Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction 00:01:44: Confidence gremlins 00:03:49: Idea for action 1: move from limiting to limitless beliefs 00:04:56: Idea for action 2: if-then shortcuts 00:06:24: Go-to guru 00:06:31: Relevant podcast episode 00:06:39: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Helen Tupper: Hi, I'm Helen.

Sarah Ellis: And I'm Sarah.

Helen Tupper: And you're listening to the Squiggly Careers podcast.  And this episode is part of our Skills Sprint series.  We've recorded 20 episodes, each of them are less than seven minutes long, and they're designed to help you build some career development momentum.  So, in every episode, we're going to talk about Squiggly Skill, share an idea for action from each of us, and then we'll give you a go-to guru and a podcast episode so you can learn a bit more.  And we really want you to turn this Skills Sprint into your learning streak.  So, for everybody who completes the entire sprint, that's 20 days, we're going to offer you a free Five Skills to Succeed in a Squiggly Career virtual workshop with Sarah and me in September.  All you've got to do is listen and do a bit of learning and then post about your progress on social and tag us, we're @amazingif, in your posts and then we will be in touch.

Sarah Ellis: In this Skills Sprint, we're talking about self-belief, and the first thing to say is self-belief is a skill.  I know that sometimes it doesn't feel that way, it might feel like we've just not got as much self-belief as other people, or it's something that we are born with and we can't really change, but we can with practice develop it, we can become more confident and also nobody has 100% self-belief all of the time.  I promise you, it doesn't matter how successful somebody looks in their Squiggly Careers, everybody has doubts, everybody has those knotty moments. I think the first thing that's really important is that we see those doubts as data, as Susan David would say.  We'll come back to Susan David.  And we always describe it as, use our doubts as data for our development.  So, see our flaws, those things that probably feel a bit more imperfect about us, see this as just being features of being human rather than something to be fixed.  I think if we feel like we've got to fix ourselves when it comes to self-belief, we're sort of starting from the wrong place.  `And of course, we all have gremlins, and these are beliefs that hold us back, beliefs that get in our way.  So Helen, give us a couple of those gremlins that you've got.

Helen Tupper: Let the gremlins out!

Sarah Ellis: Let the gremlins out to play!

Helen Tupper: I think probably the most significant one for me is a gremlin about needing to be liked, or maybe more specifically, needing to always be seen as a positive person.  And the reason that gets in my way is because I don't always articulate exactly how I'm feeling, and I will cover it up and be like, "Oh, it's okay"; or, if I disagree with something, I find it quite hard to share that disagreement and I will often just feel like I've just got to let it go, and all that happens is it really gets built up and you end up with this thing I'm calling emotional leakage.

Sarah Ellis: Resentment.

Helen Tupper: Or, resentment, emotional leakage, it's basically just an annual outburst where it just all comes out, and it probably would have been better to just manage it more proactively along the way.  But I find that hard to do because of that gremlin.

Sarah Ellis: Maybe we should put something in a diary where you just start going --

Helen Tupper: Annual outburst!

Sarah Ellis: "This is the annual outburst of the gremlin just coming out to play" and being like, "Here are all the things I disagree with but didn't say anything at the time.

Helen Tupper: I mean, that sounds great.  I'm not sure that's caging the gremlin, that's just creating a moment, a controlled way of just letting it go!  What about yours?

Sarah Ellis: Well, one of my gremlins that I have worked really hard on over the last ten years, and I always work hard on, because I think with these gremlins you cage them but then you do have to keep working hard to keep them caged, otherwise they creep back out again, and mine is definitely around conflict.  So, I prefer it where people just get on all of the time.  I think if people disagree with me, I think I make the assumption it means they don't like me, or they don't think I'm good enough or smart enough.  So, "They've got a different point of view, so that must mean that I'm wrong, and therefore do they think I'm not very good at my job?" But I think we often do get stuck in these spirals that these gremlins cause.  And so I've worked really hard to think about, "Well, what will help to cage that gremlin so it doesn't get in my way?  Do I want to join any debating team anytime soon?  Absolutely not", but that's not very relevant for my role.  So, I think we are also trying to think about this in the context of your Squiggly Career.  How can you just cage that gremlin so it doesn't get in the way of you exploring your potential, or your progression possibilities that you're really interested and fascinated by?

Helen Tupper: And so my idea for action here, which actually comes from our book, The Squiggly Career, is about moving from limiting to limitless beliefs.  So, a limiting belief is sort of the voice of your gremlin.  So for example, mine will say, "If you ask difficult questions, Helen, then you're going to come across as a difficult person, so don't do it", and that's really unhelpful.  I'm not going to do anything different while my gremlin says that to me.  So, what we need to do is give your gremlin a different statement to say, and that's the limitless belief.  So instead, I will consciously say to myself, in those moments where I want to speak up, but I feel my gremlins are silencing me, I will now say, "Difficult conversations create different outcomes".  And I really, really care about different outcomes, and I've done this enough now that I actually believe it.  The first time I was like, yeah, right.  But I gave it a go, and I was like, "Oh, maybe that did work.  Maybe they don't hate me". So, the more that you can just write down, what does your gremlin say to you today, that's the limiting belief; and what do you want it to say instead, the limitless belief, and it's that instead statement that you're trying to say to yourself in that situation where your gremlin is most likely to come up.

Sarah Ellis: And so, if that's the awareness part of caging the gremlin, my idea for action is then the sort of, what might you do differently that other people could observe.  And this is where I find if-then shortcuts have been really helpful to cage my gremlin.  So, "If somebody disagrees with me, then figure out what do you do today".  So when the gremlin is in charge, what does that look like?  So for me, that means withdrawing, stopping speaking, all of my introvert tendencies go into overdrive, so I ideally want to hide.  If I can, I'll leave the room, to be honest.  So, that's my if-then when the gremlin's in charge. So, I need to come up with an if-then shortcut that helps me to be in charge of my gremlin instead.  This might look a bit more like, "If somebody disagrees with me or has got a different point of view to me, then I ask open curious questions".  Now, I can say that in a very simple and quick way now, but that took me quite a lot of experimenting to find the right action for me, and lots of practice.  But what that does mean is that I can stay present in the moment when people do have a different point of view to me, and I can sort of keep the gremlin caged.  It's not easy, but it's such a quick shortcut that I'm just really used to it now. If someone says, "Oh, I really disagree that self-belief is a skill", in one of our workshops, rather than just panicking and ideally wanting to end the workshop, I would say, "Oh, that's really interesting.  Tell me a bit more about how you've got to that point of view [or] what have you read that's helped you to learn about self-belief?" and so just engage in that conversation.  It's almost like they're very small actions, but I think they are massive game-changers for those gremlins.

Helen Tupper: And our go-to guru here is Susan David, who's written a brilliant book on the topic of Emotional Agility and has a TED talk on the topic too, so definitely worth a watch.  And a podcast that you can listen and learn more is episode 327, and that's on How to Quieten Your Inner Critic.

Sarah Ellis: So, thanks for listening to this Skills Sprint, we hope you're finding them useful.  We'd love you to share and subscribe so you don't miss a sprint.  But that's everything for this episode, so bye for now.

Helen Tupper: Bye everyone.