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

fear 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 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 i can't do that everybody thinks they can't do everything these days i don't know why maybe it's because i do for a living but um i'm just surrounded by an audience of people that have real limiting beliefs and i wonder why but i also wonder how you help them overcome their 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 how are they serving i wouldn't be interested in necessarily where they come from i would be interested in how are they serving us right now and how are they not serving us because sometimes they're we're believing them because they're serving us for a purpose 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 one of 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 is i'm not very good at sales um you know i was i had to you know i've got a training consultancy i have to you know find clients and um you know so what's more helpful belief um and starting to unpick what would be a better way of seeing this what are my strengths um and what would be a new belief that would be serving me better i think in some point in your journey you probably not 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 we woke up i'm good yeah exactly and i think um that is a big part of where we got 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 cocked 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 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 then you cocked it up and we think in images 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 there'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 what are the attributes that allow you to achieve those things because quite often someone will go oh well i achieved that but it was because the weather was really good on that day or i achieved that because my team my team didn't 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 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 well like typically the average person realizes about five percent of their potential and i only say this because again like you said i was very normal kid from my parents bankrupt like we dropped out of school poor grades everything but it's one thing i had and i always say like the one thing i had is 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 the one of the reasons why i believed it was not because i had any bank of successes yet well 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 i think that if these are the people that become adults then i will have i will always have that advantage um so that was my way of like and so when i cut my grades and gcc and when school starts with that narrative that okay well you got an e so you're gonna be in having a life you're gonna be broken unhappy like no you're wrong like um so you were you were gathering evidence you were looking at your strengths which is part of the puzzle you may not have had the experiences and the evidence of the achievements and certificates and all of that but you what's more valuable is what you had is the non-tangible stuff because if we go through life only assessing our success on the tangible stuff then our confidence our self-belief actually in the two different things will be quite fragile oh yeah i can see that because you're always assessing yourself against a trophy or society because you're compared to oh i got this award against all of these other people and i won this trophy and i won this trophy and i won past this grade and it's always against somebody else in the society rather than looking at the intangible attributes that allowed you to achieve those successes because that's what isn't measurable against society and is transferable to other domains and this is and you're completely right i've never actually thought about it that way before because i was trying to figure out why at 14 i was convinced that i would be successful and 18 i would have a range of sport before them 25 i'm gonna be a million before them 25 achieve all those things just knew i would but it was purely based on this 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'd say grade is a tangible because school says okay you got a knee so unfortunately it creates the impression from all angles you're gonna be poor like i'm not gonna be that successful but tinny over there who's got an eight he's really gonna kill it as a surgeon you know and i think so how you make it alive out of that system and still with your self-esteem and self-belief in tact is remarkable but i think that what you had is better than the certificate yeah but what it does is it 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 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'm working with a client and you know so one of your strengths is being an authentic leader um one 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 your weaknesses i think it's important to highlight both i think it's more important to work on exploiting your strengths and i would um 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