Courage & Spice: the podcast for humans with Self-doubt

Because of the emails and messages, you all send me I know that if you are listening to this podcast, you are interested in your own development as a human and you tend to be self-reflective (which is one of the best things I believe anyone can be). Therefore, you are more likely than the average bear, to seek out coaching support. This episode is designed to support you to make good choices if you are 'coaching curious' — how to get the most from a coaching experience.

In the last couple of episodes, we have been exploring our unhealthy, unhelpful, often unhealed beliefs: how to recognise them, the benefits of changing them. In this episode, we are bringing these ideas together. I'm sharing a practice called Belief Busting that I have developed over the last few years, specifically to help folks who are held back by the beliefs that create and sustain self-doubt. This episode is a bit like a workshop cum coaching session!

Cognitive Restructuring is based on the principle that how we feel emotionally and what we do behaviourally, is not the result of what happens to us, but instead, it’s down to how we think about what happens to us.  We can change how we feel and what we do, by changing what we believe. Practising this is ace! It helps us to slow down and become more aware of our negative self-talk and unhealthy beliefs. This makes it so much easier to unpack unconscious beliefs so we can intentionally change the

Your voice is the one you hear most often, is it kind? So much mental and emotional suffering comes from the way we talk to ourselves in our own minds. This episode is all about the most common types of negative self-talk (sometimes called Cognitive Distortions), and some strategies you can use to identify and start to change your own unhelpful negative voice and upgrade your self-talk!

Unconditional Self-acceptance means that we fully and unconditionally accept ourselves regardless of our competence, and whether or not other people approve, respect, or love us. With self-acceptance, if we mess up, we understand that we’ve messed up. That’s it. No unfavourable judgement. No feeling bad. Hence, no constant fluctuation in self-worth.  In this episode we explore what Unconditional Self-acceptance looks like, it's many benefits and importantly: how to begin to cultivate it!  

High self-esteem is something many of us desire, its the source of a squillion Pinterest quotes, we tend to worry if our kids don’t have enough of it.  But does self-esteem actually make us happier, healthier, more successful? In this episode, we go on a magical mystery tour of the self-esteem movement: where it came from, the surprising research findings and how self-esteem moved out of the realm of psychological research and into Infomercials and Oprah guests.

Self-doubt is often characterised as an inner-critic or self-saboteur, but its SO much more sophisticated than that! In this episode, I introduce the concept of The Protector: a characterisation of self-doubt that you can meet with creativity and compassion. I share five key aspects of this part of your psyche including ideas for how to develop your relationship.

A personal episode for me this week. I share how I have come to really own my preferences: from NOT camping to learning how to say a clean and boundaried 'no'. I share how I uncovered the root causes of this aspect of my self-doubt, how healing these events was just the beginning and how my experience helped me to create the process we go through in Your Self-belief Map.

In this episode, I share why it's easy to get confused between your gut feeling and your self-doubt. This is particularly tricky when we are learning something new! Using Broadwell's model of competence we explore when your gut feeling is most reliable and how to tap into what it's telling you. 

It's episode 50! I thought it would be fun to revisit the first episode. Two years ago I shared my theory for how self-doubt works - how it responds to psychological risk and how we use the Five P's to keep ourselves safe. I've been exploring the concept of psychological risk, looking at how this operates and the consequences of it. These findings have updated my original framework, added an additional 'P', and led to this episode. 

If you have a vociferous inner-critic, this episode is for you! Everything outside of you, is neutral. It just IS. How you experience the world, is how you interpret it. Usually, we don't just have an experience, we have a lot of thoughts, feelings, judgements about the experience! In this episode, I share how most of us were never taught to be consciously aware of how we interpret neutral reality. Plus I share a practice for you try!

The question I am asked The Most about my work is 'how can I feel more confident right now?' And in this episode, I'm answering the question! Most of us want to feel confident so we can do and say what we want to do and say. But what most of us don’t realise, is that confidence is a consequence of other things. It never comes first. I'm sharing how I have come to understand the process by which confidence is cultivated, how I see this process as a pyramid.

In this episode, we explore a concept from developmental psychology that our growth as adults is partly about increasing our capacity to understand, reflect on and respond to two key psychological states: sameness and difference. Sameness is where we feel safe, where we integrate what we learn. Difference offers us the stimulation of newness that we need to grow. We explore what happens within these states, how we get stuck and why self-doubt is integral to keep moving.

Julie Parker is the Founder of The Beautiful You Coaching Academy where she passionately trains and supports heart centred people to become life coaches. We talk about growing up in rural Australia, the gift of being raised by excellent mothers, beginning work as a social worker, the mentors and teachers that shaped us, how our world is calling forward a new model of leadership that is cooperative, inclusive, vulnerable and imperfect. This is one of my favourite interviews!

Sarah Vermunt is the founder of the career coaching company: Careergasm. In this conversation we talk about the courage it takes to admit when your work feels like someone else's dream job, how to begin to uncover what you really do want to do, and why you never have to monetise the hobbies and interests you adore. I just know this will be the spark you need to start thinking about how you want to feel in your work!