EP 111
Welcome fellow confidence crusaders, neuro nerds and success equalizers. This is your podcast, Real Confidence. I'm your host, Alyssa Dver, and I'll be sharing a bit of basic brain science, some surprising social secrets and a touch of tough love. Why? Because I believe confidence is everyone's fundamental right and choice. So let's get to it.
Alyssa Dver:
Today we are going to be talking about something that when I read it, I was like, I gotta talk to this person, and this person is with me. Amy Kemp, I'm so glad you're here to talk today about thought habits, different than just habits, for sure, but before we get into kind of like, what it is. Well, you know what? Let's just do it. What's that? What is a thought habit? Because I want to back and talk to about how, like you even came to this space. But what is a thought habit? So people just have a definition of it.
Amy Kemp:
That's such a great question. And when I get a lot, I think sometimes when people hear habits, they think getting up at a certain time, or eating certain foods, or having good habits with your money or your just the external things that we can measure in terms of our habits, the work I do is very different from that. About 80% of the thoughts that you're having every day are happening at the subconscious level, and so we establish these grooves in our brain because we are hardwired to survive. And so our brains repeat the same patterns to save energy. Most of our subconscious habits of thinking do keep us alive breathing. You know, there are just certain movements we do that keep our bodies the way that they should be. However, sometimes we also create subconscious habits of thinking that don't serve us in our ability to connect with people, our ability to embrace structure, even the joy we're experiencing or our feeling of value in the world, those are all also subconscious habits of thinking, and so my work, first is in identifying them using an assessment tool, but then also, how do you replace? How do you create new grooves that serve you better in your life and work?
Alyssa Dver:
I’m so excited to get into this with you. This is something that I've been working on a long time for myself too, to try and understand. So how did you get into this? I mean, it's not a typical space people are. So how did you get into it? And kind of like, you know, what? What does that look like in terms of a business? Is it consulting or is it coaching?
Amy Kemp:
Yeah well, first of all, the business I'm running for the last eight years was such an accident. I did not mean to start a business, but prior to that, I had worked in sales. I was leading a sales team of over 1000 people that were spread out across the United States, and a lot of times in that work, I was engaging in personal and professional development work, and I had hired a coach who used this tool called the habit finder. And the work that I did with this coach and the curriculum that corresponds with the assessment tool resulted in a tripling of the size of my business, while also resulting in more peace, less work, less craziness. The growth happened very it felt like effortlessly, but not without effort. I was working, but it didn't feel like a grind or anything like that. The growth was very natural as a result of my personal growth. So I actually had no intentions of becoming a coach, but this is how some things begin that are the best, right? I continuously had a conversation with women I knew who were in positions of leadership or running businesses or organizations who were exhausted and isolated and just not sure how much longer they could keep going. They had demands at home, they had demands at work, and I was the person they would come to and talk to about it, and most of them were just like on the bleachers while we were watching our kids play a game, or it was at a community event, these conversations, well, I happen to be in Salt Lake City speaking at an event. I met with my coach, who used this tool for dinner because he lives out there. And I just said, I keep having this conversation. I have this feeling I'm supposed to gather these women and that if I could something really cool could happen. And he said, I think you need to take action on it right away.
Yeah, what was not what I thought you would say right? I love already running a business, you know, like, there's just so many things. So he said, but on Monday, we're starting the training to use the tools I use. And when I tell you, until that moment, I had never considered it. It had never crossed my mind, but I just said yes. I knew in that there was too serendipitous. It was too you know, there were too many things that had to align. So I started with two groups eight years ago, which has now become my full time work of using this assessment tool and curriculum in one on one and small group engagements.
Alyssa Dver:
Well, it's cool, because I didn't tell you this before. You know, we jumped online here, but I used to work for a company I was a CMO a while back who had an assessment tool, and they they didn't really call it thought habits, but something that thought patterns was their verb or their descriptor, and then they called them not grooves, but ruts. So I've been in the lab, and I was like, but odd to tell you, I had to leave the company, because once I really kind of examine the assessment and all I was like, I don't think it really is what it is or what it should be, and it sounds like you've come to what it should be. So let's talk again. Because, like, I really want to geek out with you. Thought habits, how do they happen, and what is the impact? You know, you said that it really causes exhaustion there. It's a lot of work and everything. But like, how does, how do we get there? We're not born with these, right?
Amy Kemp:
No, I think it's, I think I can most easily tell you in a story that I share in my book of a client as an example, she was raised in a home with a parent who is an addict, and so at a very young age, she was parenting her siblings. She was paying the bills. She's buying the gifts, signing the, you know, permission slips, making sure people had lunch money, running the house. And I think what happens? She was surviving, right? But she was really good at it, and very competent, hyper functioning. What happens is, the grooves in your brain that are saying like, Oh, I probably shouldn't have to do this, but I'm doing it to survive anyhow, become pretty deep, these grooves that say, if you just work hard, really hard, you can get yourself basically out of any situation in life, which did serve her very well, and she went on to build her own business. Which is when I met her, 25 years later, she's working 80 hours a week. She doesn't know when to go home and stop working. But here's what had happened, the grooves in her brain that said you survive with really hard work and by taking care of everyone around you. Well, those were survival grooves that she needed at a certain point in her life. But when you employ a survival mechanism past the point of really needing it, it becomes damaging and detrimental. Great. And so that's where she was now, that very same pattern of subconscious thinking that she wasn't saying out loud. She didn't know that's what she was doing. She had no indicator, saying, I've worked enough. I don't need to be this available to my clients. You know, it was legitimately going to actually cause physically harm to her if she kept on going in this same groove. And so a lot of our work was about uncovering, well, one, how did the groove start? And being really compassionate. Of course, you have that groove, right? What's the replacement in this new season of life that allows you to thrive and live a more balanced, peaceful existence? So that's an example of like how a subconscious habit of thinking can help you survive in one environment, but then you continue it, and it can become really detrimental.
Alyssa Dver:
Yeah, so, you know, it's, it's a great example and, you know, one of the things that you put in there is that once you identify kind of, what is the the pattern or the groove, then you can start to say, Okay, I'm going to replace it with something that's more productive. So how do you figure out? I mean, you have the assessment to figure out what the groove is. But how do you figure out how what to replace and give me? Can you give me an example of like, how did, what does she do? What did this one person or somebody do to kind of take the next step forward?
Amy Kemp:
100% usually, the antidote to this particular example is something that I identify in the book as scheduled guilt free playtime, which you don't you don't help an overworker by saying you have to stop at a certain time, because they'll just ignore it, that there will be a reason. That they can quickly override that. What you do is you start to schedule things that they love to do and that are fun and life giving, that they look forward to in their day on a regular basis. So even when we first started working together, I said, What would be like your dream? She said, I'd love to take Fridays off in the summer. It would be my dream is just to be able to, they live on near a lake, and, you know, just to do the summer thing. And I said, Okay, let's do it. And she about, it was about a panic, right? I said, No, I just, I just triple dog dare you to try this just for the summer, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, say I'm taking off Fridays in the summer. And so that was our first work together. When I say terrified, understand that your brain is legit screaming, danger, danger, danger, danger. This is how you survived, and now you're telling me not to do it. So nothing about it feels comfortable. I mean, even though, like you may enjoy going to the lake, you still will feel the resistance to it. What has happened since in her work and life is that her business has quadrupled in size. She takes regular vacations four times a year now. She takes every Friday off in the summer. She's working fewer hours than ever before.
Alyssa Dver:
Isn't that crazy? How that works, right? It's crazy. It's crazy. Well, it is crazy in that in some ways, right? Like, because you just doesn't make intuitive sense. But, you know, forgive me here, I think that it took me a really long time to appreciate that our brains need that downtime to be better, and the more we push them, you know, we you know, being in survival mode is is not a good thinking mode. So you know, you gotta give it some time.
Amy Kemp:
And the play creates new grooves in your brain. It solves problems. Subconsciously, it creates opportunities. It creates ideas. You will receive more inspired ideas. You will show up for the people you serve with more energy. It's just this elevation that happens when you honor that guilt free play. So yeah, there is sort of a rewiring that takes place that is a different way of being in the world.
Alyssa Dver:
Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, my sister said to me the other day, she loves to read, and she goes, I sit down to read these days, and I always feel guilty that there's so many other things to get done. And I said to her, you have to do those things for you to be optimal. You have to, I mean, I even explained to a friend, girlfriend of mine who said something similar, you're building a plaque in your brain with all that cortisol shooting through it all the time. You need to give your brain time to clean itself, and it only does that when you're sleeping or you're relaxing. Yes, and they she like the relief on their advantage, right? Yes, such a joy to see you gave them permission to actually, you know.
Amy Kemp:
And when you're engaged in the kinds of activities where you can't think about your work. So, I mean, I always say playing cards, taking a bike ride. I play a lot of pickleball, like when I'm out there, when I'm playing, I don't, I can't think about my work. It. It gives my brain a break. And when you are an obsessive thinker, in particular, this is actually one of your life strategies that will keep your body and spirit and mind healthier for longer is scheduled guilt free play where it's like, on your calendar you're meeting someone. You cannot miss it play.
Alyssa Dver:
I love it scheduled, guilt free play time. Yes, I gotta just trademark that. But it's though you know you work with somebody, like, the example, and other women on do you work with men and and, and this is, you said, small group, and then one on one. So like, what's a typical How do, like, how do people, like, engage you, but like, how does this work for most people? Yeah, I love that.
Amy Kemp:
So most of my clients are women. I do have one on one clients that are men, but my group settings are eight to 10 women who work through this curriculum. I do sort of like college. I do spring and fall semesters, so I'm summers off, breaks off, but I start in the January, February and run through May, and then I start in the fall. The groups are women from all over the country. So for example, like this, this semester, I have people from 10 different states in my groups. They're from all different professional backgrounds. It's kind of fun to have fresh perspective, and yet to see that, oh, we are kind of having a similar experience, even though you may be leading a nonprofit. And I'm working as a something in corporate America, we're experiencing a lot of the same challenges, and we can journey together and really learn from one another. So that that was actually the core concept around which the business started, was just the groups. It's kind of funny. I thought it would just be in person when I started, I didn't know I wasn't starting a business, right, like, and so what happened it was so cool, is that I sort of got passed along, and then COVID happened, and so it transferred into zoom, which then allowed me to move into different geographic areas also. So it's kind of cool how it played out. My one on one engagements are 12 sessions with a client, one on one that I work through the same curriculum. It's just a deeper, more personalized dive. And for some of my higher level leaders, either their work is very public and you can't just talk about it in a group setting, even if you don't know the people, it's just not appropriate, or maybe just they've evolved to a place where they have some specific things that they really need to work on. And so one on one's a better option.
Alyssa Dver
Yeah, that's cool. All right. Well, so here's what we're going to do. We're going to take a little bit of a break to give our sponsor some opportunity to say hello, and at the end of a course, I'm going to ask you to tell everyone how they can reach you if they do want to engage in some kind of a group or one on one environment. But I want to come back and ask you this one big magical question, which is, like, how does somebody even know you have an assessment? I know, but like, is there a sign or something that goes, Oh, that is not a good serving thought habit, so that they can at least identify that they should take the assessment. So I'm going to come back in a couple of minutes, and we'll do that.
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Alyssa Dver:
Amy, I knew when I read your bio and some of the information you sent that we were going to be friends, and it's hilarious because you triple dog dare before I actually double dog dare some day. So are you taking it up a notch? We're not just neuro nerds. We're just nerds. All right, so here we are. We're back. And I kind of tempted you to think a little bit about if somebody is listening to this podcast and they're like, who I wonder if I have a negative thought habit, and, you know, should they take the assessment, like, is there a sign or something that is a obvious tell that they may benefit from figuring out.
Amy Kemp:
I will tell you there are a couple of cross sections where I meet the majority of my clients. One of them is in a transition. Whether there's something that you've been doing for a period of time that has lost it's luster. You can't the same things that you used to do that you loved just are feeling either just you have nothing for them anymore, and you don't know why or where the passion went. But I think all of us experience at certain points in our professional journey a transition, and we never ask for it, and often don't want it. We often just like me, I didn't know I was starting a new business. I wasn't, I wasn't ready for that, but I also knew, oh, I wasn't having the same passion for the work I had been doing. And then this thing showed up, this new thing, right? So there's that the transition.
The other is when you are hungry for more, more income, you want the promotion, you want more influence, you want more impact. You want the growth of the business, and yet there is no more time or energy that you have to work where the core message of my book is that you can't outwork your thought habits. Because, believe me, if you could, I would have like, if anyone could have done that, it would have been me. I would. Hard work was not the problem. So it's the person who has done some stuff. She's working. Worked and built something or gotten to a certain place, still has ambition to go further, but there's this realization that I can't give anymore of me. There's no more hours there. I don't have any more energy. So then what do I do? And it requires a kind of growing of of you inside that maybe the first part of your journey didn't require.
Alyssa Dver:
I love it. I love it. So either you are feeling like it may be time to do something different, or you're doing something that is just not it's not getting to the place you wanted to get. But those are both good signs for somebody to say maybe there's some thoughts that are some patterns and and habits that I need to change to unlock some of the potential in there. Yes, absolutely. Alright, so book, let's talk about the book I See You is your book, and to reach you and find the book. What's the best way to do that?
Amy Kemp:
Yeah, you can find the book anywhere you buy books, so Amazon, Barnes and Noble, bookshop.org, wherever you even you can have them order it from small, independent bookstores. So you can get the book anywhere it's also on Audible. So it is my voice. People often ask me that, and a lot of my quote, unquote readers are listeners. They really enjoy the content. This book is conversational, and it is not a series of like a master bringing knowledge to you. It feels more like a coaching session with me. Feels that's the feedback I've gotten from people. I feel like I'm sitting with you at a coffee shop and having a conversation, and so I think you'll enjoy the listening if you're a listener.
Alyssa Dver:
Terrific. Thank you so much. And finding you in the assessment. How can they do that?
Amy Kemp:
Oh perfect. You can find the assessment at Amy Kemp, so my name, AmyKemp.com, and the assessment is free to take. It's takes about five minutes, five to 10 minutes. It does work from your phone, but I always recommend, if you have a computer, to take it from a computer, it's a little bit of a different way that you toggle. So anyhow, it's great, and you get your results. It's a really detailed results that you get right away sent to you. So I just encourage everyone, if you want to know what's happening and just to see a picture of what's happening in your brain, it's a great first step.
Alyssa Dver:
I love it. I'm so cool. I feel like I have a new thought buddy here. So for coming into my world, but thank you for entering all the the people's brains that we are podcasting to so really appreciate you being here today and congratulations and building the business. And what an exciting opportunity and business that you have. It's wonderful. Thank you so much.
Before we totally wrap up, I want to let you know that full transcripts and show notes for this and other Real Confidence episodes can be found on www.AmericanConfidenceInstitute.com/podcast. I also want to remind you once again that the best way to get confidence is to give it to others, and you can do it just by liking and sharing this episode on your preferred podcast and social media channels. You can even give me some confidence by noting topics you'd like me to consider for the future. So for now, this is Alyssa Dver. Thank you for helping to bring more confidence to the world.
Master editing done by Ben Weinstein with original music performed and composed by Jeff Mitchell. Real Confidence is a production of American Confidence Institute. All rights reserved.
