Breaking Through The BS
Self-doubt is one of the most difficult hurdles to conquer both personally and professionally. We often hear about the saying that it's all the things that people don't try in life that they regret as they approach the end, not the things they tried and failed at. Knowing that this issue is one that resonates with all of us on such a deep and profound level, it can be a tough one to tackle.
So tough in fact, that people are encouraged to hire coaches to help them overcome their battle with self-doubt to truly unlock their potential. Recently, our CEO sat down with one such expert to discuss her experience in helping her clients achieve their potential and overcome their issues with self-doubt. In this blog, Hollywood Branded learns how to create a growth plan and bust through your beliefs that are holding you back, from the expertise of Dr. Kimberly Hambrick.
A Little More About Kimberly
Dr. Kimberly Hambrick. Kimberly is a leadership development and growth coach and trainer. She designs empowered leaders to achieve the significance they desire. Known as the BS Buster, she works to bust through their BS, belief systems, that is, of negative thought and excuses with a proven system that minimizes risks and moves them forward. She owns Kimberly Hambrick Consulting and is an executive director with the John Maxwell team and serves on the president's advisory committee. Kimberly has almost three decades of experience in corporate America, serving in leadership roles with a focus on coaching others to achieve more.
Interview Transcript Highlights
Question: As we start off, could we have you share a little bit about how you got to where you are today? How is this an area that you specialize in and how'd you get started?
Answer: Absolutely. So as you said, I have almost three decades of corporate experience, and you can see me so you know I didn't start when I was 12. It's obvious that I look like I've had 30 years in the corporate world. I started as an educational consultant, so I worked with companies where I did business development, corporate growth. I wrote multi-year, multi-million dollar projects. I was so great at winning the work. What happened in companies like that is that we would put people in leadership roles and we put them in the leadership role based on their resume, and that didn't always translate to being an effective leader. It started to weigh on me that I was putting people in positions where they weren't going to be successful, and the corporations that I worked with weren't offering training to them.
I just decided I could do better. I could do more. I stepped out on my own to do my own consulting business, where I focus exclusively on empowering leaders to see their full potential, to use their full potential and to use that to add significance to others. What I mean by that is John Maxwell says, "Success is when you add value to yourself, but significance is when you add value to others." That's really what my work is all about.
Question: Now, you just said something that's really interesting. That in corporate America, and quite frankly, in businesses of all sizes, we look at resumes and we move people into positions based off of titles, based off of experience, based off of gloss and glamor, things that we put a lot of assumptions to. That's part of our belief systems, of someone's going to be able to step up and do it and be that all heroic person who is a good leader, but that's just not always the case, right?
Answer: Absolutely. I have conversations like this daily with CEOs and leaders in the corporate world, because there might be a position that's coming open. When they start to talk about who could fill that position, they'll start to talk about a person at a job level and they'll say, "Well, Stacy's been here for 20 years so it's her time to advance." Well, Stacy, you've never worked or aspired or are aligned with it. It's really difficult for leaders to step out of that and look at someone's potential. I look at someone's potential to do the work and then we move them into that work and we give them the tools and the resources that they need to grow. At the same time, you let them know what the accountability steps are. So if they're not meeting those targets, they have an opportunity to change and improve. But if not, then you can move them out. But so many times we promote people or hire people based on what their resume says. Let's be honest, a lot of our resumes are creative writing.
Full disclosure, I mean, because I got caught in a BS trap early on in my career. My Bachelor's is in journalism and I'd worked at a newspaper and I did pagination. I laid out the newspaper. So I was applying for another job and it said, "Do you know..." And it named a specific program. That's pagination. I knew pagination and I said, "Yes, I know it." I show up for the interview and they put me in front of the computer and they want me to lay out a newsletter. I'm pretty sure my excitement of actually opening up said program and creating a file gave away that I didn't know that program.
Question: How did that change your own belief system about yourself at that point?
Answer: Well, at that point, it didn't change it. To be perfectly honest, I suffered what I call from limiting self-beliefs well into my 40s and early 50s, and I was successful. I was always advancing in my work and my career and from the outside looking in, nobody thought I had any issues. But if you suffer from limiting belief systems or what I call the BS swirl of negative thoughts that were just going rampant in my mind, at some point you butt up against a lid and you cannot outperform your belief system of yourself. So even though from the outside I looked successful, I was starting to struggle with that and it was getting to the point that I valued more what other people said or thought about me then I did for my own voice. As somebody who suffered long-term, and if you have people who enter your life that know you suffer from this... Imagine a conversation, Stacy, where you and I are talking and you come into my office and say, "Do you know what your problem is?"
Well, now I'm wondering what my problem is. I didn't have a problem two seconds ago, but you, who I admire and respect, just told me I had a problem. so now there I go swirling into, "Oh my gosh, I have a problem. I'm incompetent. Why am I here?" It really took what I call a gut kick in my life of somebody just not being kind and nice to me to make me realize just how bad my own self-talk was to myself. At that point I had to change it. I didn't do it overnight. I don't want anybody to think this was an overnight snap the fingers and I was all good. But one of the simplest things that I did, and I have my clients do this, is to keep track of what follows your 'I am'. I would write down what I would say about myself, and it was shocking and hurtful to hear how I spoke about myself so effortlessly. I didn't even hear it coming out.
"I'm not good enough. I'm not successful in this job."Once I saw that, I had to make a mental break and I had to work on changing my mental swirl, if you will, about what I said about myself. I'm going to be honest with you. It's an ongoing process, but I'm at a point in my life that if I start, if that BS bubbles up, which it does, I can recognize it right away. And then I ask myself a few questions. The first question is, "Is there any truth to this?" If there isn't, bless and release it. If there is truth to it, then I ask myself, "What do I want to address?" This is an important step that I talk with people about all the time. Just because there's truth to it, I don't have to address it if I don't want to. That's where we have power.
It's just been truly night and day difference of how I talk about myself, but more importantly, the people that I attract now into my life, because it's the law of attraction. When you feel good about yourself, when you're putting out positive, good, empowering vibes, those are the people that come into your circle, and the others who were toxic, they're not in my circle anymore.
Question: What happens to you when you actually have gotten to the top?
Answer: Well, what I do now, and a lot of the leadership work that I did started first and foremost with myself, to enhance my own leadership skills, and what you see a number of times with people who reach that pinnacle of leadership, they stop growing. It's like you get comfortable, and that is such a bad word in society, to get comfortable with where you are. They start to do things like, "I'm the leader, and as the leader, I say this." And they talk about themselves in the third person. And I'm like, "Oh no, we need to talk about that." But we're always growing. One of my mentors says it so well. He said that he really struggled because he was bigger on the outside than he was on the inside. What he meant by that is he was always advancing, always looking for that next hurdle, and he stopped doing the inward growth that is so needed before this.
These days I am so much better on the inside and I am so much happier and I don't have a corner office or a fancy title. I found what I need to be doing. I really think when you get comfortable with a healthy belief system, you start to recognize your own potential and your own gifts, if you will. When you lean into those and when you use those, it doesn't matter what they call you. It truly doesn't.
Question: So for our listeners today who are listening in and saying, "Okay, I might have one of those little voices in my head, too, that sometimes says, 'I'm not enough,'" what do they need to do? What's the first step that they need to actually do to start making a change in their lives?
Answer: Well, the first step was the one that I just said, which is very easy. Document how you talk about yourself. So, document what you say about yourself. Another way is to reach out to a trusted few, so your circle, your family, and ask them, "What do you see as my strengths?" If you're in a leadership role, "What's it like to be across the table from me?" Because that's really telling, and you'll start to see some gaps. You'll start to realize that external people view you completely different than you view yourself, and then you try to make some steps forward to close that gap.
I also include people that I know that don't like me into that conversation, because once you get past the bitterness and the hurt, there are some nuggets of truth in there. But I'm going to be real. You have to be thick skinned and you have to be in a good place, and I didn't do that right away. I had to get healthy with my own belief system before I could go out and ask somebody who I know does not care for me to say, "Hey," and they tell you.
Check Out The Podcast!
Kimberly has SO MUCH of great information from her experience in breaking down self-limiting beliefs, check out the podcast below to learn more about how to drive your business from her advice and expertise!
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