🏆Having the confidence to go again and again with Kirsty Hulse
Kirsty Hulse is a confidence expert who runs Roar! – an inclusive training business that specialises in empowering teams to hit their professional goals. She previously founded a successful marketing agency, and is the organiser of Confidence Live – a conference celebrating motivation, confidence and self improvement in Stoke On Trent on 30th March
On top of all those professional achievements, she is an absolutely brilliant human being who speaks about confidence with bravery, generosity, and courage. The perfect guest for this week’s webinar then.
Kirsty talked us through; her relationship with confidence, negativity bias, habit-stacking, motivation, and the power of language, and how all of that relates to resilience and having the confidence to pick yourself back up in hard times.
It was an engaging, thoughtful, and actionable session – thank you to all who tuned in!
🏥 Take time for your wellness, or you’ll be forced to take time for your illness
Kirsty began the session by telling us about her experiences with anxiety. She described how anxiety affected her body for so many years, resulting in rashes, heart palpitations, panic attacks and more. Maybe not what you’d expect to hear from a confidence coach, but Kirsty highlighted that anyone can get stressed and have anxiety, and that none of us are immune to overworking.
Sometimes the decision to step off the hamster wheel is yours, and sometimes, without warning, the bottom can fall out of your life. Grief, loss, redundancy, and major life changes may be out of your control and can leave you feeling lost.
Kirsty shared 4 things you can do in those moments, to get up, dust yourself off, and try again:
👎 Understand the Negativity Bias
We are genetically predisposed to focus on the negatives. It’s a survival method that has kept us safe as a species.
In our daily lives, we can be doing a really good job on all of the things we’re responsible for, but if you drop the ball on one thing, that’s all you’ll be able to think about.
This is human. And once you’re aware that we all default to the negative, you can start taking a bit of time to consciously attach to the positive.
🏃♂️ Learn about away and toward-state motivation
On human motivation, Kirsty explains that any time we’re spurned to take action either ‘away-state motivation’ or ‘toward-state motivation’ is at play.
Away-state motivation is driven by the idea that when there is a bad thing that you don’t want to happen, you work to move away from it. It could be that you don’t want to let someone down, so you do a job they’ve asked you to, or maybe you don’t want to look incompetent, so you spend more time working on a pitch deck. Away-state motivation is where you don’t want a certain thing to happen so you act in order to avoid it.
This kind of motivation can be good and helpful, but there are some pitfalls to be aware of. ASM is essentially motivating ourselves through fear. When we do that, it can cause:
- Burnout
- Stress
- Exhaustion
- Feeling like a failure
- Not acknowledging the good things
We root ourselves in the negative to spurn us into action, but if we consistently do this, it’s draining.
Toward-state motivation is away-state motivation’s friendlier cousin. Kirsty explains that she tries to exclusively motivate herself through TSM now. So, instead of motivating herself to act from a fear of making mistakes, she motivates herself to act with a hope of doing good work. The change is just semantic, but it makes all the difference.
Research has shown that when we use TSM, it can engage our motivation processes and lower our cortisol levels.
🤬 Watch your language
The language we use to describe ourselves can have a huge impact on how we feel about situations. For example, how often do you start your day or end your day talking about how busy you are?
For Kirsty, the word ‘busy’ creates great feelings of stress. When she tells herself she’s busy, she can feel her body tense. So instead, she uses the word ‘lively’, which feels comical and much more lighthearted.
❤️ Prioritise actions over feelings
There is no such thing as not a confident person. Confidence is not a personality trait, it’s a feeling. There are no rules about how confidence manifests itself. It’s different for everyone and you tap into it more often by working out how it looks and feels for you.
Ask yourself:
- When you’re feeling confident, what does it look like?
- How does your confidence express itself?
- What actions can help you bring about that feeling?
- What actions make you feel playful/calm/silly/enjoy things?
Work out a list of actions that you can take to help you feel confident. Focus on the actions and the feelings will follow.
And those are your takeaways! Check out the full video above!