How do you go from insecure overachiever to secure high performer? One Mental ChatGPT prompt at a time.

Pooja Venkatraman

Jan 10, 2025

Let me tell you how your stress is created.

There are 3 characters in this story.

Circumstances.

Your Automatic Brain.

And you.

Circumstances are things that happen outside of you.

They are the words your boss says.

The look on your coworker’s face.

Your emails.

Your to-do list.

Your job title.

The amount of money you have in your bank account.

Etc. etc. The world has LOTS of circumstances.

You run into them all day long.

Your Automatic Brain is like ChatGPT.

It is a little AI copilot that sits on your shoulder.

Except it’s not artificial intelligence. It’s automatic intelligence :)

And your Automatic Brain spends all day long providing you with running commentary on all the circumstances that it encounters.

And it’s extremely detailed commentary.

Your brain gives you an interpretation of what the circumstance means for you.

It gives you a feeling, based on that interpretation.

And it gives you an action plan for what you should do next, based on the interpretation and the feeling.

And your brain never stops.

Every waking hour of the day, it provides you with a continuous stream of commentary, full of interpretations, emotions, and suggested action plans.

You are the user.

If your Automatic Brain is like ChatGPT, you are the user.

You’re sitting in your desk chair, looking at your screen, watching it fill up with all this commentary from your AI copilot.

Now, here’s the thing about the running commentary that your Automatic Brain gives you.

Your Automatic Brain, just like ChatGPT, can give you an almost infinite number of interpretations and emotions and action plans.

AND all that infinite commentary, broadly speaking, falls into two big categories.

Those two categories are:

Secure and insecure.

Safe and unsafe.

No-threat-detected and threat-detected.

(Those are just three different ways of saying the same thing :)

If your Automatic Brain interprets something as being unsafe, it activates protective mechanisms.

For example…

Your brain might create the feeling of inadequacy and give you an action plan of: do extra work to make sure you don’t look stupid.

Your brain might create the feeling of overwhelm and give you an action plan of: scroll Instagram and procrastinate starting that big project.

Your brain might create the feeling of uncertainty and give you an action plan of: keep analyzing your options but don’t commit to a choice.

Your brain might create the feeling of anxiety and give you an action plan of: figure out if that person is mad at me and make them like me again.

Your brain might create the feeling of defeated and give you an action plan of: give up, crawl into bed, and stay there forever.

These are all examples of common protective mechanisms that brains tend to deploy when they feel threatened: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and fold.

And there are a million subtleties, nuances, and variations in what these protective mechanisms look like in each individual person and each individual situation.

But the overall theme is the same.

Your Automatic Brain has interpreted something as being unsafe, and it has activated protective mechanisms to try and keep you safe.

Insecure Overachiever is who you are when your protective mechanisms are activated.

If your Automatic Brain interprets something as being safe, it doesn’t activate protective mechanisms.

And Secure High Performer is who you are when your protective mechanisms AREN’T activated.

Secure High Performer isn’t something you have to become.

It’s something you have to return to.

That version of you is not something you have to create.

It’s simply something you have to uncover.

It’s not a new house you have to construct and move into.

It’s the house you’re already living in — you just have to turn the alarm system off.

So how do we do that?

One Mental ChatGPT prompt at a time.

Because here’s the amazing thing about your Automatic Brain.

Just like ChatGPT — it is extremely responsive to whatever prompt you give it.

So all we have to do is throw a new prompt at it and see what it says in response.

See whether that new prompt that helps your Automatic Brain interpret its circumstances as safe…

So that it deactivates your protective mechanisms…

So that you can go back to being a Secure High Performer.

In my posts, I give you suggested Mental ChatGPT prompts.

I drop thought suggestions, new perspectives, and new ways of thinking about things into your brain.

Just like a ChatGPT user typing a prompt into the text box and hitting enter — I’m just doing that in your brain, through my words.

And my hope is that these Mental ChatGPT prompts will:

Cause your Automatic Brain to shift from an insecure interpretation of your circumstances to a secure interpretation of your circumstances…

And therefore, turn off your protective mechanisms…

Take you out of Insecure Overachiever Mode…

And put you back into Secure High Performer Mode — your natural home base.

That’s the most I can do in my posts.

Drop a prompt into your Mental ChatGPT, cross my fingers, and hope your brain gives you helpful outputs in response.

In my coaching sessions, we do prompt engineering.

We’ll take a download of what your Mental ChatGPT is saying right now.

We’ll assess, broadly speaking, whether it’s in Insecure Overachiever Mode or Secure High Performer Mode.

And if it’s in Insecure Overachiever Mode, I’ll throw a Mental ChatGPT prompt at it.

Then we’ll see what your brain has to say in response.

Then I’ll adjust my prompt and try again — or try a new prompt altogether.

Then we’ll see what your brain has to say in response.

Then I might follow up on what your brain said and try a further prompt based on its response.

Then we’ll see what your brain has to say to that.

And we’ll keep going until we’ve turned your brain’s protective mechanisms off, shifted your brain out of Insecure Overachiever Mode and back to its natural state — Secure High Performer Mode.

This is nothing more than prompt engineering for your Mental ChatGPT.

Trying a prompt, checking the response, trying another prompt, checking the response, adjusting again, checking the response — until you get the outputs that you want.

Just like you might do with actual ChatGPT in order to get the outputs you want.

And in coaching, not only do you learn how to keep your brain in Secure High Performer Mode for the specific circumstances that are currently in front you…

You also learn the overall skill of partnering with your Mental AI Copilot…

So you can switch your brain from Insecure Overachiever Mode to Secure High Performer Mode on demand for the rest of your life.

So if you’d like to spend less time feeling stressed and anxious in Insecure Overachiever Mode in 2025…

And more time feeling in control and in flow, in Secure High Performer Mode…

Come talk to me, and let’s get started.

Book a free coaching consult

What my clients have to say…

“Trust the process and within a few sessions, you'll see results. This is not something where you have to wait six months or a year before you expect to start feeling better. It happens pretty quickly.”
—Client | Head of Business Development at MedTech Company

“After a few sessions, I saw that, ‘Wow, I’m not in my own way anymore.’”
—Client | Solutions Engineer at Fintech Company

“I started seeing the results in a couple of months and it was huge.”
—Client | CEO, PE-backed company

Less Stress, More Flow with Pooja V.

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