252. Self-Preservation Focus: Refresh Your Confidence and Self-Belief Artwork

Secrets From a Coach - Debbie Green & Laura Thomson's Podcast

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Secrets From a Coach - Debbie Green & Laura Thomson's Podcast

252. Self-Preservation Focus: Refresh Your Confidence and Self-Belief

August 29, 2025 • Season 20 • Episode 252

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In this fourth episode in our Apply SPF (Self-Preservation Focus) we explore practical ways to reset our confidence and self-belief. Taking a moment to refresh and enhance our sense of self in and out of the workplace.

• What3Words exercise helps pinpoint where you are mentally and emotionally right now; follow with Start/Stop/Continue reflection to make empowered changes
• Adopt a growth mindset like a fox rather than a fixed mindset like a panda; reframe "being bad" at something as simply "not practiced yet"
• Understand the learning journey from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence; practice makes permanent - most skills become comfortable after doing them three times

We also share our daily GAIL practice which is a great way to take a 2 min end of day reflection as you brush your teeth at night.

A useful listen for those wanting content ideas for themselves or others - as a reminder to look after yourself (as you're the only you!).

This episode is dedicated to all the self-doubters out there x

Speaker 1: 0:03

secrets from a coach thrive and maximize your potential in the evolving workplace. Your weekly podcast with debbie green of wishfish and laura thompson staveley of phenomenal training. Debs Insert Debs here now saying Lord as she's left me, manning the fort as she takes a well-earned summer break. This is our five-part focus that we've called Apply SPF Self-Preservation Focus. Summer is an ideal time to reset, refresh. Maybe your time frames, your daily schedules, have changed a little bit. The summer hours are out and it's that reminder of every now and then. Even the superheroes amongst us need to take a bit of downtime to be able to reset and refresh. As Deb's grandma taught her, slow down to go faster. Grandma taught her slow down to go faster. And this fifth and final one, we've called summer reset a chance to refresh confidence and self-belief. So I'm going to take you through three practical tips. These three are fantastic ones to take and pass on to someone else. So maybe you've got a team that is limping along a little bit and actually, actually, this would be an ideal September boost meeting. Maybe you're feeling a little bit fatigued at the moment and you've had a few things that have knocked your confidence and you want to reset and refresh that sense of confidence and self-belief. And this is about being yourself, because everybody else is taken, and we are going to take a look at three simple practical tools that people over the years, at our various workshops and leadership programs and team building days, have said they found genuinely useful. So, practical tip number one in order to know where I want to take myself, I need to know where I'm at now and where I've been. So our favorite icebreaker at the moment is the What3Words exercise. So if you've used the What3Words app, it's a tool that enables you to pinpoint with absolute precision where you are physically geographically in the world. Where you are physically geographically in the world. So the What3Words app. If you're not familiar with it, they've put the world into grid squares. Well, the land at the moment and 1.2 trillion squares that are three foot by three foot, which means that if you fall over and twist your ankle and you're lying in the middle of a random field, unlike a postcode, which could be a mile space, an ordnance survey grid reference is precise, but that's 12 digits. You might lose them when you're there in that kind of horrible moment. So what three words are three words, and those three word code, which is one room will be a different code from the next room enables you to be found. Therefore, it's a really powerful way to just sort of find yourself and be able to summarise actually, where am I at? So summer is a classic time for a bit of a reset.

Speaker 1: 3:14

What three words would you use to describe how your work life has been in the first half of this year? So, if I just give you a moment just to mull that through, what three words would you use to describe your work experience over the last six months? And whatever that word work means to you? And what that does in that moment is whether it's a reflection exercise for yourself. It enables you to just ground yourself Actually, where am I at the moment? And it's a really powerful tool if you feel like change is happening at whiplash speed, as I heard a team leader say the other week. I thought that was a really powerful word to use. So if you're feeling a little bit whiplashed from all the jolts of change maybe you've had some big things going on at the moment it just enables you to take stock.

Speaker 1: 4:03

What three words would I use to describe my work experience over the last six months? It is a phenomenal way to check in as a team. I'd encourage you, if you are going to do it, get everyone to write it down, otherwise they can get influenced by other words that people say. But it's an incredible way for everyone to be able to read the room. Where are we at Could be a fantastic way to check in in the first meeting back after summer. What three words would you use to describe the summer that you've had and that enables you to be empathetic, to then be able to have an awareness, to do. A bit of emotional intelligence in terms of being able to read the room Works well in a chat function as well as kind of verbally. So there we go.

Speaker 1: 4:45

So the first tip is checking in with yourself when am I at, and the what three words is a really nifty tool to be able to just grind ground and set yourself up with a little bit more of a sense of self. And then the step two with that one is what do I want to start, stop, continue? So let me check in with myself what three words would I use to describe how stuff has been? And then what three things would I want to start doing, stop doing or continue doing, and it's a really empowering way to make a bit of a shift or a bit of a tweak, and that's a really nice way to step out of a conversation. So, if you're there and you're enjoying some of the last summer rays, what three words would you use to describe the year so far? And what's maybe one thing I want to start doing? Stop doing, continue doing for the second half of this year, and what that enables you to do is to put yourself front and centre and to just keep ourselves empowered and a little bit higher level, above all of the kind of challenges that might be chucked at us, so we can keep a bit of a sky high perspective. So what three words? And start, stop, continue A really handy way to be able to refresh and reset that sense of confidence and sense of self.

Speaker 1: 6:03

The second tool that can help refresh our sense of identity, belief and confidence is to just remind ourselves that we are in a kind of a learning phrase of our life. We are in a kind of a learning phrase of our life no matter what age we are or what stage we are at, and having that kind of learning mindset keeps us in that growth mindset. So you'll see the fox and panda behind me. So those are the metaphors that I use to bring Carol Dweck's Fixed Versus Growth mindset to everyday life. So if we were to channel Darwin, survival of the fittest I don't have to be the most qualified, certified, experienced person in my role to be able to succeed and thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape. The trick is my adaptability. So can I adapt at least at the rate of change externally, to be able to kind of keep supported and relevant in that environment? And there are two characters from the animal kingdom that probably are interesting views to sort of keep in mind. So we don't really want to be a panda. So pandas love them as we do.

Speaker 1: 7:09

They find change incredibly stressful because all they eat is bamboo. They have to eat a lot of it because it's really low in calorific value and their lives are almost quite siloed. They're not running for their food, they're reaching for their food. So if suddenly the bamboo in your role is gone but you've been so busy doing those tasks that you haven't had a chance to upskill or innovate or find out what's going on, then change can feel a bit stressful because it almost creates a bit of a fixed mindset. This is what I do. This is how I've been trained to do it and anything that's going to stop me from doing it in that way is going to feel a bit scary because I might not be able to succeed at it.

Speaker 1: 7:47

And the foxy mindset is having that growth mindset of, well, I used to hunt and forage, but now actually I'm kind of sniffing around the bins. Now I'm not saying that we want to work in that way, but having that mindset of it might be different the way that I'm going to do what I do, but it's still me. I'm still the same fox, even though I used to be in a woodland but I'm now urbanized. It's still me. What I'm doing day to day doesn't define who I am. I'm who I am and actually that growth mindset is. It doesn't mean that I'm good or bad at anything, it's what I'm practiced at.

Speaker 1: 8:23

So let's say, as a kid you had the belief that you weren't great at maths or you weren't great at public speaking. It's remarkable of how that sense of self can carry through to adult years, the amount of adults we meet who are really worried about speaking up in front of others because they've got this fixed belief that they're not good at public speaking, and there's only a certain type of person that is good at public speaking, but no baby is born there with a mic and a lectern ready to do public speaking this idea of our brain being live wired. So the more you practice it, the more it becomes in that familiar kind of comfort zone. So the growth mindset perspective is well, I might not be a lover of public speaking, but I'll become more familiar and confident with it the more that I do it. So, rather than aiming for perfection, let me aim for progress, and that foxy mindset where we're channeling that growth mindset just enables us to be a little bit kinder with ourselves about.

Speaker 1: 9:22

You might have set yourself a bit of a challenge. Maybe you want to get promoted, change a job, get a job, shift how you're doing things, maybe adjust your hours, and you might be feeling a little bit that that's out of your comfort zone. And that's okay because it's outside the comfort zone, that stretch bit where the good stuff happens. But it's amazing how that comfort zone can become a bit claustrophobic. So the second step is what does it mean then, to have this growth mindset, rather than be good or bad at something, if we were to reframe it as practiced at something, and if we view it from a learning perspective, then it reminds us, no matter how old we are, no matter what stage we're at us, humans are born to learn. If you can worry about something, you can learn about something.

Speaker 1: 10:06

So, step two put in a learning mindset around it, in terms of any challenge that you've got, something that you don't feel particularly confident about yet. So, step one what three words describe my past? Start, stop, continue to start, set in the future If, as part of that, it's going to require a little bit of a comfort zone stretch, treating it as a learning experience rather than a judging past or failed experience. And then the third tool we're going to look at just enables us to keep that moving forward. Okay, so Malcolm Bradwell, about 50, 60 years ago, came up with this really handy tool that looks at how do you turn, how do you shift from not being skilled at something to being skilled or competent, and I bet, as you hear me using the words, you might have heard it before, but it's often used as a way to talk about a training process. But actually it's a really handy way to set a bit of a plan in action, if you know you want to reset or refresh some of the ways in which you're viewing yourself or doing stuff.

Speaker 1: 11:18

So the first stage is unconscious incompetence. So let's say you want to start doing some more things in your working life, but you haven't ever done anything like that before. So all you've got to go on in the unconscious incompetence stage is your beliefs and perceptions of what you've seen around you. So if you've had everyone in your life saying, oh my God, speaking up in front of people is a nightmare, let me tell you this horrible thing that happened to me, and of course, your brain is going to have a perception of that. Doesn't sound great. Let me avoid that for as long as possible. But actually, once we start to do something for the first couple of times, our brain then gets into conscious incompetence. So I now know what it is that I don't know, and actually that might be a little bit less bad than what I feared it was. So the unconscious incompetence stage is where I don't know what I don't know yet. So it either is. You know it could feel big and scary.

Speaker 1: 12:14

The second stage, once you've done a little bit of that task, is, okay, conscious incompetence. I now know what I don't know, but now I know what needs to be done. And then you get into the practice bit. So conscious competence is where I can do it, but I have to really think about doing it. So it can be quite tiring that bit. That's often why we might want to give up. That's why if you're learning to drive or you're learning a really complicated task, you need a mentor to kind of keep you going, because that conscious competence stage is where practice makes permanent and imagine your brain kind of the more you do something, the more that pathway becomes familiar.

Speaker 1: 12:51

And then you get into unconscious competence, which is I now just do it. That's gone from front brain to back brain. It's now part of and assimilated as part of my identity. So think of some of those things that five years ago you'd have been quite shocked at seeing yourself doing thinking. God, that would have really, that would have really frightened me before doing that. And actually now it's just part of my day job. You might not love it, but it hasn't taken over your thinking, for that you know, a week beforehand or a week after.

Speaker 1: 13:23

I think it's often really interesting to ask people what was the very first job that you had and what are some of the skills that you're still using now that actually you learn back in those early days, but they've become so unconsciously competent we sort of don't even recognise it as a skill. So the unconscious incompetence shifting to unconscious competence, it's a nightmare to spell on a flip chart those words. I can tell you that is a helpful way to be able to just remind ourselves that wisdom isn't instant, complicated. Skill acquisition takes time. It's not that you're not good at something, it's just you might not have gone through that conscious process of learning. So step one, what three words? Start, stop, continue, great way to reset and shift your intention. Step two having a growth mindset. So, rather than viewing it as a judgment, opportunity, pass or fail, viewing it as learning and the win is to learn.

Speaker 1: 14:24

And then the third step reminding ourselves that learning can take a bit of time. There'll be some bits of info that you've learned in an instant and actually might have been quite a traumatic learning experience, but those kind of chosen skills that we want to get more confident in practice makes permanent and um it uh, it might take a bit of time to kind of do something Interestingly in the world of learning and development when you're getting your head around a new workshop. We kind of what I've seen over the years, what we've seen over the years that really helps is that power of three. What we've seen over the years is that power of three See it once, then duel it, then solo deliver it, and then once you've done something three times, it's kind of under your belt. It's gone into that conscious incompetence stage, unconscious competence stage. So there we go. Which of those three tips did you know already? What do you think might be useful?

Speaker 1: 15:15

And let's end with our final postcard from Debs. Okay, so deb's, in her postcard from the beach, has reminded us and encouraging us to do a daily gale. So a gale is one of the tools that she created when we were right in the throes of the pandemic, our wonderful colleague gail. We can't imagine working without her, and actually what we were able to come up with devs came up with is a little mnemonic acronym mnemonic that enables us to take a bit of a pause at the end of each day or after a notable moment. And Gail stands for gratitude. What am I grateful for today, accomplished, what have I accomplished? So, as well as all the stuff that I have, what have I accomplished, what have I improved upon and what have I accomplished, what have I improved upon and what have I learned? And it's a great way to soothe away the rigours of the day and get set up for a bright tomorrow. So that's Debs's final postcard, from the beach to practice a daily gale. What am I grateful for, what have I accomplished, what have I improved upon and what have I learned? And this marks the fifth of our five-part SPF focus.

Speaker 1: 16:26

Summer is often a time where we have a little bit of a shift in our daily patterns and the purpose of summer is to reset, refresh for the autumn, winter ahead. And whether it is taking a bit of time for you guilt-free, whether it is being able to set ourselves some goals that fire us up rather than burn us out, able to set ourselves some goals that fire us up rather than burn us out, whether it's being able to rehearse in our head rather than ruminate and stress ourselves out by looking at some thinking tools. Or maybe it's just taking a little bit of time out to think actually, who am I and who do I want to be next? And there might be some challenges you're facing at the moment, but Debs and I and the rest of the team always here cheering you on. So we hope you've had a wonderful summer and can't wait to see you in the autumn winter stretch. Look after yourself, because you're the only you.

Speaker 1: 17:15

We hope you've enjoyed this podcast. We'd love to hear from you. Email us at contact at secretsfromacoachcom, or follow us on Insta or Facebook. If you're a Spotify listener, give us a rating, as it's easier for people to find us, and if you want to know more, visit our website wwwsecretsfromacoachcom and sign up for our newsletter here to cheer you on and help you thrive in the ever-changing world of work.