This is The Coaching In, a podcast from 3D Coaching. Hello, welcome to The Coaching Inn. My name is Claire Pedrick and today I am speaking with my friend and colleague Leslie Cave, who is a professional certified coach with the ICF. And Leslie, you and I were talking about masks and coaching. We were. Do say more. We were, we were. Yeah, I've got this notion about coaching behind the mask. And obviously it feels really, really topical at the moment.
And I guess at the start of COVID, it came more to my consciousness because I noticed people, we were all doing our social distancing when we were out on our walks that we were allowed. Everybody was averting their eyes and there was no contact with each other. And then I think we've gone through a phase during COVID where people relaxed into things a bit more and perhaps started to acknowledge people a bit more.
And of course now what I see is more and more face masks and public transport, et cetera, now making it compulsory. And it's just got me thinking, coaching behind the mask, what's that like? I have mine here. Have you? Yes. Because actually when you put it on, it changes your sound as well as not seeing your expression, doesn't it? It does. It does. And I noticed when I, because I've got mine too, and I noticed that when I put mine on, I feel very closed in as well.
And again, what we often want in coaching is people to do the exact opposite, which is to open up and free themselves up so that they can do the work that they need to do.
It's really interesting because at the moment I'm not planning to do face -to -face coaching and the reason for that is I recognize how much I depend on visual clues even when I'm on the phone on audio only how much I depend on what I see and hear and sense in order to coach well and then there's the whole issue about people who have hearing loss. your lit read, you know, it's just really crippling, isn't it? In terms of capacity to really be able to notice.
I think it really is, it is crippling, but I also think there's something about us being able to do some myth busting today. And I wonder what limiting beliefs we're carrying. I mean, I'm hearing more and more stories in the system around, you know, some people saying, actually I'm beginning to feel quite anxious about doing face -to -face with the face coverings and actually all of a sudden Zoom is becoming a more intimate place to work. And at the same time, my own coach is over in Chicago.
We've never put a picture up of each other. She's got a poor video connection, so we've never done any video work at all. I've... got to the point now where we've done such incredible work, I actually don't want to see her picture because I'm concerned that, well, I had built up an image in my head of her. There's a picture of the work we do. And in my view, the work is fabulous. And I don't want to burst that bubble now by seeing her.
So it makes me inquire again, if we think of the screen as a mask. what it is that's been going on in our work on a black screen in effect that has been so, so powerful. And what of that we can replicate as we move forward now, as we need to adapt to some of the ways of working. That's so interesting, isn't it? Cause it reminds me that I trained on the phone. So my whole coach training had no visual cues at all. I don't think I'd consciously thought about that for a long time actually.
Yeah and I find it really interesting because when I'm coaching on the phone I know I can hear the change in people's voices, I can hear the tone, I can hear different breathing, I can hear the full stops, I can hear the silences, I can almost feel them coming hot under the collar because I think my listening is acutely tuned or turned up. But so am I as an instrument doing that work and connecting with the person I'm working with. And there's no distraction? No. On audio only.
Because as I'm looking at you now I can see, I know this is an audio podcast but I can see you. Yeah. And I can see what's behind you and although I'm not doing an investigation of your bookcase. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's something about the acuteness of our presence I think as well when we're sat there together. with those black screens.
a myth, assumption, belief that we need more information when actually what you've just described is how do I be totally here in the moment versus how do I acquire as much information as I can in the moment? And playfully earlier on I put on my face covering and I put on my dark glasses for the summer. and actually inadvertently created a black screen which I hadn't quite realised. yeah!
I hadn't quite realised that I had created the screen and again that then says to me, okay so if we are going to be coaching some people who will be wearing face coverings and let's face it, culturally face coverings are the norm for some cultures as well. Indeed. You know, therefore the quality of our work shouldn't be diminished. You know, actually we've got a whole skill set, a whole level of experience that we can still bring to coaching and therefore do a brilliant job in my opinion.
So when I hear coaches talking and I start to query these limiting beliefs that I start to hear. I think one of the things that is missing when you do online only, one of the things that might be missing when you do online only is if you have an arriving and a leaving thing where with me, if I'm doing face to face coaching, I'll go to a coffee shop and then I'll go to the coaching engagement and then I'll leave. So I have a sort of time buffer around the beginning and the end.
And I also encourage the people that I work with to have the same time buffer. And I think one of the things that I've noticed about about a life of Zoom is that you have to be very intentional about your buffers otherwise you end up not having the arriving and the leaving thing that might be the very ritual process, landing thing. Yeah, I think that's completely true because before this call I took some time out.
I've come in, I've intentionally closed all the apps because I didn't want anything pinging. I've deliberately turned the telephone off. I've cleared the desk of distractions so that I can be present to do the work. So there is something really significant there. And there's also for me something very significant. So on Zoom here you and I are managing to look at each other very, very easily. And I know I love working with people's eyes. I use eyes as cues a lot.
And of course, when the telephone, if you do it, if you're coaching on the telephone, you haven't got that cue. And actually I don't worry about it if I'm coaching on the telephone. Yeah, if I see somebody with sunglasses on and I'm trying to coach them, I feel like I've lost something. How interesting. Have I? I'm not sure if I have. I'm questioning my own belief at the moment.
I coached somebody this morning and when we first started working together about a year and a half ago, I said to him, we can do Zoom or face to face. I think that given your geography and my geography, Zoom would be better. And he goes, no, no, no, I want to work face to face. And when we met this morning, he said, isn't it interesting that you've been doing this for years and suddenly everybody's doing it? And he said, I really like it now.
And when you offered it to me before, I said no, because it was totally outside my experience. So there is something about how normal do we make whatever is the medium in which we're working, how do we make it normal and how do we do our very best work?
Yeah. And I agree because I can picture a client where we were both giggling at the start of our last session because she was having to do it on Zoom and she had absolutely categorically not wanted it on Zoom before and at the end of the session she too was saying, well actually it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. So we're having some fun learning, so we run practicums where people practice coaching, and they coach, they are coached and they watch a lot of coaching.
And the group that's just finished has done some huge and wonderful playing with, do you watch it with sound on, sound off, video on, video off? And people observe coaching conversations happening in each of those mediums and whichever medium people have chosen, they notice something that the others didn't see. see.
So video off and they go yeah I heard this and I heard that and I heard the other and the people who had video on are going I didn't see that but really interesting you the people who've got sound off. sound off and video on, we'll also see something different. And it's just trying to expand our capacity to notice, I think. And we're never going to notice everything, even if we have everything turned up to full noticing potential, we still won't notice everything.
But tuning up our capacity to notice in different media, I think makes us much much better in every one -to -one that we have I would say.
Yeah I think that's right and when you're talking there what that reminds me of is the Joharis window and what are our blind spots and what's our work to expand those blind spots, create awareness as coaches which is in effect what we were doing and I was quite rightly challenged by my own supervisor, my coach supervisor, years ago now when I was recalling my paramedic life and how and I described how I used to put my mask on as I stepped out of the ambulance at an emergency and my
mask actually I think was the equivalent of that that tuning in and that being present piece where it was like okay so an emergency is over now I'm here I've got a uniform on I've got this big white box with blue lights on that gives a bit of a clue that somebody has arrived that should be able to do something and now I need to look calm and I need to be able to do all this. So in a way I put on a mask or was I preparing myself?
I'm not sure for the emergency and looking calm and being reassuring so that the work could be done for the patient that needed doing. And for me there's a real parallel into our coaching world. in the sense that we don't know what state our client's going to arrive to us in and where they're going to be at in terms of readiness for their work or not. I can see your thinking. I think that's a Pandora's box because is there a coaching mask? Do we put on a coaching mask?
I've done lots of thinking about partnership and power. And I did a webinar for ICF Israel a few last week, and they asked me to write a biography that they could send around to their people. And the talk was on power and partnership in coaching, because it's so core, I think, to great coaching is all about paying attention to power and partnership. And as I started writing the biography, I knew that the delegates are all really, really experienced executive coaches.
So I wanted to write, I am an executive coach with 11 ,000 coaching hours, which is true, but that's a form of mask. So in the end, the biography that I wrote, it said, How I describe myself is going to impact how you receive me. So I could tell you I'm an executive coach with 11 ,000 hours, or I could tell you that I'm a human being, a friend, a mother, a volunteer.
And I, and I, they really liked it and it kind of unlocked the whole discussion because at its heart, I think we need to be really careful that coaching doesn't look like a sorted person. helping an unsorted person do their own stuff. And I know that it's not for me to pass my stuff on to you if I'm your coach, but equally, I am only a human being. I am a human being. Like you, I'm a human being, you're a human being. And it's a conversation between two people about one of us.
So I think that... all of us get tempted at different stages of our development as coaches or whatever is our profession, we can get tempted to hide behind the mask of the label when actually in the end this is an encounter between two human beings.
So for me there we parallel off again because for me one of the things I've Well, I've been arguing through this actually, we're putting masks on and off the whole time, regardless of whether there's now an additional mask, which happens to be called a face covering because of COVID. But the label piece, yeah, I'm one of those coaches that I suppose on my email, if I'm honest, my ego piece has got me labeled as an executive coach. But I have always vehemently refused to niche.
Because for me, you know, business coach, executive coach, life coach, whatever kind of label we can put in front of the word coach, I am a coach. I come together with somebody to help them think through the work they want to do. And for me, I think we can just get hung up on those labels.
So again, it's about... which masks are perhaps useful for us as coaches to enable work or actually should we just be trying to as human beings take away as many of those masks as we can during a coaching session to support that person we're working with? Take away their masks. Well that will enable them to perhaps take theirs away won't it? Yes, I love that thing in one of Brené Brown's books, I think it's her.
when she says that vulnerability is the first thing that I look for in you to trust you and it's the last thing I'm willing to disclose in myself. Yeah, yeah. Because it's really uncomfortable to do that. Yeah, yeah. And we are human beings and we work with human beings. And, you know, I hope we're really good at working with human beings and coaches are not sorted. We have our own journeys and our own stuff and our own whatever. So yeah, it's interesting.
You said earlier, I just need to follow up. You said let's do a bit of myth busting. Yeah. So what other myths do we need to bust? What other myths do we need to bust? I think it's some of those around these. Well, the senses we've all got this, although this real myth that we can't coach because these come into play. Yeah. You know, because, because what's going to change what we're going to notice, it is going to bring different, different things up, isn't it?
So, so again, for me, the myths, the myths are all around, they're around culture, they're around the disability that you raised, you know. They're around all those potential barriers we're putting in, or we could put in the way of our work. When actually what I believe is that if two people come together and their mindset is such that they want to do some great work together, actually it's about, okay, we're both wearing face coverings, how are we going to make this work?
And that's actually exactly the same conversation. you and I are having right here, right now, without face coverings. Yeah. So yes it's different, except we've got face covering on. I'm personally going to get hot and bothered because I hate being shut in. It doesn't mean I can't do the work. Yes. And then another question is what's the best way for us to work together? Which I like as a question once we're in the conversation, but actually that's a good pre conversation question.
So given the subject that you want to be thinking about in coaching is the best way for us to work together face to face. Is it indeed on the phone or is it something else on our, our, our coach training yesterday, which we're now delivering completely online. I wanted them to do short standing up coaching. So we were in our Zoom training room. So I put them all in breakout rooms and I'd asked them to bring their mobile phones with a headset.
So in their breakout rooms, they swapped phone numbers. And then the invitation was five minutes coaching each way, walking outside on your phone with your earpieces in. And it was extraordinary how powerful the work was. with no visual cues at all, even though the training is visual because it's face to face on online. So, so being flexible and in the moment working out the best way for us to work together at this time, I think is really important. Whatever that turns out to look like.
I was trying to imagine a coffee shop where perhaps I was meeting somebody to do some work and we were potentially going to be sat. two meters apart with our face coverings on and how that would work and I don't know my instinct my gut says for me that feels really tricky and yet would it be? I'm not sure if it would be. I think there's pragmatic things around that which is to do with with how noisy is it and all those kind of things.
The last, this sounds like some apocryphal statement, last training I delivered before lockdown. I had a whole load of people from various A &E and accident and emergency departments and various other healthcare workers in a room and there were eight of them and it was a very big room.
And because I had decided during the kind of two hours before the training that probably this was the last piece of face -to -face training we were going to do for a while and we locked in a week before the government locked in because of spreading stuff. I asked them to observe other people coaching from the other side of the room and they saw much more without the sound than they do when they're close to because when we're too close I think we miss some stuff.
So if you go to your coffee shop example, I absolutely agree because if you're two meters apart in a coffee shop and other people are there, you lose the intimacy of the one -to -one because, because you can see the vista of what you can see is wider and the, and the noise interference from other places is bigger, isn't it? But if you do two meters apart and you're the only people in the room, then that's going to feel and look different.
Yeah. Because I think also in the coffee shop example, we would also be far more vulnerable in terms of psychological safety, in terms of confidentiality and that safe container. Yes, I'm not a great believer in coaching in coffee shops, I have to say, for that reason. So there's a whole load of things there. I also wonder about the myths around... maybe they're not spoken myths, but maybe limiting beliefs around our ability to really, really tune our senses up as well.
Because actually I know if I'm coaching somebody who wears sunglasses and I'm thinking of an example when I was overseas and it was the summer and we were doing a piece of work together and she had her sunglasses on and I know there's something about the way I turn my head and I sort of listen more deeply because I haven't got some of the visual cues. So I'm tuning up other senses in me to pick up the nuances of the work. It's all about. presence, isn't it? And being fully present.
It's really interesting because one of the other things that happened yesterday in this training is that, I think, no, maybe it was Monday. I like using stuff. So when somebody's got kind of complex thing that they're bringing, I like to encourage them to map it out in some way, whether that's drawing or using, moving stuff around. And on Monday, that was what we were going to be doing in the training, had the training been on site. So I thought, come on, you know, we can do this.
And so they were all using stuff to map out their question and their context. And the feedback was that not being able to see somebody mapping out their stuff significantly increased their curiosity and their capacity. to facilitate the other person to see new things in their own situation. Interesting. So they saw it as an advantage to not be able to physically see what was going on.
And again, as a coach supervisor, I guess one of the observations I have a lot of the time is where coaches are getting themselves too involved in the needing to know. Absolutely. You know, so again, a mask, Do I need to know? No, I don't, because who's the expert, the person I'm working with. Yeah. I call that don't talk to the wavy people, you know, when you go. yes, I've seen, I've seen your wavy hand postcard.
But it's like, it's like the story is so seductive, but the only thing that's in the gift of the person that we're talking to is them and their behaviour and how they do what they do. Yeah. So a bit of mash up, mixing up stuff is quite a good thing, isn't it? Yeah, I really think it is. So where I'm hearing noise and what I would describe as some fear among coaches at the moment about their own potency, I guess, in this new world, I just want to challenge it the whole time.
I just want to question it and go, you're holding yourself back here. How are you limiting yourself? because actually you can be really creative. And if the whole formation of a great coach is about inhabiting not knowing, sorry I'm getting a bit... Should I say that in a softer tone?
But if the whole point of this is that we are able to tolerate not knowing and facilitate that not knowing mind that Kabat Zin talks about and not knowing mind, cultivating a not knowing mind, if that's what makes a great coach, then this is our moment. Yes, yes. And it's that whole piece about living with ambiguity, isn't it? Nearly couldn't say it, nearly. And again, that's where my parallel goes all the way back to my emergency life where the 999 call came in.
We didn't have a clue what we were going to. No. And we had to turn up and we had to create something in the moment with whatever was going on. And I think that's why I'm continually drawing parallels with my coaching life where... I'm really chilled and I'm really excited about whatever conversation I might end up having because I know it's going to be in service of the person I'm working with and who knows what they're going to bring on any given day.
And that actually drives my own energy and my own adrenaline. Yeah. and I need to calm down sometimes and obviously sit quietly as I'm working as well. But two really great examples of not knowing and depending on your formation as a professional. Yeah, yeah. And so there's something here, isn't there, about... As we move into this new set of, I don't know, conundrums that are presented to us, there's something about just being relaxed and not trying to control them. And just let them be.
In the book, I've quoted that Ella Fitzgerald song that says, take it easy, don't try too hard. I'm trying to think in my head. Yes, don't try too hard doesn't mean a thing. Take it easy and then your jive will swing. There's something about doing less, isn't there, in service of more happening. So it's interesting, isn't it? Because again, I just want to pick up my mask and put it on and think. Well, there's less there then. There's less there now. My face covering is on.
There's less and yet I can do more. Less is more. It is. And I noticed that when you just put your face covering on, Leslie, I saw self -conscious eyes because we're talking about it. And actually the thing is, is whatever we do, what do we need to do in a way where we're not self -conscious and that our self -consciousness doesn't get in the way of that. of the conversation.
Yeah, so it might be that we meet, you know, with face masks and that we have to do some extra past timing as they would say in transactional analysis to, you know, and be a bit more overt about that while we get comfortable and while we get over ourselves almost so that we can just settle into the place we need to be to do the work. Say more about that past timing. Past timing. It's...
So it's about time structuring and how we time structure and there's different levels of time structuring but there's one that's called past timing and that is really just this piece about where we're making connection before we move on into the work we really want to be doing. Great, I call that the pre -conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah and I sometimes call it the small talk and generally I hate small talk.
But actually for some people it's needed and it's the right thing and you actually can't do the work until you have that chunk of time. Nancy Klein says people don't arrive until they've spoken and sometimes they need to speak a bit more than others, don't they? Yes, they certainly do. So as we're moving to the end of our time, Leslie, any more myths that you want to bust? Any more myths?
I'm interested in that one around the disability and deaf people and then face coverings again and what we might do to help them. And again, it's not a myth so much as a truth, isn't it, for them, if they're lip reading and how that might work. And actually, as I say that, I'm going, why am I even worrying? Because in the moment, what would you do, Leslie? You'd ask them what they need. Exactly. Why would I even worry? You know. It's simple isn't it really?
Yeah, ask them is the answer to nearly everything isn't it in coaching? Yeah and I guess yeah, myth busting so yeah, new settings, some new cues that might be sitting around so what do we do? We believe in what we can do, we believe in the fact that we're coaches and when in doubt we ask the person we're with what do they need? I mean, how easy is that? Simples. Simples. Simples and pragmatic, which is why I love being a coach. Yeah. Fabulous. Thank you. Pleasure.
So if people want to talk to you more about these kinds of things, how do they contact you, Lesley? Probably the easiest way is via email, which is lesley, that's with an E -Y, at rooktree .co .uk. Thank you very much. So I'm Claire Pedrick and I was talking to Lesley Cave.