confidence

As human beings we are masters at creating narratives.  We create colorful stories that have the capacity to stir up emotion.  And that can be very wonderful and inspiring.  I’ve often said that emotions are the elixir of life.  The problem with our innate gift for story telling is that we often tend to cling to the negative and painful narratives and replay them repeatedly in our minds.  If she just hadn’t said that.  If I just hadn’t done that.  Then the relationship wouldn’t have been ruined.  I wouldn’t be in such dire straits. We create headlines of negativity And off this rumination we create high level headlines, scripts that sound like:  I am always getting taken advantage of. I am estranged from this relative. I am always making bad choices. I am bad at leadership. I am horrible at relationships. I am not assertive enough. I am weak. I am not hardworking enough to pull that off. I am overweight. I am stupid. I am never going to get ahead in life. I am damaged. I am a victim. I am powerless to change anything. Just let it go, right? We’re often told by self help experts that we have to let go of these negative scripts.  Release the negative self talk, they exclaim!  But how?  Especially when they’re so ingrained.  Many of these stories have been kicking around in our brains for decades.  Maybe I’m crazy for saying this but “Let that sh%t go” sounds trite and condescending.  If it was that easy, I would have done it by now, is what I often think when I’m met with platitudes like that. I often speak about the power of language with folks I am coaching, and direct coaching clients to pay particular attention to anything that comes after the phrase “I am.” Why?  Because words are literally magic.  And they have the capacity to expand the possibilities in our lives or close them down for good.  Words, whether spoken out loud or spoken in our head, are incredibly powerful.  If you’ve ever read or heard of the book, The Four Agreements, Ruiz speaks to this when he addresses the first agreement – Be impeccable with your word, who says: “You can measure the impeccability of your word by your level of self-love.  How much you love yourself and how you feel about yourself are directly proportionate to the quality and integrity of your word.” Beware of the negativity bait and switch So what would impeccability of word look like as it pertains to releasing negative self-talk?  Would it be the converse?  Instead of I am not weak, perhaps the answer lies in the reverse – I am powerful.  That would be convenient, wouldn’t it?  Just a simple bait and switch should be enough to do the trick, right? In my experience it’s tough to go from one extreme to the other.  We as humans also have an animalistic ability to sniff out the falseness of a message.  If […]

The last few weeks have not been the easiest.  I’ve got a condition in my inner ear, that when it flares up, I have an on again off again low-grade fever and get dizzy, where every day I’m on a boat that is rocking in the wind as I try to do my best to coach, facilitate, or do whatever it is I’m tasked with.  Not fun.  And then things pile up, I get stressed, I try to exercise self-care and ask for what I need, reschedule where I can, show myself some much-needed compassion and empathy.  But as you know, these things aren’t easy, especially when you run a business. All this to say that some things fell off in the shuffle last week, which included this blog.  And at that time, I practiced compassion and told myself it was okay, that in every life a little rain must fall, and took the opportunity to congratulate myself on my fine efforts up to this point.  Which is all well and good.  Yay me. And this week I’m still muddling through as the dizziness isn’t gone yet and heard a pesky little voice ringing in my ear, the voice of the workhorse, full of type A authority – “Pull your head out of your rear Shelley, and just get the blog done!” And guess what happened?  Absolutely nothing.  I started looking for ways to procrastinate.  My mind was filled with anything else I could do, and I really do mean anything else.  Taking out the trash, scrubbing the toilets, making a grocery list.  I was really scraping the bottom of the barrel to be sure.  Why?  Because it felt like a grind. A soul destroying, sucking daily grind.  And who can easily muster energy for the daily grind? We unknowingly create our own daily grind And then I remembered the fundamental lesson on why it’s important to approach life more focused on the journey than it is the destination.  Or in other words, the being is just as (or even more important) in life than the doing.  So often in life and leadership we’re focused on the latter.  I’ve just got to get this deliverable out the door.  Make another phone call, send another email.  Complete another performance review.  Give another presentation. And then I can relax.  I’ll have more time later to think about things and enjoy things. But the problem is we never do.  This is how we fool ourselves.  And then we wonder why we feel so empty, and life just feels like an endless daily grind of one thing after another. I’m not saying reframing this is easy by the way, we live in a world that rewards output and productivity.  We set ambitious targets for revenue, we set stretch goals, we live in a VUCA – volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world where everything needed to be done yesterday.  And I’m also not saying that we shouldn’t get goals or visualize success.  As a coach […]

I look around and see everyone is pursuing these amazing careers and they have great lives.  They all seem to know what they’re doing, and they have a purpose.  I don’t understand why I can’t get in gear.  What’s wrong and missing in me that I can’t figure it out? I hear this a lot as a career coach.  And I also recognize it’s hard not to compare yourself to others.  When we are caught up in the cult of comparison, we are often caught up in the trance of the inner critic.  It’s our brain’s flawed way of trying to motivate ourselves to move into action by using comparison as the carrot to dangle in front of our faces or more aptly the switch to use on our backs.  It works up to a point where it stops working as a motivator. We prove and we prove and we prove and then we get tired. And wonder what it was all for.  And that is when we find ourselves on the messy path to growth.  To wholeness.  To uncovering our true value. When I first started out as a coach, my confidence was lower.  I was trying something new; I was worried about whether I would be a success and I spent a lot of time and energy ruminating about what I was doing in relation to other coaches.  I’d see their fancy LinkedIn posts of workshops they were running, filled with pictures of smiling participants, complete with slick materials bearing perfectly polished logos and I’d feel woefully inadequate.  I’d use it as fodder to beat myself up with.  I’d start to spring into action to post something, to plan something, in a desperate desire to compete, to put my own words out there too.  And then I’d be riddled with thoughts about how my idea wasn’t as good.  It would never work.  And I’d abandon the idea to the graveyard we each have in our heads.  Following your true north isn’t easy The inner critic comparison attack still happens from time to time for me, and chances it does for you too.  But it looks a little different now.  Recently I’ve turned down a few opportunities that have come my way, because I’ve sensed they weren’t the right path for me and didn’t resonate with my values.  Perhaps they would have been right for a different coach, or if I had a different idea or vision for my business.  And it was extremely hard to do because I knew deep down my inner critic wasn’t going to like it.  I was afraid of the fire that I knew saying no would brew.  Now Gertie (my inner critic) is telling me I was crazy to walk away from the revenue.  Telling me I am woefully inadequate compared to the coaches that took that path and look how successful they are.  And it’s getting in the way of progressing a couple of initiatives I want to kick off, which was […]

There’s a common misconception floating around currently where passion and purpose is concerned and the whole decision of career path.  “When I find my passion, my job won’t feel like work.” “When I’m following my purpose, I’ll be fearless. I’ll know I’ve found the right career path.  The things that used to scare me just won’t anymore.” Don’t get me wrong, tapping into passion and purpose is great.  A lot of my career coaching and leadership coaching work is geared at helping folks recognize these things for themselves and connect to them in a meaningful way.  But as far as the above statements are concerned – I hate to burst your bubble, but they just aren’t true. I’ll give you an example.  I love teaching, I love facilitating.  It’s when I’ve had probably the most moments in actual flow – those moments you lose yourself, time passes and you’re not watching the clock.  These are magical moments, as you’re completely present, mindful and 100% engaged in what you’re doing.  I often suggest coaching clients think about times when they have entered this state as a way of connecting with activities and topics that bring joy.  The more you notice a correlation between flow moments and a certain activity, it may be a good career path option to explore. There is no career path that will deliver constant flow But that doesn’t mean shifting your focus to that activity or career path will automatically bring you into an instant state of flow 100% of the time.  The human experience is way more complicated than that.  I’ve also had a lot of scary moments as a trainer and a facilitator.  Difficult participants, difficult clients, difficult colleagues.  Logistical challenges where a room hasn’t been ready, the materials failed to show up or a flash flood was suddenly headed my way with a room full of participants and no idea what to do.  Add to this my personal favorite – incomplete or incoherent course content that’s only been delivered to me a day or so before a program and I’m expected to pull off a miracle with no time to prepare.  Before every delivery I’m a little bit nervous.  There are often insecurities that come up – What if I don’t know enough?  What if I get asked a question I don’t know the answer to and look stupid in front of participants?  What if I can’t handle the challenging dynamics in the room?  Things are often coming at a facilitator a million miles a minute.  What if I miss something?  What if the feedback is negative from the participants and they express it was a waste of their time?  What if this team or coachee doesn’t get the outcome they’re looking for? I can’t recall a single delivery where I haven’t felt at least a twinge of anxiety in the run up to a session starting.  And yet I do it anyway.  Day in and day out, over and over again.  I show […]

There’s often a disconnect between what we want and where we find ourselves in this journey called life.  Maybe you come up with an idea of something to try or to learn, but you find yourself quickly dismissing it or finding reasons to rationalize why it would never work.  We often mistakenly perceive these things as a lack of motivation.  “I guess I just didn’t want it enough.  But when I find the right thing, I’ll know it because I’ll suddenly be motivated and filled with an intense passion!” Wrong.  Motivation doesn’t just fly out of the air when you find the right thing.  There is no right thing by the way.  Cultivating motivation and passion has a lot more to do with what voices you’re letting speak inside that crazy thing called your head, rather than the specific thing that you’re focused on. In my experience as a coach, folks typically are stuck for one of two reasons.  The answer lies in the source of the stuckness, and whether it has to do with an outer block or an inner block.  What is an outer block? An outer block is an external constraint or barrier that gets in the way of a person achieving their goal.  It’s something that needs to be planned for, managed, and actively worked.  Let’s say I’m thinking of making a career transition, and I want to move into finance.  Education will obviously be a barrier to me achieving this goal if I know nothing about numbers.  So identifying a course or a program to enroll in, using time management skills to plan for this course, budgeting for this course will be key.  Outer blocks are relatively straightforward and easy to coach.  The problem is that most of us suffer from inner blocks when there is a disconnect from where we currently are to where we want to be, when we feel stuck or are lacking motivation. The sinister world of the inner block and the inner critic In my time as a coach, I’ve never met a client (including myself) who didn’t suffer from inner blocks and the curse of the inner critic.  An inner block is a deep-seated belief that who we are and what we are just isn’t good enough and will never be enough.  We all have an inner critic.  Mine’s name is Gertie.  Here she is: Gertie loves to fly around my head at warp speed and bump into things.  She squeals with glee as she yells, “You don’t work hard enough Shelley!”  Deep down Gertie knows that I’m lazy and I’ll never do what it takes to finish that new initiative or project.  That online leadership academy I’ve been thinking about building and piloting – What a silly pipe dream!  And then I start thinking to myself, “Well, maybe it wasn’t that important after all.  Maybe I just didn’t want it that bad.” Or maybe I do, and I just allowed myself to get derailed because the inner critic […]

“You know what I’ve realized?  I’ve concluded that it’s okay to just be average.” I heard this from a client a few weeks ago.  He continued on to say, “For so long I’ve been worried about my image.  What others thought about me.  I would leave every interaction wondering whether I’d said the right thing.  Worried that I didn’t.  Worried about the interaction.  Did I dazzle them enough?  Wondering if they were seeing the smart and successful attributes in me that I wanted them to see.  I had to get them to realize I was special, a star.  Was I successful in getting the sale or the deal?  Wondering how if it hadn’t gone well, how I could later manipulate the situation to get the outcome I wanted.” (We all do a version of this, just in case you were wondering if this is unique.) “Sounds exhausting.”  I replied. “Extremely.”  He confirmed. “And now you’re realizing it’s okay to just be average.  How does that feel?”  I asked. “I feel free.” I smiled.  It reminded me of the moment when I realized it too.  And the feeling of serenity and intense peace that came with it.  I was so jazzed about the revelation that I even broke out into poetic genius and wrote a poem about it – The Joy of Being Average. It wasn’t a very good poem.  It didn’t even rhyme.  I even tried to find it to insert it into this blog because I thought that would make me look quite clever, but my filing system must be pretty crap because it’s disappeared.  But I swear I wrote it.  The Pursuit of Special is Stressful The image management aspect of trying to prove ourselves is exhausting.  I got told growing up I was smart.  I was special.  I believed it.  I so wanted it to be true.  And it was all very well intended appreciation meant to lift me up from family members, teachers, friends and colleagues.  But then I had to prove it.  Then I had to live up to it.  I spent a lot of time thinking about it.  My image, who I wanted to be, who I wanted people to think that I was.  An international woman of mystery, a courageous trailblazer who had conquered the globe and lived and worked in multiple countries, started my own successful businesses – twice.  I carefully crafted and perfected these stories, used to spend a lot of time thinking about them for when I would give a speaking engagement.  It had to be just right.  It had to dazzle the audience.  I had a whole wall in my office filled with degrees, certifications, accomplishments.  I ran out of room for them eventually and started putting them in the bathroom.  It’s not a surprise I did this.  It’s not a surprise my client did something similar.  Our context sets us up for it, and we unconsciously fall straight into the trap.  If you look on social media it’s […]