Do You Remember When You Believed in Father Christmas?
Maíra Flores works with executives whose success has come at the cost of their body, the same tension, the same wall, the same pattern, no matter how much they've 'worked on it.' She helps them see what their body's been trying to tell them.
For a while, he was the centre of your world. Not a small part of it, the whole architecture. Whether he was coming. What he'd bring, based on how good you'd been. You didn't need any other explanation for how presents appeared under the tree. That was reality. Complete, self-contained, and entirely true, until the day it wasn't.
When it wasn't, when you found out, your whole world had to reconfigure. Not just, "Oh, that one fact was wrong." Something closer to: everything I built on top of that fact now has to be re-examined too. There was grief in it. A real loss, even if it sounds small from the outside now. For some of us, it took a while to land fully.
I bring this up because it's the closest thing most of us have to a memory of what it feels like when a blind spot becomes visible. It's useful because, as adults, this happens far less often than it should, not because we have fewer blind spots, but because nothing forces the reveal the way growing up forces the Father Christmas reveal. We just keep living inside them.
Here's the thing about a blind spot: it is a blind spot until the moment you see that it's a blind spot. Before that moment, it isn't "a belief you hold." It's simply reality. The only one you have access to. You don't experience it as an opinion you could question, you experience it as the water you swim in.
In my work, this is most of what I'm actually doing: not fixing behaviour, not installing new habits, but helping someone find the edge of a blind spot they didn't know was there, gently enough that it doesn't have to feel like the ground giving way underneath them.
A few I see constantly, in almost exactly this shape, in the leaders and executives I work with: Rest has to be earned. Not a preference, not a strategy, a rule so deeply embedded it doesn't register as a rule. Stopping without having "deserved" it first triggers something closer to guilt than relaxation.
Being fully seen is dangerous. Not disliked, dangerous. So the public version stays curated, competent, composed, while the rest stays carefully out of view. Visibility itself, not just judgment, is what the nervous system is bracing against.
If I slow down, it all falls apart. Not a conclusion reached through evidence. A belief so foundational it was never actually tested, because testing it feels too risky to attempt.
None of these arrived through conscious choice. Like Father Christmas, they were installed early, absorbed rather than decided, and have been running the show ever since, quietly enough to be mistaken for personality, or "just who I am."
The difference between this and the Father Christmas moment is that this reveal doesn't have to be sudden, and it doesn't have to be a loss. Nobody has to yank the belief away from you at a birthday party. It can be found slowly, on your own terms, with someone alongside you who already knows the shape of what you're looking for, because they've had to find their own.
So, what's a rule you're following right now that you never actually chose? And what might be possible if you could finally see it?
Read more from Maira Flores Xavier
Maira Flores Xavier, Embodiment Coach for Executives
Maíra Flores is an embodiment coach working with high-achieving professionals and executives who look after their bodies on the surface, the gym, the routines, while staying disconnected from what those bodies are actually signaling underneath. Combining ontological coaching, somatic medicine, and movement, she helps leaders recognize the patterns, often shaped by old trauma, quietly running their decision-making and leadership presence. She is the creator of The Five Masks framework, a diagnostic identifying the survival identity the nervous system has organized itself around, and works with clients internationally from her base in London.
