Moment 28 - How To Overcome Your Limiting Beliefs: Anna Hemmings

00:03fear and doubt like lack of self-belief not believing that you can or those things that's probably one of the most common sort of mental games that um holds us back or um limits us from our full potential um how does how does one go about overcoming their own limiting beliefs about themselves like they think okay well no i can't do that everybody thinks they can't do everything it seems these days like i don't know why maybe it's just because of what i do for a living but um i'm just surrounded by an audience of people that have real limiting beliefs and i i wonder why but i also wonder how you help them overcome their own limiting beliefs big question it's a huge question how do we overcome our limiting beliefs it's actually something that i work on a lot with when i'm coaching clients um identifying beliefs that uh so you know we would start probably with what are some of those limiting beliefs and start to unpick how are those beliefs where how are they serving i wouldn't be interested in necessarily where they've come from i would be interested in how are they serving us right now and how are they not serving us because sometimes there's we're believing them because they're serving us for a

01:09purpose they're helping us in some way but often more often than not those beliefs won't be serving us um so starting to unpick that um you know almost like what are the pros and cons of having this belief here um right now that i can't achieve this or that one of my limiting beliefs was that i'm not very good at sales um you know i was i had to i have to you know i've run a training consultancy i have to you know find clients and um how you know so what's a more helpful belief um and starting to unpick what would be a better way of seeing this what what are my strengths um and what would be a new belief that would be serve me better i think in some point in your journey you probably not at one particular moment but gradually i imagine you started to build evidence within yourself that you could be a great kayaker and i imagine that was over a long period of time probably there wasn't one day where you woke up and thought i'm good yeah exactly and i think um that is a big part of where we get our confidence from is like our past experiences yeah so whenever we do something we we start to build a bank of memories and when we're at the next situation that is similar, we can choose to draw on the bank of negative experiences where we

02:26cocked it up, or we can choose to draw on the bank of positive experiences where we succeeded and we did it really well. And the trick is, and you know, if we, if we, and if we're not conscious about it, chances are we might pick the experience of when we failed. And then that's when we start to regurgitate all those thoughts and feelings of embarrassment and anxiety and nerves. And, and that doesn't help us and that's like that probably would then hinder performance absolutely it perpetuates the you know the doubt and the because you're reminding yourself of all remember last time when you did it you cocked it up and you messed up and you did then you then cock it up because you're thinking and then you cock it up because you're and we think in images yeah and so when you think of something that you messed up you're seeing yourself doing it right you're imagining it in your mind right here and now and so the trick is to consciously recall the positive experience, the past successes. And if there's nothing in the bank, exactly of that experience, there's chances are there's something similar.

03:25There's always something similar. And, you know, so I would work with clients to identify what are all of the successes that you've had, not just in that specific scenario, but let's look at lots of different successes and then let's pick out what are the, attributes that allowed you to achieve those things? Because quite often someone will go, oh, well, I achieved that, but it was because the weather was good on that day, or I achieved that because my team did it really. It wasn't me. So it's about starting to unpick, actually, what role did you play in that success? And what are the attributes that allowed you, your strengths, your attributes that allowed you to achieve that? And then we start to build up the bank of successes and the strengths and the attributes which we can transfer into any scenario how much do you think people and this is i don't know why i'm asking this question because it's not quantifiable but like to what extent do you think people underestimate their potential generally oh massively like would you say like over 95 because i think i'd say over i think i'd say people realize what like typically the average person realizes about five percent of their potential and i only real i only say this because again like you said i was very normal kid from

04:48very my parents bankrupt like we i dropped out i got kicked out of school poor grades everything but this one thing i had and i always say like the one thing i had was i genuinely believed that i was going to be where i am today just for no without a ton of evidence just genuinely believed And in fact, one of the reasons why I believed it was not because I had any bank of successes yet, but I had a little bit, but it was actually contrasting me to my peers when I was 14 and thinking, I think that I have skills they don't.

05:17And I think that if these are the people that become adults, then I will have, I will always have that advantage. So that was my way of like, and so when I cocked up my grades and GCSE and when school starts with that narrative that, okay, well, you got an E, so you're going to have an E life. you're going to be broken and happy like no you're wrong like um so i get my you were you were gathering evidence you were looking at your strengths which is part of the puzzle right you may not have had the experiences and the evidence of the achievements and the certificates and all of that but you what's more valuable is what you had is the non-tangible stuff yeah because if we go through life only assessing our success on the tangible stuff yeah then our confidence our self-belief actually and they're two different things will be quite fragile oh yeah i can i can see that because you're always assessing yourself against a trophy a trophy or society because you're compared to oh i got this award against all of these other people and and and i won this trophy and I want to pass this grade and I and it's always against somebody else and a society rather than looking at the intangible attributes that allowed you to achieve those successes

06:34because that's what isn't measurable against society and is transferable to other domains and this is the and you're completely right I've never actually thought about it that way before because I've always tried to figure out why at 14 I was convinced that I would be successful and at 18 I wrote my diary I'm gonna have a ranger of a sport before that I'm 25 I'm gonna be a millionaire from 25 achieved all of those things just knew I would but it was pure as you said it was purely based on and it's almost a strength audit or skills audit versus other people that I knew and I thought oh those skills are really good skills and they'll take you far but school is about tangibles like and I would say a grade is a tangible so school says okay you got a an E so unfortunately like it creates the impression from all angles you're going to be poor like and you're not going to be that successful but timmy over there who's got an a he's really going to kill it as a surgeon you know and and i think so how you make it out alive out of that system and still with your you know self-esteem and self-belief intact is remarkable but i and i think that what you had is is better than the certificate yeah yeah but but what it does is

07:42it allows you to go this is intrinsic in me no one can take it no one can take that away and my self-worth isn't based on a certificate and a trophy and an award how do you give people that well so you work on identifying those strengths what are those strengths we do this all the time we work with clients on what are those strengths and where's the evidence of those strengths and when they start to see the evidence of those strengths well you know so i'm i I'm working with a client. And, you know, so one of your strengths is being an authentic leader.

08:17One of your strengths is building relationships. Where's the evidence of that? Look at all these people. What do you do about weaknesses though? So would you highlight their weaknesses? I think it's important to highlight both. I think it's more important to work on exploiting your strengths. And I would, so we do a lot of diagnostics. We use behavioral profiling and all of that kind of stuff and all of that will bring up both and i think it's important to really be aware of your areas of development but ultimately if i'm sat on the start line of the world championships and i'm focused on my weaknesses and all the things i need to avoid my confidence is fragile yeah chances of performing on best slim and so in that moment i absolutely need to have on the tips of my fingers what my strengths are and i need to know them and I need to be able to exploit them. And I think the more you work on those, the better.