The Intentional Leader Podcast | Colin Kingsmill | Overcoming Limiting Beliefs

Think limiting beliefs are blocking your road to success? Buckle up, because this episode is all about shattering those barriers and overcoming limiting beliefs. Join Sean Olson as he chats with Colin Kingsmill, the cofounder of Whole Human Coaching, who helps leaders achieve fearlessness. From his early days in Swiss banking to navigating the complexities of international real estate development, Colin shares invaluable lessons learned along the way. He dives into his powerful framework for fearless leadership: cultivating humanity, living with integrity, and achieving true freedom. If you’re ready to stop playing small and step into your full potential, this episode is a must-listen!

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colin@colinkingsmill.com

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Fearless Minds, Fearless Leadership: Overcoming Limiting Beliefs With Colin Kingsmill

Colin’s Career Journey

Welcome to episode 31 of the show. This is the show where you discover real stories of normal people like you who have become extraordinary leaders. You’ll learn some valuable lessons from their lives, lessons you can apply to become the best leader you were created to be. When you become an intentional leader, lives are changed. Thank you for joining us. It is my privilege to introduce you to Colin Kingsmill. Colin is the Cofounder of Whole Human Coaching. He is also an international real estate guru agent, one of those passions in his life that continues with him. He is joining us from Nova Scotia, Canada.

Colin, it is great to have you on the show. How are you?

It’s great to be here. Thank you very much for having me and spending some time with me. What you’re doing is great. I’m really happy to have a conversation. I’m doing great. It’s sunny out here, so it’s a good day on the East Coast.

We’re excited to have you. When you and I met previously, we were talking. I know you have some great insights for our audience. We start every show with the same question, which is asking you to walk us through some of your professional careers, but more than that, the leadership lessons learned along the way and how you’ve been growing as a leader.

My career can be divided into three chapters. In the first chapter, I was in Swiss banking. The second chapter was on international real estate development. The third chapter is my coaching and consulting world. In the first chapter, I spent about a decade in Swiss banking and finance in Switzerland at the time. I’m half Canadian and half Swiss, so it was a natural thing to do after I got out of university.

In that era of post-university first career move, the most important thing was to understand who you are as an individual. What is your personal brand? When you’re a younger leader or a younger entrepreneur, or you’re getting out of university and starting your career, you often can abdicate your personal brand or even your persona to the company that you’re working with.

The biggest lesson for me was to figure out earlier who you really are and what your personal brand is versus the brand of the businesses that you’re working in. That probably happens generally in life anyway as you grow, develop, and mature. Certainly, if I were to counsel my younger self, I would be like, “Figure out who you are within the context of the organization that you want to work in.”

In chapter two, that part of my career was focused on international real estate development from Bora Bora to the Maldives to Montenegro and everywhere in between. Over a twenty-year period, and it goes back to the brand, I honed in on the importance of language, commitment, a brand promise, authenticity, and meaningful language. I was always on the sales marketing and branding side of things even though I got to see and touch master planning, design, and everything like that, all the other essential ingredients.

The lesson for me there is to be as real as you can. That lesson is even more important in this world because several years ago, you could get away with anything. It was very easy and commoditized. Now, people are much more discerning. Markets are much more thin-sliced, and target audiences are very specific. People in this age of knowledge and this age of information are very well-informed. Your marketing language and brand need to be as authentic as possible. That was chapter two.

Let me ask you a question about that. You brought up something really interesting. I’m curious about this piece. You’re in international real estate, so you’re going to different countries and adapting to different cultures, which made you very well off your brand and the authenticity piece. I’m curious if that was driven by this idea of trying to be applicable to various people and various cultures.

We live in a world that, whether you’re in the United States, Canada, or anywhere in the world, is multicultural. There are people from all over the world around us. Yet, we naturally gravitate to how we communicate in our home culture. What was really driving that authenticity? Was it trying to be all things to all people? How did that play?

For some reason, I’ve always worked on projects that were unconventional and slightly challenging. When we moved to Europe in 2009, I was working on a project in Montenegro. It was the vision of the primary investor to create a super yacht marina and residential village with hospitality, retail, commercial, and everything like that, but we were building it on an ex-Yugoslavian Naval base that was going to be repurposed for this.

My challenge was, how do you sell luxury real estate or berths, for that matter, in a post-communist emerging market that’s still hard to get to and that didn’t have air transfer and air flights and infrastructure? For me, it has always been less about the cultural differences and more about, “How do I connect to the audience?” I’m not working in uncharted territory. I’m not working in an urban setting where the playbooks are much more standard. These were new, remote, emerging destinations and places. Some of them were less emerging, like the Maldives. How do you sell a villa in the Maldives to people who don’t need them?

For me, it was always a cultural yes, but also, “How do I connect to the human that is going to live, breathe, and play in this space hopefully for generations?” Also, it intersects with a personal dislike for meaningless language and the junk food language around the marketing world. Those days are over. People don’t buy it anymore. Maybe they do to some degree, but people want more. Customers and consumers want depth to the conversation that you want to have with them.

I agree. People are seeking meaning and purpose, and they find that in other people. That’s fantastic. That rolls you to chapter three. Talk about that transition.

Chapter three has been about bringing the lessons of life that I’ve learned along the way to fellow leaders, fellow entrepreneurs, founders, CEOs, and teams. I got to a point where it felt as though I needed to be of service. It felt as though the time was right to be of service. Somewhere along the way in the last few years, I really honed in on what my purpose is here. For me, it’s all about helping people rediscover their humanity, live in integrity, and become fearless.

Ultimately, if you can have that tripod, it frees you from psychological suffering but also from the self-limiting beliefs and the stories that you tell yourself. Humanity, integrity, fearlessness, and freedom mean you can become unlimited. I don’t know how that happened, but chapter three is all about taking what I’ve experienced and helping people expand their horizons.

The Tripod For Overcoming Limiting Beliefs

That tripod that you mentioned there is what really drew me to you when we initially had our conversation. Let’s go into that for a minute and break down those three different elements and how that leads to that life of overcoming those narratives we create.

Starting, first of all, with humanity, what I mean by that is remember that you are or we are collectively on this small rock, spinning at 1,600 kilometers an hour on its axis, at least at the equator, and flying through space that we know very little about. If you can begin to put into perspective what’s happening, where we are in the world, who we are, and what we’re doing, you begin to live differently and act differently.

You can become more cooperative, more caring, and more compassionate about your fellow humans and less divisive. There is so much division that has come into this world. For me, there’s this cult of individualization that’s happening. It’s tragic. Reminding ourselves of our humanity puts things into perspective, but it also lets us rethink how we connect with our fellow human beings. That’s step one.

I want to talk about that for a second though. I’m huge on this humanity piece. One of the things I share a lot with our leaders is we have so much more in common than we have differences. It’s humans. My wife and I were on vacation. It was an international location. There were people from all over the world there because it’s a destination spot.

You’re sitting down on these patio restaurants surrounded by people from around the world, many of us not having the same language, although, for many, either French or English was the common language being spoken, but we’re all the same. It was incredible to see families from Asia talking to families from Europe, taking pictures of their families with one another in front of the different buildings, and realizing, “We’re all here. We want to experience joy. We want to experience what’s taking place.”

At the main circle in the town, they were having all these novelty shows. The magician, singer, and unicyclist were putting on shows at the main center of town. We have so much in common. We’re a part of the human race first. We all feel insecurities. We all feel inadequacies. We all want to be noticed, seen, and heard, but it seems like all we ever focus on is how we’re different, not how we’re the same. How are you working through that in your coaching?

You’re right. One of the things that I do with people in coaching around this subject is part of a bigger ecosystem, but I ask them to create a personal protection system. A personal protection system is about turning off the news and getting truly informed. That might sound like an oxymoron, but I don’t think it is. Things like social media and the news cycle have accelerated that perception of divisiveness. It’s the, “I can stand behind a fake Twitter account or an X account and hurl whatever I want at you. We can spar.” It can be very negative. The news and social media can be negative.

I really coach people to create this personal protection system, which is turning off the news, getting informed, and understanding what is going on in the world. Start to sense-make for yourself. I advise people to look at things like geopolitics, history, and megatrends that are happening. I advise them to look at long-format podcasts. Get into a book. Look at the journals. Go for the source materials. Going back to the junk food analogy of language, the junk food of news, social media, and doom scrolling has inhibited that divisiveness that you talk about.

I really ask people to create a very solid compass in that regard. If you do want to go onto Twitter or Facebook and rant, have fun, or go down some rabbit hole, understand that you’re eating a box of chocolates and it’s not good for your mental diet. That’s where I start. A lot of people can get very upset about what’s going on in the world. I remind people, “Go outside your front door and discover who is in need right outside your front door. You do not need to go to the Middle East, Central Europe, or anything like that. There is need, humanity, and suffering right outside. Start there.”

I love that aspect. We’re blessed to live in a very multicultural town. What we see on TV and social media, our phrase is, “That’s not our Friday night.” Meaning, on Friday night, we’ll go to the ball game at the high school, and it is ethnically rich. We’re all wearing the same color shirts. We’re all cheering together. We’re all families watching our kids play sports and things like that. That’s that phrase that we have when we see everything out there. We’re like, “That’s not our Friday nights because that’s not the reality of it.”

I love the idea of the personal protection system. Especially this year, 2024, I saw the statistic that 50 countries have elections this year. An estimated 3 billion people are going to the polls in 2024. Elections create divisiveness. 2024 could be a horrible year unless we take personal responsibility to say, “That’s not what’s going to be for me.”

You’re right. It is that assumption of personal responsibility. It’s also recognizing that you as an individual can have an enormous impact. You don’t have to go and volunteer for the Red Cross or become a Nobel Peace Prize winner, but start with your own ecosystem, your way of thinking, and your way of contributing. I love that analogy of Friday night and saying, “That’s not our thing.”

Making a huge impact doesn't require joining the Red Cross or winning a Nobel Prize. Start by transforming your own ecosystem – your mindset and contributions.

A lot of this divisiveness that we’re seeing, and we’re seeing it in Canada, the United States, the UK, and all over Western Europe, certainly, you have to ask, “What are the incentives to keep us divided, keep us glued to those screens, watch that negativity, and watch that train wreck that’s happening?” It’s business. There is a business of divisiveness because it keeps people on those platforms.

That personal protection system or that personal accountability that you speak about is us individually recognizing that we can easily abdicate our power, influence, creativity, and positivity, and impact those divisive instruments. It’s about being aware of what they’re doing. There’s a business around racism. There’s a business around the culture wars. There’s business around all the activism in various areas that we see.

I love that phrase you used there, “Don’t abdicate your power to it.” That’s a rich phrase.

Thank you. It’s important. It’s because of the culture that we’re living in that we sometimes aren’t aware of. We’re all busy. We’re all active. We all have businesses, responsibilities, families, and things like that. It can be easy to relinquish that power almost without even noticing it. You wake up one day and you’re full of anxiety, or you’re depressed, or you’re angry. What’s the origin story of those? Where did that come from? It came from somewhere. It’s really important.

What is the second leg? We have humanity as our first leg. What’s leg two?

It is humanity and integrity. Integrity is so important. I don’t mean don’t tell lies or don’t tell white lies. Martha Beck has a wonderful book called The Way of Integrity, which I would highly recommend to your audience. The fact is that in this modern Western civilization that we live in, we are often acting or putting on a mask, trying to people-please, putting others ahead of ourselves, or we’re not good with boundaries. What happens is you begin to live for others and not for yourself.

What I mean by living in integrity is to put on your own oxygen mask first. Be who you really are. It’s also a question of energy. How much energy do you want to expend on portraying this person who you think others think should be? It’s a real release when you live in integrity and you don’t have to put up any more facades.

Those facades or masks that we wear or even little things like saying yes when you want to say no, all of that impedes your integrity. It depletes you because it is such an energy drainer not to be who you are. It’s about defining who you are and being that person. It liberates you from acting for other people. It’s a liberation of energy. We only have so much fuel in our fuel tank.

We always teach that the greatest key to leadership is self-awareness. You have to know yourself, know how you’re gifted, and all those sorts of things. I think about what you’re saying. In my life, I always jokingly say I’m a recovering people pleaser. It’s not recovered but recovering because I’m still working through it. I can honestly say that for the first 40 years of my life, I never tried to uncover who I was. I was trying to be what everybody else told me I was supposed to be.

It doesn’t mean that I didn’t have great things in the first 40 years because I did. That’s my spouse, family, relationships, jobs, and friends. Honestly, I had to go through some counseling to have somebody guide me through this, break that trend, and dive into who I was. The biggest thing I realized with it is the massive weight off of my shoulders to be me and not worry about it. It’s like, “If Colin likes me, great. If Colin doesn’t like me, that’s okay. I can’t be liked by everybody.” The weight lift is incredible.

When you say weight lift, I see how much energy you have liberated to be who you are. It’s even more important than being who you are. It’s about what your contribution is. How can you make an impact? You don’t have these physical weights holding you down. You can fly. You can have a purpose-driven existence in this space-time intersection that we’re here for a nanosecond.

That leads to the third piece, which is fearlessness. If you can live with integrity and overcome any challenges you have around fear, confidence, and resilience, what are the possibilities? They become unlimited when you live without fear. The integrity part has to come first because that’s about you finding out who you really are and what’s your mission. When you are no longer pleasing other people, what is that for you to do and be? If you can add fearlessness to that, that turns up the volume on your power, possibilities, and potential.

Living with integrity and overcoming challenges related to fear, confidence, and resilience unlocks unlimited possibilities.

I like those three legs because they build. When I understand the humanity aspect and I build in that personal protection system, it frees me up to identify who I am and live in my integrity, which creates that fearlessness. If you could really quickly, walk us through an example of someone that you’ve worked with who got to that fearlessness point and what that opened up for them.

It’s interesting, I have a few people I’ve followed or worked with for several years. I started working with them when they were in university. There was fear around exams and finishing, starting, and opening a new chapter and things like that. I’ve probably worked with this person for 4 years out of university through getting into the legal profession, understanding her place, and within the context of work, breaking down the people pleasing, and discovering who she really is within that context.

She’s pivoting away from what was her original idea about a legal career and taking a little bit of time off for the very first time in her life. In her mid-twenties, she is taking a little bit of time off because finally, she is looking at who she is and becoming unafraid of what might happen next. We’ve been working on things like, “If this is a gap summer, you don’t need to-do lists. Don’t be afraid to think of possibilities, creativity, and openness. See what can happen when you get surprised.”

Don't be afraid to unleash your creativity and openness to possibilities. You might be surprised by what unfolds.

I’ve worked with a few people like that who start off like a flower that hasn’t seen sunshine, and then it pops and people become free. The last step in that whole process, this idea of freedom, is if you can work on those three foundational elements, you become free from psychological suffering. More weight is lifted. All of those stories that you used to tell yourself you’re not telling them anymore, you see life with clear lenses as opposed to opaque ones where you can’t see what’s out there clearly because you’re telling yourself this story and that story, pleasing that person, and getting all upset about this or that because you’re not thinking about humanity or whatever. It’s freedom.

Shedding The Stories

I want to talk about that piece for a minute. I know Brené Brown is huge on that phrase of the stories we tell ourselves and misunderstanding people and situations. You talked about the narratives and the limiting beliefs. The phrase you used when we first met was, “You need to shed the stories.” What is it in us where we produce those stories, and how can we shed them? It’s hard. It’s a total shift in our mindset.

We have 30,000 decisions a day or 30,000 to 35,000 thoughts a day. It’s important to dissect where those stories are coming from. Typically, they’re coming from an early childhood development era. Often, they are plagued with or colored by small t traumas. It’s nothing that has to be on the news, but things like divorce, moving, or alcoholism. You know all the small t traumas that can happen in families. What happens as a child is you create a coping mechanism to deal with whatever is around you or whatever’s happening around you. The trick as an adult is to go back and understand, “Is that story true? Is it still serving me?”

I’ll give you an example of that person I was speaking to you about before. She was getting into her law profession and starting over in Europe in a prestigious law firm. At one point, she was like, “I’m like this control person in the office. I keep wanting to be in control of all these other people, and they’re not my team. Why is this?”

We traced it back to younger childhood development where her family was going through a lot of change and she felt she had to be the adult and take care of her younger brother and her parents. She probably didn’t, but the mind of a ten-year-old said, “I need to be in control of everything around me.” That’s a story from a long time ago that’s being served up now as an adult that’s not serving her.

Once you understand the origin of it, you can ask yourself, “Is it serving me or is it not?” and then, you do with it what you may. If it’s not serving you, we can dive into dissecting it, what’s true, what’s not, and where it came from. It’s like the 30,000 to 35,000 thoughts and decisions we make a day. It can evaporate. I call it deconstruct to reconstruct.

I love that. When I think about it, I always think, “Why don’t more people do that?” When I listen to the story you explained, I think about my own life. I’m sure this is the way for you too. We have to come to that point where there is someone or some ones, which could be multiple people, who are willing to lay bare. We trust them to see all of our scars and all of our issues.

In this case with that individual, you were her coach. You were able to ask questions and help her connect those dots. We do that in executive coaching all the time. People think executive coaching is all about leadership, and it is, but it’s about the leader. We’re taking them through the same journey of understanding, “Everything you’ve experienced is why you do what you do as a leader, but you have to have that moment in life where you’re like, “I’m going to be willing to lay it bare in front of somebody, risking rejection, ridicule, and whatever.” We can’t figure this out by ourselves. We have to let people in to become the best version of ourselves.

I agree. We’re not taught any of this in school, are we?

No.

Especially men are not taught at all to go into those vulnerable spaces. You’re right. It’s extremely important. We’re in an era though where people are speaking more. It does feel like these topics are bubbling up to the surface and we are beginning to allow ourselves to speak, share, be vulnerable, learn, and grow together. Thank goodness. I’m very happy about that.

We’re getting there. In my life, faith is a big thing. I always say it’s the definition of grace. The definition of grace from person to person is you can know the worst of me and love me more, not less.

That’s beautiful.

That’s how we get there.

It’s all back to this analogy that we started with, the idea of do you want to eat junk food or do you want to have a healthy meal, right? A healthy meal involves a little bit more work and might not give you the dopamine rush that you get from a burger. You said a minute ago that people don’t want to necessarily change. It’s easy to stay in that circular closed loop. It’s notwithstanding. It might be challenging and you might have to take a whole bunch of pills to exist and other mechanisms of coping. A lot of times, people don’t want to break that circle because outside of it, that fear of the unknown is holding them back, so they’ll stick inside of it. I’m like, “Jump out. Get out. We got you.”

Actionable Tips For Listeners

You’ve got to get your feet wet. You got to take a chance. This has been a great conversation. It falls right in line with a lot of our readers who are looking to break out of their own traps, break out of their own way, and become the best version of themselves. I appreciate that. We finish every show with the same question. That question is, what is something our audience can do intentionally to become a better leader?

It goes back to what I was saying before, this idea of sense-making. Make sense of the world. Dive into what truly matters to you. Become a subject matter expert in that field and thin-slice that specialty. I could ramble on about that idea of thin-slicing your market, thin-slicing it again, and connecting truly with your audience. Generic is over. That would be my advice.

I love it. That’s powerful advice. I appreciate it. It has been great to have you. We’re really glad to have you here. This is the start of a relationship. I appreciate you and thank you for impacting our audience on the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.