Debi Haden Life and Entrepreneurship Coach Norfolk

Published:
8:30 p.m. March 8, 2022

The best-laid plans…often never come to pass. Why? In the case of women, it is often a combination of quitting work/passions to focus on childcare and feeling a lack of confidence to “get back there”.

But, says life and entrepreneurship coach Debi Haden, you can make your dreams come true. You just have to work on them.

Debi, whose clients include start-ups and people in leadership positions in large organizations, says, “My role is to empower people, especially women, to overcome their limiting beliefs. and to help them live the life they want because a lack of confidence holds people back.”

This, she says, is a big problem for businesswomen. “There’s often a lack of self-confidence they can run their own business and achieve what they want to achieve, and someone will want to buy what they’re selling or take a service they offer,” says she.

“For a lot of women, that bit of selling themselves as part of the business can sometimes feel out of their reach. That feeling of not doing everything right is something that I think women especially struggle with.”

Debi’s work begins with the individual. “One of the things I understand is that they ARE the business and they have to do the work on themselves first. You can go and do a business plan, but if you don’t don’t have the confidence and self-confidence, it’s really hard to move a business forward.

“When you’re self-employed, you have to step out of your comfort zone a lot. For starters, you’re the sales and marketing manager, you handle the finances, you juggle a lot of roles, when you may not have used to doing all of that. Then you have to juggle all the other things you do in your life, like running a home and a family, which a lot of women still feel primarily responsible for.

When Debi starts working with a new client, she asks him to look at himself, examine his strengths and how he sees himself. This can sometimes create a lot of problems – things from childhood and being bullied at school, for example, can all affect self-confidence in adulthood. So Debi does what she calls the “groundwork” first.

For some, it doesn’t take long, so it’s Debi’s job to act more like a mentor. With others, she must dig into some of these issues and work to get rid of their limiting beliefs, or “gremlins,” before moving forward.

“We almost create their gremlin as a character because it’s easier to deal with something that you see as an external thing,” she explains. “Half the time we would never tell anyone else what we tell ourselves, and we have to get to a point where we can counteract those thought processes.”

Using hands-on exercises that she often combines with NLP (neurolinguistic programming, a technique that examines the connection between thoughts, behavior and goals), Debi may find that she has to do a lot of subconscious work with clients if beliefs are very entrenched.

Debi invites clients to visualize what they want their life to look like.

“Once we have the vision for the life they want to create, then we go into practical mode, creating a business plan, how they’re going to market themselves, what they’re going to do in terms of technology. I then put on my mentor hat to help them move their business forward.”

Debi will then often check in monthly to assess a client’s progress and status – agreeing goals for the following weeks, which come from the client, championed by Debi.

“I will push them harder than they would push themselves, often outside of their comfort zone, a little at a time,” she says. “You’re not pushing them so far that they’ll lose confidence or be scared, but enough that they can get the success they want and feel safe.”

Part of Debi’s job is to support clients who work for established organizations in leadership positions, encouraging them to be good leaders – someone who will listen to advice, their staff and their managers, but who will be able to take the hard line and make tough decisions. .

“We don’t know everything as leaders, and it’s important to bring people along with you. It’s important to take feedback into account, but there are times when you need to be confident to make a decision that’s right for you. to your business, then you’ve got to find the right balance.”

Ultimately, says Debi, letting go of unnecessary beliefs is key. “One of the things I explain to people is that every doubt you have in your mind takes your energy, and we only have a limited amount of energy. Once they clear that, you see them flying.”

debihaden.co.uk