The 5-Stage System I Used to Change My Life Trajectory

Someone like me would usually not be where I am right now.

I grew up in Vietnam in an unstable household. My father was never home, and when he was, he was sleeping, busy working, or angry. My mum was attentive physically, but not so much emotionally. I was constantly in unrequited love as a teenager, struggling with self-image and confidence. Then, at 17, my family sent me to the UK when their business went bankrupt, and they had to borrow money for me. I was pinching pennies at university, knowing I had to get a sponsored job to help pay back the debts and provide for them later. 

Thankfully, I did. But it only solved one part of the equation. Internally, I was a mess. I still remember the first time I felt physical pain from my anxious attachment because my WhatsApp message to a boy I liked was ignored. From then on, it was a never-ending nightmare of a dating life, making wrong decisions, getting heartbroken, traumatised, and not even able to enjoy the early stage of getting to know someone because of my anxiety and fear of abandonment. Everything felt like a big deal. I was paralysed by self-doubt and shame.

Finally, in my mid-20s, I did the unimaginable: I rewired my brain. I broke my childhood and cultural conditioning. Really. I did it. In a year, I completely turned my life around. I told myself: You’ll have everything you want and more. I added “and more” because I believed there was more in store for me than what I could even dream of. And it came true.

But it didn’t just come out of nowhere. It was incredible, but it wasn’t a mystery. I had always been self-aware, self-observing, and self-honest. People thought I liked to write and publish articles online. True, but it was also me processing in real time, validating my feelings and thoughts, and producing a narrative to make sense of my experiences. I did it so instinctively. I never let an experience go to waste. I did not avoid, suppress, or run away even when it hurt so much. I made notes of what happened, of what I did, of my context. I figured out why it happened, why I did what I did, what it meant for me as a person, not to ruminate or blame myself, but to find a way forward. 

I did not judge, I gave myself compassion. I came up with frameworks, and through the frameworks, I could configure my actions and my environments to achieve my desired outcomes, overriding even sticky past habits and well-worn thinking patterns. Then I continued to update the frameworks based on new observations and outcomes. Over time, my self-knowledge increased, my pattern-recognition capability advanced, and the changes became the new me.

This efficient mechanism has unlocked real transformation in every area of my life. From mental health, love, career, to fitness, to this day. It has five stages. In practice, they overlap and repeat. I'm laying them out in order so you can see the parts.

Let’s go through each one of them:

To understand yourself better, you need data. To get data, you need to be in motion - putting yourself out there, meeting people, building relationships, falling in love, getting hurt, facing conflict, overcoming obstacles, being in new environments, trying new things. Anything that happens is a data point. 

If you do nothing, if every day is the same as the other, if you don’t get out of your comfort zone, if you don’t surprise yourself, you won’t uncover new aspects and layers of yourself. When you avoid discomfort or pain, the safe feelings might feel rewarding momentarily, but you will end up paying for it in the long run with stagnation and stunted growth while others move ahead of you.

This is the stage when you document what happens. You don’t judge or criticise yourself.

You note down factually your behaviours, your feelings, thoughts, and emotions in real time. The frequency. The pattern. The observed outcome. Without jumping to interpretations or attaching meaning. For example, ‘he hasn't replied in four hours’ is data. 'He's losing interest' is a theory you haven't confirmed yet.

Simply keep a private doc. You don’t have to write down everything, but make it a routine to journal or at least capture high-stakes experiences. The more data you have, the richer the analysis can be.

This is what you can do with a therapist or an AI tool (but use it with care and don’t forget to challenge it.) It’s about unpacking your observation and asking productive questions. Having a therapist also means having a witness, which lightens the psychological weight.

Some examples of what I asked:

The action stage is about configuring your life to produce the outcomes you actually want, based on what you've learned about yourself. You take different actions, draw internal boundaries to stop harmful thinking habits, change your environment, or apply pressure to force clarity.

This means making beneficial choices that work with your wiring. Action requires accepting the cost, such as ending relationships, leaving jobs, having hard conversations, and disappointing people you care about. The cost is high. But it’s what will break old patterns, form a new identity, and lead to real changes.

Integration is when the new behaviour becomes the default. It requires running the new behaviour through enough repetitions that it stops being effortful. Sometimes the old pattern resurfaces under stress, and you notice yourself reaching for the old response. That's normal. The integration isn't a single event. It's the ongoing process of the new way becoming yours.

Each integration produces new capacity, which exposes you to new experiences, which requires new observation and investigation, which produces new frameworks and actions and eventually new integrations. The cycle keeps running. You evolve before you even realise it.

It’s not easy and won’t be perfect. Progress can be slow. Cost can be high. Grief can be heavy. And change can be painful. But it’s the magical essence of the human experience. We can actually be who we want to be. While we don’t have control over who our parents are, our childhood, and various factors growing up, as adults, we can build a life that’s ours. It’s worth it.

Join me on 20 June 2026 for a half-day in-person event for early- and mid-career women looking to progress their corporate careers in the UK. We'll get into the unspoken stuff most people never get coached on.