Confidence & Owning Your Life’s Direction
Kemi Fadero | Confidence & Owning Your Life’s Direction
Confidence in yourself can help you negotiate your worth, speak in public effectively and re-ignite your self-belief, but what if it’s all rooted to owning your life’s direction? In this talk and workshop, Kemi speaks honestly about her previous struggles with anxiety and how coaching transformed her life and business with practical exercises to practice yourself at home.
For over a decade, Kemi sold ideas and dreams to clients all over the world as Client Leadership Director for MindShare, but despite her strong track record, public speaking ignited re-occurring negative self-talk, worry and internal challenges. After retraining as a qualified Counsellor and Coach and Director of Third Link Consulting and Wellness Link, Kemi uses her experience to consult, partner and coach individuals on subject matters including stress management, leadership skills, communication, negotiation, resilience, wellbeing and time management.
‘I believe every individual should have the means to have healthy workplaces and the skills and tools to live happy and healthy lives.’
“Own the successful times and learn from them.”
Key Highlights
0:30 Talk will cover these questions: Do you feel held back from achieving your goals? Do you talk yourself out of trying new things? Do you avoid things that put you out of your comfort zone? Are you fed up with feeling worried about a situation or judged by others?
2:45 Exercise 1: Setting confidence goals, make them realistic and time bound
4:55 As an advertising executive she sold to large audiences and clients. Except she hated the public speaking part.
5:40 Worry, sickness and panic of public speaking.
6:20 12 years of these internal challenges and out of her comfort zone. Manager of 12.
7:20 Studied psychology to understand her public speaking challenges.
7:30 Disconnect between the person she was portraying at work and her actual experience and internal feelings.
8:00 Achieved Distinction in Counselling Psychology Masters Degree.
8:45 Returned to advertising work after having children yet the negative emotions were still there.
8:55 Career coaching revealed her internal dialogue around public speaking
9:15 Specific conditions made a crucial difference
9:35 Recognising negative self-talk and a need to be perfect
10:20 Why you can’t say ‘no’ to work demands
11:10 She had made herself to fit into the advertising industry.
11:20 Passion for helping others and the human mind was lost in the advertising world.
“Confidence was about owning my own destiny and my own direction in life.”
11:50 Breakthrough: she needed to find a new path but a lack of confidence had held her back.
12:20 Confidence was about owning her life, not public speaking.
12:30 Coaching work to become a better negotiator: with others and herself.
12:50 Confidence is individual and personal.
13:10 What are you telling yourself that is holding you back?
14:10 The need for self work to identify what is holding us back
14:30 Exercise 2: Learning from occasions when you lacked confidence.
Consider 3 times you’ve lacked confidence, what were you saying to yourself? How were you feeling physically?
17:00 Exercise 3: Learning from times when you felt confident and with success.
Consider 3 times you’ve felt confident, what were you saying to yourself? How were you feeling physically?
17:30 Exercise 4: Learning from times you’ve stretched yourself and improved your confidence.
19:00 Group sharing: We can show people what we want them to see but what is really going on in our head and our feelings can be hidden.
21:35 Avoiding our own challenges by helping our children
24:45 ‘Belly-Belly Breathing’ Exercise demonstration to focus on the present moment.
“Confidence is a personal thing.”
💡 Key Lessons
When something repeatedly produces negative feelings and challenging emotions within you, spend time understanding these emotions more, perhaps with a coach. It might be a sign for change.
Confidence is a personal, individual journey which has different meanings for different people. For Kemi, confidence is about owning her direction in life.
Develop confidence by recollecting times when you did and didn’t feel confident. Examine them and understand why. It is through reflecting that we can identify areas to improve, change or continue doing in order to cultivate confidence.
💭 Coaching Questions
These coaching questions are taken from the exercises Kemi sets in her talk.
1. Write down up to three occasions when you felt lacking in confidence. For each scenario write down answers to the following: (14:30)
2. Now identify an occasion when you felt confident; perhaps when you felt successful. Answer the same questions as above. (17:00)
3. Finally, think of an occasion that stretched you and, as a result, improved your confidence. (17:30)
How are you using that experience to learn from?
Using the experiences you have just reflected on, identify a few ways in which you behaved differently and how you could implement these behaviours in future. Does this influence the way you will achieve the confidence goal you set earlier.