Meet Jamie Paquin
Understanding people has always interested me. Change made it personal.
I'm a Canadian living and working in Tokyo. Pattern Shift grew out of my studies of identity and behaviour, the experience of building a business in Japan, and changes I wanted to make in my own life.
A familiar contradiction
I cared about my health. I still wanted the chips and ice cream.
For years, those foods were part of my evenings. I could take nutrition seriously, make rules about when I would indulge, and still look forward to them as a reward.
Eventually, the meaning changed. I began to see them in relation to the health and independence I wanted as I got older. They became less appealing, and the behaviour changed with that.
That's my experience, and it doesn't tell us what will work for someone else. But it changed the question I wanted to ask: what makes a familiar response feel desirable or necessary, even when it conflicts with what we want?
The questions came first
How do we become the people we take ourselves to be?
My academic work at Carleton University, York University and Sophia University in Tokyo explored identity formation and the social and psychological influences on human behaviour. I also taught and published on related subjects.
I was interested in how beliefs and expectations become so familiar that we stop noticing them. What do we assume about ourselves? What do we think other people expect? Which possibilities do we dismiss before we've really considered them?
Those questions remain useful in coaching. They help us look beyond a label such as “I'm just not disciplined” or “I've never been confident” and examine what actually happens.
Life outside the classroom
Japan gave me another way to see my own assumptions.
I built Heavenly Vines, a Canadian wine-import business in Japan. Working across cultures brings questions about trust, relationships and communication into everyday decisions.
Something that feels obvious to one person can mean something quite different to another. Living with that difference has made me more interested in asking a good question before settling on an explanation.
That's part of what I bring to Pattern Shift: curiosity about how you see a situation, and a willingness to consider it from more than one angle.
What I bring to our conversations
Careful listening, direct questions and something to work on.
I want to understand what matters to you and what makes change difficult in your actual life. We'll look closely at examples, question assumptions where that helps, and work toward responses you can try outside the session.
I draw on questioning, reframing, perspective-taking and techniques from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), alongside my broader background in identity and behaviour. I'll explain any exercise I suggest so you can decide whether to try it.
My strongest interests are health and lifestyle habits, and helping people express what they think with clarity and respect. You bring the direction you'd like your life to take. We work together on what could help you get there.
Meet me
The best way to get a feel for this is to talk.
Tell me what you'd like to be different. In a free 15-minute consultation, we can see whether my way of working feels useful to you.