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Welcome to this week’s episode of the HRDQ-U In Review podcast, where we bring you the latest insights and practical tools for enhancing soft skills training in your organization. This podcast is brought to you by HRDQU.com, and I am your host, Sarah, Learning Events Manager at HRDQ-U.

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Today I have Steve Brooks and Serena Ittoo joining me to talk more about the recent webinar that they presented, Dealing with Your Imposter Syndrome. So thanks so much for joining me today, Serena and Steve. Thank you for having us. Thank you. And Serena and Steve are coming over from the UK. It’s 1230 in the afternoon here for me. What about you guys? What time is it for you? It’s coming up to 20 to six here. So nearly dinner time.

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I would be sitting down eating dinner by this time already. So I appreciate you guys taking the time with me today. I’m really excited to talk more about the webinar and just about the industry as a whole. We had some really great participants in our webinar. So I’m really excited to go into a little bit more detail about the questions that they had. And before we get into that, let us know for anybody who didn’t attend the webinar and as a recap and reminder for those who did join us,

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Can you tell us a little bit about who you guys are, what you do, how you got to where you are today? My name is Steve Brooks. I work with Serena. We have a business called Expressing Your Authentic Self. And our aim is to help corporate professionals, particularly women who feel overwhelmed with feelings of anxiety, self-doubt and stress. We work with them to eliminate the root cause, root causes holding them back.

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which then enables them to clear their mind and then live the life they love and get more of what really matters to them. We support this transformation by providing the tools needed to help them work through their emotions and develop rock solid confidence in who they authentically are. And we’re both master practitioners of neuro-linguistic programming or NLP. And we specialize in all areas relating to self-confidence and self-esteem.

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And we like to say we guide clients to embrace, explore and be excited to show who they are with confidence. Indeed, after working with Earth, clients reawaken and they’ve often commented to us how they felt they’ve literally stepped in to the confident version of themselves and they’ve begun to speak up, get more of what they want and live and breathe the confidence they need to.

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get to a much better place and a much more fulfilling and rewarding place. I would like to also say I’ve gained through my own struggles and journeys in life a lot of skills, knowledge and awareness that I do share with clients and people I work with. And it’s basically sharing how I’ve changed my life for the better as I become more confident, overcoming Poster Syndrome myself and develop more skills.

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to become more effective and better in all areas of my life. And that’s something that a place where everybody can get, I believe. Yeah, I can only imagine how impactful your business must be and to really see people prosper from the help and support that you provide them. So let us know, know, before we go and deep dive into this webinar content, what changes do you see happening in the L&D space right now?

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So we’ve noticed that more and more people are being overwhelmed with their anxiety and a lot of people seem to lack the actual skills and the knowledge and the tools to help them manage and overcome this. And this can lead to them feeling isolated and as though they just lack focus, clarity and purpose to help them move forwards in their life and career. We’ve had a lot of, we’ve seen a lot of clients, but we notice as well,

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people say, you know, they feel at standstill when it comes to their anxiety and the negativity of all of this, it impacts other core focus areas of their life. And this, the main one could be mental health. Well, it definitely is mental health. And then their wellbeing, their relationships, their career and their overall personal development and growth.

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But with people becoming more and more aware of their anxiety and just the fact that it seems like such a universal thing more nowadays anyway, they’re able to notice that they’re not alone. And I think the internet has helped with this because people are able to read up on anxiety and learn from other people how they can go about it. But it seems like the trick right now is to

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find that right support as in what’s right for you to help you move forwards, whether it’s someone guiding you as a mentor or just having some techniques on how to deal with the anxiety and the stress and the overwhelm that they’re personally feeling. Yeah. And I think that there’s so much power in just knowing that you’re not alone. think that that within itself really just helps relieve emotions of, you know, that you may be feeling internally to know that you’re not the only one. Absolutely. And so

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So let us know, you know, what exciting things are you, are you both up to next?

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Yeah, well, as I mentioned in the first point, we’re on a mission to help women and corporate professionals overwhelmed with feelings of anxiety, self-doubt and stress to eliminate the root cause, holding them back to get more of what really matters to them in life. And as I mentioned, we have a particular emphasis on providing the tools needed to help clients work through their emotions and anxiety.

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and develop rock solid confidence to be who they are and be true to themselves basically. Our approach is to create the most value by creating a tailored and practical personal development plan which is personal and right for each individual client to move forward fast in our six week program particularly. This helps them to move from a place where they can move to a place rather where they can make confident decisions.

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take action and move forwards, achieving balance, clarity and purpose across the key areas of their life, their career, it’s their career, relationships and personal life. That balance is a key part of that as they are more empowered to follow their purpose. And a bit more detail on this, we work with clients to eliminate the root cause of what’s creating their anxiety. So once that is eliminated,

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that level of anxiety is so much lower and that’s a huge thing. We use proven tools to help them work through their emotions so they never have a blow up at home or work in the same way. And as I said, we then help them to develop those unseen foundations that we mentioned in the webinar and develop rock solid confidence so they can actually move forward and overcome challenges as they do. There are a number of exciting things we’re also doing.

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Aside from our six week program, which we tailor to each client, one of the other things we are doing is launching what we call our personalized development touchstone tool. This is a tool that helps each individual reflect and start to live the life they want with purpose, clarity and direction by taking daily actions through a series of focused and tailored activities.

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on the core focus areas of their life. So they get more of what really matters to them. And by doing these daily activities and monitoring them and improving, they get purpose, clarity and direction. Another area where sharing our knowledge and increasing awareness is on platforms such as HRDQ by having webinars which help people to develop in this space.

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and improve their own self-esteem, belief and confidence. If I may, Sarah, can I just name a few of those webinars that we will be doing in the future? Yeah, absolutely. So a number of them are, we’re going to be doing a webinar titled, Hitting Rock Bottom and How to Overcome This and Bring Yourself Back Up, Becoming Who You’re Meant to Be, that’s around authenticity and developing the tools to find out

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what you value the most and how to get it. Another webinar on the seven steps to reversing and eliminating your anxiety. That’s quite a powerful one. The role of limiting beliefs and how to change them. We touched on that in the imposter syndrome webinar, but this would go a bit further. Another webinar we will do is on your self care and providing a toolkit to manage anxiety. We’re going to be doing a webinar on it.

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and providing an introduction to Neurolinguistic Programming or NLP so people can get into it and kind of, if they’re intrigued by NLP, can find out a bit more. We’re going to be doing a webinar on effective communication and rapport, which let’s face it, once you have rapport and a better connection with people, it makes everything else more effortless. And we’re particularly excited to do a webinar to help people get out of their heads and stop overthinking.

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and some tools around that. Well, it sounds like you have some really exciting initiatives in your pipeline. And so let us know. Let’s bring it back now to the webinar that you did dealing with your imposter syndrome that you were just chatting about. So can you let us know for anybody who didn’t attend the webinar and as a refresher for those who did that are tuning in with us today, what were the key takeaways for registrants at this event?

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So the first thing we looked at was what exactly imposter syndrome is and how it can negatively impact your life, how it can just impact you as a person and the way that you go about things. Then the webinar then introduced a different perspective and holistic approach to help you manage and overcome feelings of imposter syndrome as and when they arise.

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We then shared five key principles to work through the mental and emotional blocks which are holding you back. And then we went into how you can begin to actually take action in the moment you feel imposter syndrome. And we showed some people some techniques. We had a three-step takeaway, which were a series of techniques that they were able to apply to their own example of imposter syndrome.

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And the great thing about the techniques we shared is that you can use this time and time over and over again when feelings of imposter syndrome keep coming up for you. Great. And I know you touched on this a little bit throughout, but if you could give your elevator a pitch, what is the purpose of your business?

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Yes, so our mission and purpose is to guide, encourage and witness personal transformation so that people become the best version of themselves and they’re set up to go on that journey to become the best version of themselves and live and breathe authentic confidence without fearing the value of their worth. We believe

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and we know we can all fall victim to believing in our doubts and insecurities about ourselves sometimes. I’ve been there and I want you to know that you are not alone and that you are more than enough. Our values stem from the belief that everyone, no matter the age or background, has the potential to connect to their true authentic inner selves and design a life in which they feel fulfilled, truly happy and valued.

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Because the truth is when you commit or when you decide to commit to your key areas of focus, balance and purpose, you start to transform the way you think, feel and develop new transformative positive habits which can help you to not only overcome challenges that may affect you back in the past, but also inspire you to achieve many more triumphs and achievements you never thought you could possibly achieve.

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Great, and during the webinar, you talked about your six week anxiety transformation program, and it drummed up a lot of interest. Can you let us know a little bit more about it for our audience today? Of course. So we are on a mission, me and Steve, to help women and professionals overwhelmed with feelings of anxiety, self-doubt, and stress to eliminate the root cause which is holding them back.

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to enable them to live a life they love. So we support this transformation by providing the tools needed to help them work through their emotions and develop rock solid confidence in who they authentically are. We provide our translational value by creating a tailored and practical personal development plan, which is personal and right for clients to move.

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forwards fast and this helps them to move to a place where they can make confident decisions, they can take action and move forwards achieving balance, clarity and purpose in their mental health, their career, their relationships and just their own personal life which is the main thing. Our program is based on four pillars so I’ll go into that now. So the first pillar is

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clarity and this focuses on what are the triggers that are causing you to trip into anxious states and overthinking and we do this because once you become once you know how to self-reflect and you take the time to self-reflect and look inwards this is the huge first step that some people actually take their whole lives never going through. So once you do this step you’ll begin to become more of an observer and start to recognise your behaviours and what really is going on.

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The second pillar is elimination. And this is a huge one, this pillar, because we would work together to eliminate the triggers that are holding you back, removing the source, removing the source that is creating the anxiety. And this is ultra powerful, and it creates a ripple effect instantly with proven NLP techniques.

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and it’s all tailored as well, so it’s exactly what the client feels they need to work on, that’s what we do. We’d work together to install the resources you need to ensure that you can handle the previous anxiety creating situations, but in a much more effortlessly way, in a way that you’re in control of your emotions and getting exactly what you need. So once we have this and it’s installed in place, you’ll never have a situation where you blow up and you feel anxious like that again.

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And then the next step, the next pillar is the roadmap. So we would work with you to identify what a happy, balanced and fulfilling life looks like to you to help you get clarity on what exactly you want and what matters to you and what are the needs that you want and basically what are your needs that we will help you to meet.

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And then the fourth pillar is daily habits where we implement that. So we’d show you how to develop the habits and the lifestyle. So the changes you make become permanent. And once we implement these, it creates lasting change and you’re never going to have to work on your anxiety as intense as that ever again. And you’ll know what to do. You’ll know what you can do to change your emotional states and change your interactions while interacting better socially and being true to who you are and what matters to you. So these habits will

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Create your new reality with purpose, clarity and direction in your life to become the very best version of yourself. PDT, how do you offer these coaching sessions? Yes, so the PDT tool is another transformative tool that we use. And basically by tailoring and aligning your activities that you do every day through your very own personalized development touchstone tool.

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You have an amazing opportunity to enhance and transform the quality across all the key areas of your life. And this can be measured by being 100 % confident that you would receive the following benefits from using this tool. You would grow and become the best version of yourself, developing more rewarding relationships, improving your financial future, becoming a healthier and more fulfilled person.

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The tool would help you to design a life, doing the things that make you feel authentically valued and committed to living that life. You would gain new insights as well as adding a set of proven tools and techniques to your life that are included in some of the suggested activities in your tool. And you would acquire new skills you can incorporate into your daily routine.

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There is a core focus area under self-improvement and self-growth and these activities would fall under that. And I’d like to say to set up and enhance your Touchstone tool, we do offer weekly, monthly one-to-one coaching sessions as well where you would have our dedicated support to help you keep track and achieve the goals above that I’ve said through your very own tailored Touchstone tool. Great.

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How could people go about contacting you for this work? Yeah, so if you’re interested in speaking to us and knowing a bit more and working with us, you can book a Clarity Call. And I know that, Sarah, if you could kindly send across or just attach our Clarity Call link, you could book in a Clarity Call with us for 15 minutes and we can talk through what is right for you and think about getting your own tailored program ready for you, really.

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Great. Yeah. Make sure that you look at the description beneath this podcast episode with that clarity call link there so that you can connect with Steve and Serena in that way. And my final question for you both today is where can listeners go to learn more about your work and what you guys do? Yes. So we have a number of sources where you can find out more about us. One of those is our webpage, www.expressingyourauthenticself.com.

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Another key place where we promote ourselves and post regular content is our LinkedIn profile that I believe Sarah will be sharing as well as our webpage alongside this podcast. You could also email us personally at stevenserena at expressingyourauthenticself.com. As Serena said, we’d love to chat about where you are.

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and what you need to do to get to where you need to go fast. And that is the purpose of the Clarity Goal link that Sarah is kindly going to share as well, where we have a 15 minute chat just to find out a bit more about you and see if or how we can help. Great. Well, thank you so much for your time today, and Serena. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you. Thank you for everything.

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And thank you all for tuning in to this week’s episode. We hope you enjoy listening to the HRDQ-U In Review podcast available on all major streaming platforms. If you did enjoy today’s episode, make sure to give us a follow and leave us review. Catch y’all next time. Thanks.