The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 28 - How To Overcome Your Limiting Beliefs: Anna Hemmings

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. Anna Hemmings MBE has won a staggering 11 World and European Championship Kayaking medals with 9 of them being gold. By the age of 24 she had been a World Champion 3 times and competed at the Olympic Games and in 2010 she was awarded an MBE for her services to sport. In this moment episode, Anna reveals how we can replace our negative and limiting beliefs with a stronger, more positive mindset. Episode 65 - https://g2ul0.app.link/SkwOXQ8uvkb Anna: https://www.annahemmings.com/ https://twitter.com/annahemmings Watch the episodes on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/StevenBartlettYT?sub_confirmation=1 The Diary Of A CEO live - Sign up here - https://g2ul0.app.link/diaryofaceolive

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the united states and i'd be recording a lot more over in the states they put a massive billboard in time square um for the show so thank you so much amazon music um thank you to our team and thank you to all of you that listen to this show let's continue 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 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 um 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, identifying beliefs that, 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've come from. I would be interested in how are they serving us right now and how are they not serving us? Because sometimes we're believing them because they're serving us for a purpose. They're helping us in some way, but more often than not, those beliefs won't be serving us.

So starting to unpick that, almost like what are the pros and cons of having this belief here 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 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 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 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 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 oh 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 and you did this and you did that. But then you cock it up because you're thinking like that. And then you cock it up because you're, 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 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 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'd think i'd say people realize what like typically the average person realizes about five percent of their potential and i only really i only say this because again like you said i was very normal kid from very 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 the 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 and 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 so when I, my 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 be in, have an E life. You're going to be broken and happy. Like, no, you're wrong. Like, um, so I get my, my, you were, you were gathering evidence. You were looking at your strengths, which is part of the puzzle, right? So 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. 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 went past this

grade. And it's always against somebody else and a 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 the and you're completely right and 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 18 i wrote my diary i'm gonna have a range of a sport before i'm 25 i'm gonna be a millionaire from 25 achieved all of those things just knew i would but it was as you say 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 gonna be poor like and you're not gonna 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 what i and i think that what you had is is better than the certificate yeah yeah but 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 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'm working with a client and, you know, so one of your strengths is being an authentic leader. 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 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 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, my confidence is fragile. Chances of performing it on rest, 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.