¶ Understanding Your Inner Critic
What if mindset coaching was focused on being practical instead of just being positive? Practical, as in, you could practice it. Welcome to Unlifted Essentials. In these mini episodes, you'll learn the enlisted system of practical mindset tools to unlock freedom and confidence for yourself and your clients. Let's do this. Kimberly, who am I to be a coach?
Why would anyone listen to me? There are so many great coaches already out there doing it. I don't have enough experience to be a coach. What if I can't help people? That's the... Some of the things that people say to themselves. And then there's the stuff that also statements that build the imposter syndrome, build and maintain, create and maintain the imposter syndrome. So it's the stuff that we.
We say to ourselves about ourselves, and then there's the stuff we fantasize in a negative way about other people saying about us. Who does she think she is coaching people? He is a coach. How can they coach someone if their life is so messed up? How prevalent is this phenomenon in the coaching world? It plagued me hard. for my first three years in coaching. When you say plagued, and I'm right there with you.
What did that look like specifically for you? Because we all have our own way of doing it. Well, lots of symptoms showed up. First symptom was... showing up to a session, panicked on the inside, sitting across from someone or on a phone call with someone, listening to them talk and share with me about what's going on. And the dialogue in my own head was, you can't help her.
You're going to make this worse. She's never going to listen to you. Do you even know enough to teach her and to share about this? You're going to make this worse. What are you doing? And that dialogue is horrible. And that dialogue would run in the back of my head and I'd hear it. And then sometimes I was able to say, hey, shut up. And I did know I knew enough and I knew I could help the person and I knew I was going to make it better.
But the fight that was happening in my head made me unavailable for the session that was happening in front of me. Biggest, most difficult symptom first. Secondary symptoms included. Yes. Significantly second guessing myself before posting anything on Instagram. Editing, editing, editing, editing, throwing posts in the garbage, never putting it out there.
wanting to start a podcast, wanting to start a YouTube channel, wanting to having all these dreams about all this influence that I was going to do and all the things I was going to do to help people. Nope. Stopped me dead in my tracks. Or I got started and I quit. Other symptoms included less sales. Because I couldn't make any money if I wasn't any good at it. I was okay. I was pretty good, actually.
You've worked with everybody in our coaching coach's community so far or interacted with them. Same thing. How often do people walk through the enlisted door? to start with the imposter syndrome in hand. It's up there. I'm hesitating to say 100% because there's someone who maybe has... a slighter case, less symptoms, I'd say a vast majority of us are experiencing it. And so this is a very, why do we bring that up? It's a very normal thing.
¶ The Trap of External Validation
Folks, it's to be expected that it's there when you first start out. The good news is, just like any story, it can be dismantled. And you absolutely want to dismantle that. I would imagine that the imposter syndrome has derailed more coaches from their dream career than anything else. That's way scarier than low sales, even though they are correlated. An imposter syndrome...
who make people flinch. It's not the second guess. It's the 550 second guess. That is draining. You talk about draining the emotional gas tank. As far as a coach on your side of the street about... Because guess what? A lot of the marketing, managing finances, building a brand, all of that, you can quite easily find a lot of...
quality free information on YouTube and then enroll in yourself in programs. You can learn all that stuff and you need to go for it. It's part of the game. It's part of the craft. And that extra certification or that super ultra-polished marketing program... that's not going to get in there and dig out that imposter syndrome. Most people fall into the trap that it will. If I just get that CrossFit Level 3 certification, then finally, once I cross that finish line, then finally,
Finally, here it is, folks. Here it is. Here's the whole thing. Then finally, I'm going to feel good enough. I'm going to feel like I'm good enough. I just need a few more certs. I just need to learn a few more things.
¶ Dismantling Imposter Syndrome Internally
The answer is both, folks. Continue to develop your skill set in whatever area of coaching that you are studying. And go into your stories. Go into the victim mentalities because they're kissing cousins. Go into the imposter syndrome. So when you start running these thoughts like Kimberly mentioned and you start creating the feels.
Think about where those feelings have showed up before in your life. Do a little memory lane and what you'll likely see if you stay there for five whole minutes. Shout out to John Kehoe. You're going to see a correlation between certain events in your life and these same emotions and feelings. You can totally go in there. And I'm using the same word again, dismantle, deconstruct those stories.
I can speak definitively about this and so can Kimberly. Life, I've turned the volume down so much on my imposter syndrome that when the words... They rarely show up now. They have little to zero charge. I just look at them and it's like, come on, man, really? So you're looking at... Duration and intensity. If your imposter syndrome voice, and that voice is made up of very likely less than 20 sentences. that are keeping this thing going that play on loop it's not like you have 920
Imposter syndrome-centric thoughts. No, it's a handful of them that are repped and repped with emotional charge. So if the volume is high and the emotional... response is strong that is going so you're thinking a ton of shitty thoughts and each one of those things brings up a very strong emotional response feeling in you that's going to take up a tremendous amount of your mental
and emotional real estate. You can totally, totally turn the volume down quite quickly when you know how to do it. First things first though, know to do it. Know to, then know how to.