Why you lost your confidence and how to get it back - Thrive and Decay: [Full training]

So this is a training module from the thrive and decay course. Let's get started. You used to feel powerful, perhaps decisive, like your ideas had weight. Now hesitation creeps in. You see others thriving, but you feel like you're barely keeping up. You don't exactly know why, and you can't see a clear way of getting back to that place you once was. You've made small compromises, told yourself it wasn't a big deal, but now you don't have the drive or confidence to move forward. So I'm going to answer your question. Which do you feel more like? Are you the tree that is breaking through the canopy and flourishing, or are you trapped in the undergrowth under here? So this is what we're going to look at you in this current situation. Stuck. And how we can get you to become that tree. We want to get you to this point, but where you're thriving. Every tree in the rainforest is fighting for sunlight, and it races to the canopy to breach it. If the tree gets the sunlight, it can be forever fueled by for growth. If it stays in the undergrowth, it gets trapped, weak, starving, covered in decay. And this can be something that we go through now. This was me 10 years ago, and I didn't realize I was caught in one of these decay loops until it got so severe. I was really unclear about my direction. I started noticing I was hesitating on all of my decisions. I became really uncertain. And I just make these constant small compromises everywhere. I experienced this loss of self and just falling into this cycle of doing what others wanted. And I just lost conviction in my own head. I started to feel this. It's quite a hard sensation to describe, but it was this shrinking feeling and that I felt kind of small throughout this whole period. I could just feel my confidence declining. And it was. It was really frustrating because I totally didn't want this. And it's. And it slowly happened to me, kind of creeped up on me from everywhere. When I felt stuck, I finally gained some clarity once I explicitly mapped all of this out, what was draining me. And I use what I now call decay cards, which I'll go on about later. So let's just go over what the decay spiral is. Decay creeps up on you really, really slowly. It's kind of. It starts with one compromise and one moment of hesitation. One time you held yourself back for some reason, but then it spreads. It starts to spread throughout your whole life. You start shrinking in all aspects. Your confidence starts to fade and you start getting really drained in terms of your energy. So we're going to go over client example quickly. Katie, she had a run of misfortune and totally lost her confidence in terms of her career. She was extremely capable and had led teams in multi disciplines, but had found herself in this hole and had spoken to me at this point where she. Yeah, she was just in the kind of the pit of low self confidence and it really affected her ability to get out because she then would struggle to apply for jobs because she kept questioning herself, she kept doubting herself, and she just couldn't muster up that confidence level. And it became a downward spiral. And I started to see this with lots of clients. It totally doesn't have to be like this though now. I eventually turned my story around and this helped me build a framework that would then go on to help Katie and others. So it's been a bit of my mission to start helping other people get out of this, you know, to get out of this state because it's a really, really horrible and pretty dark place to be in when. When you don't really have to be there. Right? That's, that's the key point here. So just know that you're not alone and it can be turned around. Now let's get you started on your own path. Warning. This does require dedication. So skip this, skip this whole video if you're not serious about changing your situation. I don't really want to waste your time. I want you to think back to a point in your life when you were thriving. It felt natural because you were in the right conditions and you weren't just lucky. And we're going to examine this. You were engaged in your groove and showing up as a stronger, more capable version of yourself. Think about this, a time when you move without hesitation, when decisions felt natural and when you had momentum. It might be a really, really short period. It could even just be a moment or a, you know, a period in your life. Maybe when you were younger, people could see it, they noticed and that you were locked in. You weren't lucky or different. You were just in these right conditions. Now back to this tree. A tree doesn't just suddenly become big and strong. It always starts off as this delicate little shoot. A small shoot, fragile and exposed. But as it grows, more branches and more leaves start to capture more light. The roots dig deeper, the bark of the tree starts to thicken and. And it becomes more resilient. So growth fuels more growth, just like when you were thriving. So a spiral looks like this. You start with a small action and it Gets you a little bit of confidence, right? If it starts going your way, which allows you to take a bolder action over here, which over time you start to build some self belief here. As you start to gain momentum, you're able to take more initiative here, which leads to rapid skill acquisition. And we'll go on for this later. And you start to get this, you know, this strong sense of I've got this. But the opposite is also true. The decay spiral. You start with a small compromise, you start to hesitate, and then you start to fear the actions that you take. And because of the fear, you're not moving. So you start to stagnate. And then you have a deterioration in your skill sets because others are just surpassing you at this point, you start to feel like this, you're starting to shrink inside yourself. Now I know I experienced these myself personally, both of these. And the decay spiral was one of the worst ones for me. So spirals, the tree that reaches light, it just gets stronger and stronger and it grows even faster. And the tree that starts to shrivel in the undergrowth, it starts to weaken. The leaves fall off, the branches start to, you know, fall away and start to rot and it decays even faster. So we really have to get you into thrive mode. Why is it so vital we get you into thrive mode now in real life? Well, it leads to rapid skill acquisition because it's nearly obvious, but I'll just explain. What happens is you have this higher level of focus, right? When you're actually in thrive mode and you're in that groove, not only is it your conscious side, but unconsciously you're all completely tuned in to whatever you're doing at that point in time. So it's very high efficiency in terms of how much your brain is picking up. You also have more time on skill because when you're thriving and just think back to any moment that this has happened, it may have even been when you were a teenager or something like that. And when you were working on a project or working on something with friends, you have this sense where even though you're expending energy because it's so engaging, you feel like you have even more energy to give, which allows you to self fuel this thing. And so you get these two things. You get high efficiency and high energy availability. You won't even notice this, by the way, right? I see this with a lot of clients. They don't even realize when they're in these, this thrive mode. The point is, others will. And it's because it's actually happening. It's hard to get the perspective from your own pov, so others will and probably have done already. It has this toward energy, but the opposite is also true for decay. You get this limited focus and the reason is usually because you're in a survival mode. You're kind of constantly anxious and constantly stressed because your back's against the wall in some ways. And it has this away energy because you're always trying to escape. So you have exactly the opposite. You have less time on skill because you just want to get away from the situation. Right? And you have this limited focus because your brain is just so preoccupied with surviving the situation. You can't. You can't focus in on these high value and high, high impact skills. So the question is, how much are you thriving before you try fixing things? If you want to know how bad your situation is, I actually built an assessment tool exactly for this. It will instantly show you where you are on this thriving decay spectrum. Here's a clip from, from the results page. You'll get the links in the description. Check it out after you've watched this video. Right? Okay. Why you're not thriving. Most people don't engineer thriving. They wait for it. They're not even paying much attention to it, which is kind of crazy. Now, I've been reminded about this throughout my life, and I only really paid attention to it over the last kind of 10 years or so. You've probably experienced thriving by chance, not intentionally. It's often because maybe you've been placed in a collab, particularly collaborative team, you were given a really interesting project, or you just happen to be working under a really good boss. The problem gets worse. If you're not thriving right. You're either one of the two situations. You are very rarely in the middle where you're just, you know, actually not going kind of anywhere. You're either shrinking or you're thriving. It gets harder and harder to turn it around. If you're decaying and you're shrinking, you've got this accelerating force downward. So it's really difficult, you know, for example, when you start to hesitate. The problem is when you have decisions to make, you're going to take longer to make them. And so it gives you more space and time to hesitate even more. And you'll have less ability to get into the light so you won't grow. Right. That's the bottom line. So clients I work with often tell me it's really difficult initially to clearly pinpoint when they're thriving. So we use guidance and Thrive cards to make it a bit easier, which is in the course modules. Now, you can check that out if you already have the course. So right now, thriving might feel out of reach, but it's possible to reintroduce it into your life systematically. Right, this is what we're going to focus on. Thriving isn't something you wait for. It's something you can engineer and put into your life, but it actually requires a bit of work. You don't need the perfect conditions, you just need to create the right conditions. So we're going to talk about how you can actually do this. So engineering your thriving environment. This is a step by step guide. A little caution here, right? This is not easy. Yeah, it is step by step, but it's not easy to execute. But if you want to live in a thriving mode, it's worth it. Right? So step one, identify your thriving conditions. Thriving is not speculation, it's real experiences. We don't want to go on what other people thrive on. We want to go on what you thrive on. You've probably already experienced many activities. Look back at real moments when you thrived. What were you doing, who was around you, what environments and structures were around you and what were you working into? So write a simple list, right? You can open a blank word document or get a notebook out and start going through your thriving conditions that you've experienced. Now, again, I use kind of guided worksheets that I found have been very useful for clients, but you don't actually need this if you don't want to. And we create these thrive cards. I get clients to make these so that these little cards that you get, they're just like the ones where when you buy a house, plant, and you get these thrive cards that show you, you know, don't put it in direct sunlight or keep it at a certain temperature. So we can create one of these for ourselves. Here's a client example. So we'll come back to Katie. We use these thrive card worksheets to construct her ideal conditions. Now, if you're in the course, you can go and check it out in the resources. She initially thought she didn't have thrive conditions at all, right? So this was actually a really interesting problem. When we went through thriving conditions, she. She thought she'd never really experienced them. So only when we really picked it apart and we went back through her life like she was in such a bad place, it was really difficult to bring back those memories. So we actually just systematically worked through these and we went. It was kind of going through A process and it reminded her of those times. And it was a really nice experience because like I said, she really, her confidence was so rattled and it was, at least to me, based on her past, we can see that she had, she had done some pretty amazing things and she just needed to be reminded about them. And we started to relive them and it was quite an interesting process. Yeah, so we relive some scenarios is really powerful. And then we started to plan, we started a plan to recreate those because she was in that powerful mode. And remember, it is a spiral, it's like a compounding effect. If we can activate that thrive mode in anything that you're doing, it will quickly build up. I've seen this many, many times with lots of clients here. Start to identify common threads and themes from your list of thriving activities. It might be, you know, examine why they work so well. Why and why aren't you experiencing these things? Now, client observation, longer lists, if you can make long lists. Right. If you just go through lots and lots of thriving scenarios. Now I really recommend this. I would spend a good week on this, right. And actually just really think about it because hopefully you'll be able to add to the list when I again, a bit of insight when I'm coaching. We will go through this. This will be a one or two week exercise and we will keep adding to this list and then we'll discuss it, which brings up more and more, more and more items to the list. Look for your patterns. Now here's an example. Oh, yep. For guidance, I've got a worksheet on this. Go and check it out. Engineering your thriving life worksheet. It is a really, really thorough and detailed worksheet. It's based. It's quite interesting because it is totally possible to work through this with a blank piece of paper. But. But I've definitely found that from experience it is quite difficult. So I've tried my best, at least in the worksheet to kind of break it down into what I found the process that works with most clients. So an example here, just to give you a quick one. So here's a list and this is one from a client. So guiding a junior colleague, fixing an inefficient system in the company system, leading a small team, presenting a technical workshop, running technical. Sorry, presenting a technical idea and running technical workshops. Now these two in particular were highlighted as something that they particularly enjoyed. They really liked passing on knowledge, you know, working in their expertise and then passing it on either one to one or into a Small group, you know, workshops. And it was really interesting because you could see them light up when they were starting to talk about this. Step three, we want to start, we want to choose a path. Right? Right. This is not actually that easy because there are many paths to get there. Now just to touch on this, the reason there are many paths is. Well, yeah, I mean there are tactically many paths to get there and some are easier than others. So there are some where it's just one action to get there, that's a quick, quick one. Others you might have to do a couple of actions to get there. Some you might actually have to set yourself up to get to the actual activity. Now I'll explain this in a moment. So yeah, there's quick wins, medium projects and long term plays and also mini experiments. Now I will go on about this a bit later. Yeah, now what? Now what we mean by this is let's say you want to mentor, you want to teach. Well, it could just be a simple action to take one of your team members and start coaching them. But if you want to actually set up a formal coaching thing or a side business or a teaching thing, you may well need to set yourself up. You may need to figure out how to set a side business up. You may want to set up, get involved with a mentoring scheme at work which might require you to do some work beforehand before you get to the actual activity of mentoring. Right. So then we want to start mapping out your battle plan. Take your time with this. This is definitely not easy, but it is worth it. Right, Small steps. Again, this is one of the more tricky ones. So again, if you've got the course, there'll be a full step by step guide in module three. So this is where this is how I try to explain it to get to a thriving position. It can be quite difficult. And so you want to, and you know, we want to lay things out again, what I call infrastructure. It may be setting up a side business. All of this to get to a point where you're teaching or you're running workshops or you're speaking or presenting or something like that and taking wins along the way. Yeah. To explain this, in the guides, you will find some cheat sheets. So I'll be using some examples that I've been through personally and I'll also give some examples of some clients and this will be continue. I'll add to these as well as I'm working with clients live. So yeah, here's a little snapshot of what the worksheet looks like. Okay. And Step five supplementary skills. This is something that people often, I mean some people do think about, a lot of other people don't. So to get to your thrive situation you will likely need other skills. I'll give you an example. If you want to go down some kind of speaking route or coaching route or mentoring route, you'll probably need to learn how to reach out, how to have effective conversations, how to market yourself, how to pitch yourself and the concept of sales. I mean these are all things I went through and I didn't realize that I needed these skills. Otherwise you don't get to the point where you get to mentor people. Like these are some skill sets that you need to get to that position. Right. So we actually want to start understanding what those are. Yeah, so I had this when wanting to be in one to one time with people. You know I wanted to do that when I was in my corporate job but I didn't understand that I needed a whole bunch of extra skills to get there. So think about what you would need to learn. Client observation I have when coaching other people often they would need a few and they'd be very domain specific. So I've had another client where they wanted to work in conservation work and it would be really useful to have some specific skills in photography, in kind of guiding communication and marketing as well. So if we go back to this image, this is what it can look like in real life. We have these little wins along the way and then along here you realize you need a new skill and you need a new skill here and then you get to this thriving position. Okay. And then step six executing thriving happens through will real world feedback. Just go back to those moments again when you have thrived. Right. It was because you were actually doing something. So just remember each step forward will give you thriving exposure. It's really important to get your hands dirty in this sense. If you struggle getting started you can try a mini thrive experiment. This is something when I'm working intensely with clients and we've got maybe they've got a long term thing that they want to do over six months to a year. I'm looking to help them get a win very quickly. So we will create mini thrive experiments to do that. An example will be here. So if you think this is all really overwhelming, I've got a little experiment playbook in the resources and you can, it's essentially like if you're here and you're not feeling great, we can get you running a mini experiment so that you can experience what it is like to be back thriving, which is so important. And often I like to run these experiments because it kind of proves that you can thrive and then that fuels you to chase the next win. Right. And as we set this up, it makes it more. More of a. What's the word? A quest or a mission. Okay, and the next point? Removing the case. This is also really important. We can't just focus on thriving because you may well be stuck in a really, really bad situation right now. And we need to get rid of that. So decay creeps in really subtly. Just like this. You can see these little plants. Step one, we need to identify the situations and environments. Look for the signs. When do you feel small or like you're shrinking? I really hated this. I used to think back to those situations. I just can't believe I stayed in them for so long. Well, I can because I was in that state. And these are the times where you feel really de energized by the activity, action, or environment. And it's just a feeling of not being aligned with yourself. It's a horrible feeling. Again, having been there for many, many years and sometimes being in denial about that, it's quite painful. You may find yourself rationalizing these situations too, because you've got sunk cost. Maybe you've invested a lot of time, energy and money into the thing. You feel a bit guilty about it, and maybe you feel obligated to. To stick with it. If you feel like that, you should be questioning that situation because these are not great emotions to be experiencing and like thriving, really recommend creating a decay card. So these are things that if you were to say, you know, these are toxic for your little house plant, don't do it again. You can keep it really simple. Have a blank word document if you want, and just work through it like that. Yeah. Or if you want some guidance and some prompts in the cheat sheet, go and check the resources, because I think you will. You may find it helpful to see you need to be taken through a process and see some examples done by someone else. Step two, Fix or escape. Once you understand what is toxic, we need to figure out what you want to do about it. Is there a way to manage the situation? Yeah. So some situations are fixable. Others it's just best to escape. It's like this house plant. You know, can you get out of direct sunlight? Can you put some blinds up? Or do you need to take it outside? Right. You need to repot it. Think about this. If you had a reset button, would you choose to be in this situation? Again, if you would, you may well decide, you know what, this is actually worth saving. It's not easy. Clients have found this extremely challenging. I've had to work through this with a lot of clients, and we've had to do it on the fly and figure out a customized solution to either fix it or escape it. I'd ask yourself, is it possible to set boundaries with this, or is it fundamentally misaligned with you and it's just causing you emotional pain? Take your time with this. Like I said, this actually is a just being serious for a moment. This actually is very difficult for. And I've seen this with real people. It's. We have to be quite careful with this. We have to really think this through. We don't want to, you know, we don't want to burn bridges and, you know, but at the same time, we don't want to keep continuing to decay our own situation to the point where it's unrecoverable. Again, if you need help, check the guidance prompts and examples in the resources. Okay. Step three, Engineering boundaries to prevent decay. It's not useful saying, I'll set boundaries the number of times I've heard this. Right. Just be careful about it. Think about what does it actually mean? We need real actions in practice, the behaviors you will adopt to uphold those boundaries, not just the concept of setting boundaries. What does that mean? Because it is hard, even when you are precise with those actions, to execute what you are saying to yourself. It's very difficult. You must create new actions that are different to your current actions and behaviors to uphold this new boundary. And it's like this barbed wire fence. You need actionable rules that you will stick to. So examples, you know, if you want to set boundaries for time, not accepting extra work. Right. And you know, I'm not going to go into details here. It's all in the worksheet. But we need to have rules so that we can stop you from accepting extra work if that is what is causing the problem. Same thing here. Energy, not entertaining, toxic conversations. Right. Not getting involved with that then. Precisely. How are you going to do that? Yeah, so it's the actual. In the past, I've actually helped people write playbooks and scripts because we analyze what let's say is a toxic person, particularly in your life. What did they always say? Because they usually say the same thing to you. That. That pulls you into those conversations. You can actually rehearse a script for this. Yep, I've got some examples of this. I'll just go over a Quick example with a, with a client I had years ago, Lorena, and she really, really struggled with this, a serial people pleaser. And we had to find. And we did some scripts for this and it was all about trying to, you know, protect this little grass. And I was trying to find it the other day. She drew, she actually drew a really awesome picture about this. And it was kind of like saying, don't step on my garden. Right. This is my garden with my picnic. I'm looking after it and I'm going to protect it. Yeah. Now I'll go over this in another video. I've got more details in the resources anyway, but let's keep moving. Step four a tactical exit. If it can't be fixed, get out. Right. If you've decided you need to get out, this is really, really important. We need a tactical exit framework. You may have situations where you need to get out immediately. It's extreme. It's kind of like you've got this rotten branch on this tree and it's infecting everything else. Get rid of it. You've got to cut it off. Right. A transition one. This may well be a situation where you can, you can tolerate it for now. You do need to get away from it so, so we can kind of balance this. It's backing off in good time. And finally there's a long term shift. It's a structured transition where we are going to try and elevate you out of this situation over a good amount of time and we create a good structure to get you out. That won't be too overwhelming. It will be, it will be hard and uncomfortable, but ultimately you'll get out. Just like looking at this like escaping from a, you know, through a, through a tunnel. Yeah. You create a plan and then you get out. And step five, of course finally is execution. We need to cut off decaying parts of your life. Just like this tree with rotten branch means cut it off. Take the quick wins first to give you more air to breathe. Start working on longer term plays. Once you have got rid of some quick. Once you started with some quick wins. To be honest, it will usually feel quite good to get rid of some of the. To get some of the quick wins. It gives you more motivation and more hope. You don't need to escape everything overnight. Start the shift now and work through it. If you're ready to start engineering thriving to your life, take the assessment first. You can see where you are on the spectrum. It's pretty fun. I'll share some. You know, I'll share some averages and some results and where we try and get people to the end. Or just let me know once you've completed it. Once you've done that. If you want access to this course and you're not already part of it, you'll be one of the first people to access the exact systems I've used, built and tested with hundreds of clients. And I'm going to release it early so you can get your hands on it. Then I will add lots more of these situations because this is a tactical system, right? This is a practical one that we're going to use in real life. So I will use some real life case studies. So over the next few weeks and months, you'll see the examples get bigger and bigger in there. And the majority of the time, you know, I have a fairly diverse set of clients with different backgrounds and, you know, different kind of working backgrounds, different problems. You'll hopefully find some examples that will match pretty much exactly to your situation and then you can use that as inspiration. Okay, good luck and I'll see you inside.