bell’s argument is that the reflex is the trap.
Liz Bell is a Career Coach and Positive Intelligence Coach based in Plymouth, Devon, and has volunteered with The King’s Trust for eighteen years.
A Sabbatical Fixed the Job, Not the Pattern
Two things can drain a person at work, and Bell separates them before she looks at anything else. The first is the job.
“The first mistake is assuming all burnout is an individual problem: poor working environments, including discrimination and inequality, excessive workloads, low job control and job insecurity, are recognised by the WHO as risks to mental health and must be addressed.”
Those conditions do not respond to insight, and she will not treat them as though they do. Only when they are not the primary cause does she look at the person, and the order matters because of where the alternative leads.
“Purpose-driven women and their advisers often blame a lack of competence, either their own, other people’s or the organisation’s. This can leave them feeling powerless.”
The Diagnosis Bell Arrived With Herself
She learned that from the inside. The counselling that followed her collapse, six weeks of it through her employer’s support scheme, handed her both halves of the wrong diagnosis in one sitting.
“I received six weeks of counselling, which helped me understand that much of my distress came from feeling powerless and from my perception that others in the organisation lacked competence.”
The two things she now looks for in clients were the two she arrived with.
What came next is the part of the sequence that gets misread.
“I returned to work, and a change of line manager helped, but the real shift came when I stepped away from everything familiar and took a six-month sabbatical.”
Neither move was an error. A better manager was a real fix for a real problem, and six months away restored something the job had taken. What neither reached was the pattern underneath.
“Years later, when I noticed the same patterns beginning to reappear, I discovered Positive Intelligence and finally gained a practical framework for understanding and interrupting them.”
Positive Intelligence calls those patterns Saboteurs, and Bell now works as a PQ Coach and member coach of the programme.
She completed the seven-week Positive Intelligence programme in March 2024 and became a PQ Coach member shortly afterwards. The programme is designed to help participants recognise mental patterns that can undermine wellbeing, relationships and performance, strengthen mental fitness, and apply five core Sage Powers, Empathise, Explore, Innovate, Navigate and Activate, to challenges.
The same separation runs through the client work.
One client had spent 35 years at a single company, joined it with no qualifications, and progressed to a senior role before being made redundant. She arrived convinced that her lack of formal education meant she would never work at that level or earn a comparable salary again.
The environment had genuinely ended. What remained was her reading of it, and Bell went at that with the Saboteur Assessment, Positive Intelligence’s assessment of the patterns, before anything else.
“We explored how her strongest patterns were narrowing both her thinking and the options she could see.”
Then came Bell’s Explore, Dream, Discover career-change programme, which helps people who are stuck or uncertain about what to do move towards a clear action plan for their career-change goals. Bell used it alongside the work of identifying and interrupting recurring patterns.
Within four months the client moved from believing she was no longer employable at a senior level to securing a consultancy role.
The result rests on that single engagement, measured by the change in her stated confidence and by the role she took.
The speed was not the surprise.
“What surprised me was how quickly she incorporated that awareness into her everyday decisions.”
Three Cases, the Same Order of Operations
A second client had decided she was not entrepreneurial. Underneath the conclusion sat one of the patterns in the Positive Intelligence model: “her Pleaser Saboteur made her fear that clients would no longer value her if she changed the way she worked.”
She arrived at a session reporting that “she had expanded her business’s client capacity, filled every available space and increased her income.”
The fear had been replaced by something quieter.
“She now understood that the changes benefited both her clients and the financial stability of her business.”
The third case sat a long way from either. Through a mentoring programme at YMCA Plymouth, Liz Bell worked with a young woman who avoided busy buses because she believed the other passengers were judging her.
The work took the same shape: recognise the pattern behind the fear, reframe it, then agree small action steps.
She became able to travel by bus regardless of how crowded it was, an outcome measured through her own reports of her behaviour and her growing independence.
Set the three side by side and the variables fall away. The ages differ by decades. The stakes run from a senior salary to a bus route. One was a paying client, one a mentee, and the third came in through a redundancy.
What did not change was the order of operations: name the pattern, show what it has been foreclosing, agree an action small enough to take this week, and expect it back.
What a Capable Professional Running on Empty Can Take From This
Five moves come out of this, and none of them needs a coach in the room.
First, the conditions get audited before the person does. Where workload, control, security or treatment is the primary driver, the honest next step is a change to the job or the employer, and no amount of internal work substitutes for it.
Second, retire the competence question. When the environment is not the driver, the reflex is to ask who was not good enough, and every available answer to that question, whether it lands on the person, a colleague, or the organization, ends in the same place.
Bell’s replacement question asks which pattern is running and what it has stopped the person from seeing.
“By recognising those patterns, they can focus on what is within their control, make different choices and put themselves back in the driver’s seat of their careers.”
Third, treat a change of job as half a remedy. Bell’s own environment improved twice and the patterns still reappeared years later. A move made without the pattern work postpones the problem to the next role.
Fourth, work on interruption rather than insight. Recognising a pattern in a session is the cheap part. The client who reached a consultancy role in four months did it by catching the pattern inside ordinary decisions, which is a skill built through repetition and not through a single realisation.
Fifth, measure the shift in decisions rather than in mood. The marker is not a client reporting that she feels better. Bell’s stated aim for the work is to “identify patterns beneath the surface and guide clients to use their underlying strengths more consistently in pursuit of their goals,” and consistency is visible in behaviour or it is not there.
Her line for the woman who looks successful on paper and is running on empty underneath:
“Your exhaustion does not mean you are not enough, it may be a sign that hidden patterns are keeping you stuck and draining your energy, and once you can see them, you can choose a different response.”
Who Is Liz Bell?
Liz Bell is a Career Coach and Positive Intelligence Coach based in Plymouth, Devon, a PQ Coach member, and an eighteen-year volunteer with The King’s Trust.
She has run her coaching practice since 2020, working with purpose-driven women through a seven-week PQ programme and one-to-one career work.
The pattern-reading came first and the coaching label came late.
Bell spent six years in administration at Plymouth University, coaching prospective students through applications and colleagues through processes, before taking on the Volunteer Executive role at The King’s Trust in 2008, where she was responsible for volunteers across Devon, Cornwall and Dorset, developed and delivered their training, and organised regional conferences until 2013.
She has been a volunteer mentor with the Trust since, supporting young people into employment through CV work, interview preparation, and the confidence underneath both.
“My 18 years with The King’s Trust exposed me to the thinking habits of people from vastly different backgrounds, from CEOs and directors to young people facing extreme disadvantage.”
The intervening years widened the sample. She supported students with varying needs through higher education at the University of St Mark and St John for 19 months, taught English as a second language at Mayflower College for nine years, trained staff and volunteers at Citizens Advice including sessions on wellbeing at work, and coordinated the MY Future mentoring programme at YMCA Plymouth.
Her YMCA work has included both paid and voluntary roles. During her time with the organisation, she trained 20 mentors, received 95% positive feedback, and helped match more than 30 young people with mentors over three years.
She holds a BSc in Social Sciences from The Open University and a Life Coaching Diploma from the Centre of Excellence.
Her practice is coaching rather than clinical care. She is not a clinician. The Saboteur model, assessment and PQ programme belong to Positive Intelligence, while Bell works with them as a PQ Coach member.
What she adds to them is the lived half.
“My own burnout gave me first-hand insight into how sustained pressure and deeply ingrained mental patterns can leave someone feeling trapped.”
The woman who could not make it into work in 2012 now spends her time on the question nobody asked her then: not what is wrong with the person, but what the pattern was protecting her from.
Liz Bell is a Career Coach and Positive Intelligence Coach based in Plymouth, Devon, a PQ Coach member, and an eighteen-year volunteer with The King’s Trust. To connect with Liz or learn more, visit her LinkedIn Profile.
