Leigh Howes is an Exactly What to Say Certified Guide, executive coach, and leadership consultant. She loves helping leaders and humans achieve more of their potential.
Leigh recently hosted an EWTS Critical Conversations Webinar entitled: How To Elevate Your Personal Mindset To Achieve More Of Your Personal Potential.
Attendees were treated with a masterclass on exactly how to hit their potential and improve their mindset. This blog features just some of the highlights.
Are Your Limiting Beliefs Holding You Back?
Could it be possible that you are preventing yourself from moving forward?Â
Is there potential that you might not have tapped into because of limiting self-belief? Sometimes your own worst enemy is you.
Everyone has moments and events in their lives that shape and change their trajectory, and Leigh is no different. Â
She has learned over the years that she reacts in a certain way when dealing with unplanned change. She has recognized a definitive pattern to her reactions and has learned that when she takes back control of what she can actually control, she starts to feel better.
How often do you find yourself agonizing and worrying about the things that you have absolutely no control over? It happens to the very best of us.
Leigh implicitly understands what it’s like to experience difficulties and have to dig deep, having survived breast cancer. She also knows from this experience that it’s okay not to be okay.
It’s good to lean into those emotions and experience them, but it’s better not to stay there for too long if you can help it.
Happiness is not a destination. You need to know where the destination is, but you need to make sure that you’re enjoying the journey, too.
Because of Leigh’s experiences, she has made sure her business fits in with her family. She refused to do the shoulds and needs anymore, and that all came from a massive dose of perspective.Â
The goal of her webinar was to share her experiences and offer practical advice on overcoming negative thought patterns and digging deep so that you can reach your full potential.
What Can You Learn From Leigh’s Journey?
1
You Can Not Pour From An Empty Cup
 Think about the oxygen mask available on a plane. In the event of a crisis, you have to give yourself priority and put your mask on. Without it, you will not be in any state to help those around you.
2
Enjoy The Journey
Don’t be so set on your destination that you forget to enjoy the journey.
3
You Can Decide Your Response
You cannot control what people do around you. What you do get to decide on is how you respond; that’s the only bit that is in your control.Â
4
Fix The Roof Before It Rains
This has to do with your mindset and life in general – be ambitious and go after the really important things, but make sure that in order to thrive, you know what is needed in your environment to be your best healthiest version of yourself.
5
Know Who You Are
The better you get to know yourself, the happier you are and the more you grow.
6
It’s Okay Not To Be Okay
Emotions make us who we are. Lean into them. The key is not to stay there.
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7
Be Proactive
Action is the cure for fear and procrastination.
Talk To Yourself In The Right Way
Did you know that the most critical conversation that you can have is with yourself? Because of this, investing time and energy in yourself becomes vital.Â
But when you’re committed to serving others, it can be all too easy to forget yourself – but it’s essential that you give yourself enough oxygen so that your cup is full enough to deliver the best version of you.
One of the main principles and frameworks within Exactly What to Say can help you to achieve this.
This fantastic mind flow is most commonly used as a guide to conversing with others, but it can be just as effective, if not more so, when used to talk to yourself.
It all starts with curiosity.Â
When you get curious, you instantly move out of judgment, and when you move out of judgment, you can start to open your mind up to a different way of thinking.Â
The more curious you get with yourself, the more you can potentially learn about yourself, and the more you’ll discover why you might be thinking, feeling, and experiencing things in the way that you do.Â
Through curiosity, you can begin to understand your context, and with that context, you can move forward.Â
Spend some time looking over your shoulder and analyzing what’s happened before.Â
Ask yourself:Â
- How did you feel when you were in that previous situation?Â
- What happened?Â
- What experiences did you have?Â
- What emotions did you feel?Â
The more you understand yourself, the more empathetic you can be to what you need.Â
Empathizing with yourself and understanding what makes you tick will allow you to be courageous enough to take those next steps of action.Â
How Does Mindset Affect Potential?
Mindset is a set of attitudes that determine how you’re going to interpret and respond to situations. It stands to reason that if you’re positive, you will create more positive situations, and if you’re negative, you will create more negative scenarios.
Potential is when you have or show the capacity to develop into something else in the future.
Can you ever achieve your full potential without the right mindset?
On a scale of one to ten, how much potential do you think you’re leveraging right now? Â
Most people will give themselves a number lower than 10. That’s okay. It means you have potential and can achieve more with the right focus.
What Will Make Your Boat Move Forward?
As well as being an EWTS Certified Guide, Leigh is a master practitioner with strength scope. She loves to use her boat analogy to help her clients.Â
Looking at the picture of the boat, you can see that the sail is your mindset, your strengths, skills, and actions. It is what you will use to move the boat forward.Â
Your potential and your goals are illustrated by your chosen direction, potential helps your boat head in the right direction.Â
The environment and space around you are integral to achieving smooth sailing.
These are all sorts of important things needed for your boat to keep moving. But what happens when the water is stormy? Or if you encounter performance risks?Â
A negative mindset will slow you down, but you can overcome it and carry on sailing. But there’s an important thing that you should remember about your boat: there will always be holes.Â
What you want to do is make sure that your boat is as robust as possible so that you keep moving those performance risks either above the water line or up into the sail.
As you improve your boat, you start to stretch your potential.
Control What You Can Control
Elements and change are usually beyond our control. However, there is one thing for sure that you can control, and that is your mindset.Â
How you respond to challenges is all on you.Â
If you focus on the wonderful possibilities instead of any negativity, then you are in a far better place to achieve your potential.
The best way to stay on course is to accept that there are lots of things that you can’t change, but you can make yourself as equipped as possible to navigate around any issues.
There are three practical steps that you can take to control what you can control, and they are:
- Catch it – What is your trigger? What has caused you to think in a negative manner?
- Challenge it – What is your evidence for feeling this way?
- Change it – What evidence do you have that says otherwise? Focus on the things that you have achieved and done well, the times that you’ve overcome adversity.
How To Use The Cornerstones Of Conversational Excellence To Shift Perspective
There are 4 cornerstones of conversational excellence, and focusing on these 2 could help you to shift your perspective of yourself and achieve your full potential.
- Curiosity is the fuel for great conversations
- The person asking the questions controls the conversation
Move away from judging yourself and head towards a position of curiosity. You can’t be empathetic to yourself until you get curious, and you can’t be courageous until you show yourself some empathy.
When searching for answers, just try asking better questions, such as:
- What are the facts?
- What’s a more helpful way of looking at this?
- Where is the evidence?
- Are you catastrophizing?
Leonardo da Vinci famously said, ‘One can have no smaller or greater mastery than the master of oneself’, so take the time to be more reflective.
Use these three simple steps:
- Reflect, Refocus, and Retrain – Be proactive with your self-awareness and seek out opportunities to do better.
- Create Space For Curiosity – What’s the destination? Where are you now? What is happening? What needs to change? How are you feeling? What is serving you?Â
- Take Responsibility and Action – You get to choose your next move. What tiny step can you take at this moment to move your boat forward?
This blog was part of a series of EWTS Critical Conversations Webinars, and if you want to experience the full webinar experience, you can sign up to hear what’s coming up in the series.Â
