You're at the Coaching Inn, 3D Coaching's virtual pub where we enjoy conversations with people who engage in the world of coaching. Welcome to The Coaching In. I'm Claire Pedrick and today it's a delight to have Verity Simcox as our guest. Verity and I met in Prague at the ICF Global Conference three years ago. Yeah, 2019, pre-pandemic. Indeed, indeed. The last time I went on a plane, I think, actually. So welcome.
Verity, tell us about your coaching journey and then tell us about this interesting intersection between coaching and mental health. Well, so my coaching journey, I think I've probably always been a coach, if I'm honest. I think I go back to what was I like at school. I was the one asking questions all the time. So I think I've always been a coach. think it just took me a while to actually carve it out as a career.
yes, I, so I kind of began in the world of psychometrics like 10 years ago and just dabbled a bit. And then I actually had very early on in my coaching career, had an experience where mental health had affected one of the teams that I was going in to work with, with this particular psychometric tool. And that really shaped my journey. And I came back from that really interested in, well, more interested in mental health.
I think it's fair to say that that's always been part of, you know, who I am and what I'm interested in. So then I decided to go and do a part-time counselling qualification along with everything else. So I'm not a counsellor. but I am a coach. I have a master's from Henley, but I definitely have a therapeutic background and underpinning to what I do. So I'm really interested in what difference did it make, did the counselling underpinning make to the coaching?
that is, I've been asked that question a lot and that is really hard to answer because it's almost backwards to the coach training. So kind of day one of therapy school for me was learning about my assumptions, learning about myself, learning about my nonverbal communication, how I sit and learning about listening. So actually not saying anything, just listening and reflecting.
So it was, there was no tools, there was no theory, there was no method in those first, probably few weeks, it was very much getting you used to just sitting in space with somebody else and responding and thinking about what's going on for you and like learning to quieten that so that you can be present. Whereas kind of day one in coaching was, it was tools, know, it was, let's have a grow model. Yeah. Henley. Yeah, Henley. Yes, yes.
And it was, you know, it was very much tools and it was fantastic, but it was, the shift was very different. And it was only after a few weeks that we started getting into thinking much more about ourselves. And it might've changed, you know, I started in 2016, which is a long time ago now and coaching, has grown massively since then. But it was, yeah, was talks focused. So it was a real shift.
I remember in my first essay, so we had to do a series of essays, and I remember saying how strange it was not to kind of gone through that process of thinking about how I sit on a chair and thinking about how I show up physically. And actually it was more about what, you know, what questions responding, listening, those sorts of practical elements, I suppose. That's so interesting. Cause we talk a lot in our training about how you sit. Do you? Yeah. that's fantastic.
So yeah, that's in counseling where there's an acronym, which is Solar Bee. And you'll ask me to you what that is in a minute I'll completely forget. will. There you go see. So yeah so it's sitting upright and it's open posture so and you know no crossed legs no crossed arms no tables or desks obviously this is in therapy. The S O L so L is leaning back slightly on your chair to give that more of that inviting posture. So I have got to spell it now E I remember. This is terrible, isn't it?
So that was relaxed. So you kind of went through a little exercise of just relaxing the tension out of your hands, out of your shoulders. And then the B was breathing. Don't forget to breathe and pace yourself so that you're not, know, as our voices naturally go faster and slower, we're not rushing in for questions. Yeah. So I'm interested now, Clancy, I'm going to ask you. How are we meant to sit as a coach?
Well, I think there are lots of ways of sitting as a coach, but I think you need to think about it because our position and our pace and our tone all have an impact on the quality of the conversation. And we talk a lot to people about working online. Yeah. And one of the issues is that when we're coaching online, we're coaching people who've probably been sitting on the same chair in the same rectangle. for two and a half years now.
And if you're working with somebody who's bringing a situation to coaching that they have experienced in that very same chair, we need to do something different. that we've always spoken about it, but now it's much, much, much more of an issue. And I love that. And I learned it because I was talking to a friend, a coaching friend. who happened to say to me in a Zoom call, I just had this really awful meeting. And every week I have this meeting and it's awful.
And I said, what, right there in that chair? And the person went, yeah, right here in that chair. And I said, yeah, and you've got no background on, so I can see that you're in your home. So you're watching yourself having a bad meeting in your home. And he went, yeah, I am on time. And I went, that okay? And he went, no. So he started using a background. And also I think we work quite a lot with managers around the world using coaching in not-for-profits.
And one of the things that I talked to them about is if you're going to receive feedback from your line manager and you're working from home, you need to be in a place where you can leave that place and go to a place of safety if the feedback is difficult. And if you're in your bedroom, because it's the only place that you can manage to be private in your home, you can't be receiving bad feedback in your bedroom, because then where do you go?
So even if you have to go and be in the street on your mobile phone, that would be better. So, yeah, so posture, sitting, tone, position. matter. Yeah, yeah, they do. They do. I think I completely agree completely agree with you. So you're doing this great research variety around mental health and and coaching. And I'm just wondering how much you're willing to share about what you're learning.
I'm I'm at well, I'm still at the very beginning and the more I talk to people who are doing PhDs, I think it is probably always the beginning because there's, well, in qualitative work, there's always more questions that arise. So we met in Prague, I'd offered to finish my masters and I had researched specifically then how coaches make sense of mental health. And that was born from not just being in the Henley classroom, but talking to other coaches as well.
And I kind of had all these questions around, as a coach, we're not allowed to coach mental health. That's kind of the clear boundary that all the professional bodies agree on. If there's a mental health issue, refer to a therapist. And yet the coaching models are based on very similar models to therapy. And not everybody knows they've got a mental health issue before they turn up in our coaching relationships. Sometimes these things arise, we're humans.
I was in retail before I moved into the coaching and therapy space. And I think when you've been in any profession and you've been with people and you've spoken to people, you never know what they're gonna say. And as coaches, we have this... you know, such intimate relationship with our clients and it's a relationship they don't have with anybody else. So I was like, well, how do we, how do we know if we're not collectively?
And I know so many schools are now introducing mental health awareness and there's more courses popping up. But if we kind of say, actually it's not standard practice for coaches to have mental health training or wellbeing training, how do we know? How do we know when somebody turns up? And that was kind of my conundrum. And then of course, we get into the theory of, this is the dark side of this personality.
you know, the Hogan profile assessments, they talk about dark sides of traits and things. And I'm there thinking, but is it a dark side or is it a drama triangle or is it this? And so I think that's where I came from. And I was very lucky with that piece of research because the ICF research portal helped me find lots of coaching participants from across the globe. So that was fantastic.
But that actually has spurred me onto where I am now, which is this starting my, well, I'm a year into my PhD at Birkbeck University of London. And I've kind of continued with the same theme, but I'm taking it into the workplace. So I'm thinking about what's it like going to work when you've got a mental health issue? And how does, you know, how do your managers support you? How do they make sense of your behavior? What do they think about mental health and taking a real experiential view?
You know, what's the experience of holding these two things? Because what I'd really like to do is, you know, my big ambition. And I think when you start a PhD, we have these wonderful ambitions that slowly become smaller and smaller as we go along. is it would be lovely to, at the end of this journey, have an effective, tangible coaching solution that can work ethically in this space. And I say ethically in kind of glitter and gold stars and flashing neon bubbles. So, yeah.
So I think your question, what am I discovering? This is probably the most complex subject and a subject that isn't really spoken about very much in coaching. And yet the more coaches I connect with, and I know you're equally connected to lots of coaches, it's kind of the number one question. How do I know when I'm at that boundary and there's mental health and I've got a refer? It's on that we're mined.
Yeah, and I think that in different parts of the world, people feel more or less fluent about it. So I think in the States, coaches will refer much earlier. And that's partly because of the places that they can refer to a more visible, more easily accessible, and all of that kind of stuff. I think in the UK, people feel more confident about going closer to the edge. But certainly for me, having done the mental health first aid training, mental health aware training.
Having a little bit of an insight into where the boundaries are from standing on the boundary, I think gives you more confidence, doesn't it, to move closer to that boundary. And I love coaching people who are in therapy. Love it. Because really much anything goes because they've got a safe space to take it to. Yeah. Immediately. if we fall over something that needs to be dealt with in another space. And what I notice is that means really pretty much anything goes.
And we don't fall over that thing, which I think is fascinating. We talk about it and we talk about whether we're likely to fall over it. We talk about what we're going to do if we do, but we don't. And that of course builds people's agency, doesn't it? And they go, it's amazing. I've had a conversation which isn't about this being a bad thing.
Yeah. So, and your comment there about it being a bad thing is actually something that is being challenged by other researchers outside of the coaching space at the moment is what can we do proactively for mental health and wellbeing? And, you know, The psychology has been built on the pathology of our mental state. identifying when things have gone wrong. And it's not really until the world of positive psychology came along that we actually started thinking differently.
When I say we, collectively people started thinking differently about all these different things. So this idea that mental illness is always diagnosable, there's always something wrong with you, know, wrong with you. It's a hugely negative thing, you know, is, is wrong. And actually, what we've got now is so many more complex models around well-being and, you know, thriving and struggling and flourishing that actually for a coach, it does make it really quite difficult. to know what is there?
Are they just in a period of low wellbeing? Is there a mental illness? But equally, Claire, a lot of the private clients that I see, they might have a diagnosed mental illness. They might have something very complex. They're being supported either by a therapist, by their GP, by sometimes a psychiatric professional. Sometimes it might be on medication.
there is something really freeing you as a coach that actually we can talk about what does that mean to where they want to use our coaching and their goals and all these other things that are really important for everyone's wellbeing. Having that sense of fulfillment and achievement and progression, there's huge wellbeing benefits in that.
And I'm very passionate that with the right support, It's something that we should be able, as coaches, we should be able to be more inclusive about so long as our clients are supported and we know, and we have, you you said it about this conversation, you know, what happens? What are we going to do if something comes up? how are we going to solve it together? I, you know, I've done, I've done a few different bits and pieces now since my first bit of research.
And a lot of it is making coaches more confident to kind of sit in that intersection between coaching and therapy. The space that is gray and it's unknown and it's complex and just kind of sit there and listen and take, know, strip it back to some of those basic, you know, okay, so let's co-create this moment together now. What do you want? How can I help you? Where will we go? You know, what do you need?
and remove that panic that some coaches share with me, they feel and they experience when they get close to the boundary. Yeah. And I think when we demonstrate a high level of anxiety, when we get close to the boundary, the boundary becomes risky, but it becomes risky partly because it's risky, but actually also because I'm losing my capacity to manage not knowing. Yeah. and I'm getting anxious and my anxiety will project into the space between us.
It's interesting, because as you were talking, I remembered years and years ago, I was not trained in this school of thinking, but I used to meet a lot of coaches who said, who would do an intake questionnaire, including a question about, you on medication for anxiety or depression? And if people were, they wouldn't work with them.
I mean, I have an issue with that kind of an intake because it makes you sound like you're a GP and you're not, because actually the thing for those of you in the rest of the world, a GP is a doctor. the more we do a questionnaire intake like that, asking people in detail about their journey, the more we look like we are an expert. amazing, most wonderful thing we bring to coaching is that we're not.
Yeah. So I, and actually I shared this back in Prague, when, when we first met, I encourage coaches to have a position statement on how they view mental health and wellbeing. and what they will do if it shows up and to have this visible in their contracts, on their website, you know, to have it there. it's, they understand because my research showed that, you know, where we assess the boundary is subjective.
So where you put the boundary, Claire, and where I put the boundary are different and they're different in every single coaching relationship we have. So it's not static, which makes it really hard when coaches would like I, know, a clear, this is it, this is coaching, this is therapy. It's, so we're kind of in this unknown with each client individually. And by having this, you know, this is how I view it. And whether that's actually, I take a really medicalised approach.
So if you tell me that you're going to go and see a therapist or you are depressed or, you use that medicalised language, then that's fine because you know, Your client knows it's clear. But if you're like me and you've kind of got these, you know, dual bows and you can bring on different things, then I have that disclosed. You know, I will tell my clients, this isn't therapy, but it's therapeutic. we might look at the past and I might bring in some of my therapy training, but that's co-created.
We've defined that. You've given me permission to go there. So that's kind of the first thing, because that keeps it out of the expert zone. They know their wellbeing and that's most important, isn't it? I think the other thing when it comes to contracting is getting coaches to have their safety net. So the ICF have, and they've obviously updated their... or their ethics and competencies and capabilities recently, but they actually have in there having a referral network.
And this is something I'm really passionate about because if we have our referral network kind of there before, then we know if something happens, if we end up stumbling across something, to use your words, then I know I've got somebody that I can say, actually, this person is here. But equally, I will say to my clients, so I will get an emergency contact. I won't go into too much detail, but I'll say, is there somebody, if I'm ever worried about you, I can contact?
And it's that, you know, and they'll often say, yes, this is my spouse or my friend or my brother or sister or whoever. And it's that permission that actually, if I am concerned, or they've said something, to then open up the conversation, tell me, you look, you shared some of these details with me. I'm a bit worried about what we've talked about. Could I just get so-and-so to check in on you later? I don't have to know anything else. And keep it in that coaching way.
Because I agree, the more we say, have you done this or have you done that? It's, I think we're creating boxes as a coach. put ourselves into a box that means that we hold the keys to unlock. And that's not right, in my opinion. And I think there are huge benefits of knowing who your referral network is, are. So for example, we are coming across significant numbers of people who are looking for coaches who understand neurodiversity. Now that's not mental illness.
It's a way of thinking, isn't it? And we've interviewed Nathan Whitbread here at the Coaching Inn. But I think that I had a request come in today. Did you? Really specific, really specific. So I went out to my network and said, is this you? And they came back and went, no issue. Well, that's got battery. That was a really, well, it one of my colleagues they were pinging it back to. But that's a, I think having a network creates a bigger space, doesn't it?
So that you can say, well, it might be this person and it might be me. Let's have a chat and see what might be the most useful thing here. And again, that gives people agency, doesn't it? Yeah. And it must be horrible. I mean, I actually don't know any coaches that have ever done this, but it must be hard for the actual, sorry, no, you know, off you go, go to your therapist. This is not, you know, there's so many more ways that we can do this.
I'm saying coaching, you know, we have the ability to ask all these coaching questions. Why not use it with all this, get, know, who to refer, when to refer, how to refer, and sit there with them. My way of doing it is to say, let's see how we get on. Yeah. this might be something that we can move forward in coaching. And it might be that you need a different kind of conversation with somebody else. So let's give it a go.
And then you or I can go, actually, we've probably hit the boundary there, maybe need to do something else. Can I pick up on what you said earlier? Cause I'm really interested. You said, said something about coaching and the workplace. And then you said ethically with some beautiful thing that I've forgotten. I am I. So this is where I, I get very fascinated.
So at the moment, as the way things stand, it's, it's not unethical to coach in this space, but they're, it's a very different type of coaching. And many coaches don't feel it's within their competencies, their capabilities to coach closer to the boundary. So that is kind of one side of the coin, but we kind of flip this over and we look at the continuing prevalence of mental illness and poor lobbying of employees at work.
We look at the rising in coaching, workplace coaching, and some of it is, you know, very, I don't know. specific to, I don't know, career development, leadership development, but others is general workplace life coaching. And what I would love is to have a coaching tool that can help somebody that may have a diagnosed mental illness, they might just be very poor low wellbeing, they may just be experiencing poor mental health at this moment in time.
We can feel depressed and experiencing depression without actually going off to the doctors and getting it diagnosed and treated that way. That actually supports people to remain in work, to remain productive, to keep up with what they, you know, all their other obligations beyond work and actually helps them to.
When I say recovery journey, it's not a place of, I never have that problem again, or never experienced that challenge or issue, but actually work in a way so that they're thinking about their wellbeing. They're thinking about what it means to their wellbeing and how that affects everything they do. And they've got a coach that works with them. So it's not necessarily a therapist to look at why this has happened or where this has come from, but it's a coach to say, okay, so.
I understand, I mean, I mentioned depression, but you know, I understand what depression looks like. I know a little bit more than, you know, somebody else in this space. And actually, how is that showing up for you? How can we get you from A to B with your depression in mind or with that? So that's kind of my utopia, I suppose, when I say ethically. The reason I put ethically on that is because I think there are, there are lots of coaches already out there doing it.
And I am all for mental health training and awareness training, but there's a difference between noticing the symptoms and the signs and referring to actually noticing the symptoms and signs and working with them within the coaching space. And that requires some research, some thought, some effort. And as I'm kind of talking, I always have this slide. I use it all the time. It's Kavanaugh and Buckley to quote the reference and the ICF use it in their documents.
And it talks about this coaching space and the therapy space. In the middle, they have these challenging clients, which I hate is the term, but that's the term they use for challenging clients to help identify when they might need to go to therapy. But actually there's something in that challenge.
And it took me a long time to understand that, you know, while challenging clients can be lots of different things in the space of mental health, having a challenge, it is challenging to coach somebody if they're experiencing poor mental health, that that's why they need to be referred. If they're just maybe, you know, boosting wellbeing from not such a deficit place in their wellbeing or in their mental health, you're going to see results that you're not going to see in somebody else.
And I think that's why when I say ethically, it's helping coaches navigate that space. so that they understand, yes, this is wellbeing and this is, you know, we're improving their mental wellbeing by doing this, but actually if it's not working, well, maybe we need to do something else. There's also something for me, Ethically, which came up when you were saying it, Feriti, which is about people can't untell us something they've told us and the trusted space that happens with an external coach.
Yeah. is different from the trusted space that happens with an internal coach. you know, that the need, I think there's a huge need to do some much digger deeping. That's didn't, that wasn't a deeper digging. We can dig deeper. I'm not the one who's had COVID. Some deeper digging around how do you manage that ethically and how, and what does the distance need to be between the internal coach and the person who's being coached for it to feel that it's a safe thing to disclose.
Yeah. And that's, sorry. Go on. That's a challenge that is echoed, not just in coaching in workplaces, you know, there's, and actually not just with mental health, you know, you get into hidden disabilities and we've talked already about neurodivergent, you know, there is, as soon as there's stigma, it does make disclosure very difficult.
And we also know about obviously psychological safety, the moment that's broken, it's very hard to get trust back, not just within the coaching, but within, you know, teams within workplaces. So yeah, there's, and I'm taking back to my first point of this is, it's all subjective. It's all subjective. So my experience of wellbeing and your experience of wellbeing and the next person's experience of wellbeing, they'll all be very different, but they're all equally valid.
And if you go back to your statement about safety, everybody's experience of wellbeing and of what's safe is different, which multiplies the variety, doesn't it? mean, well, everybody is different. And some people would like to talk about it at work and some people would choose not to. And I think the other important factor when I think about particularly mental health in work is, you know, workplaces are a complex web of relationships.
And there's lots of research that shows this, I'm going to use the word symbiotic relationship between leaders well-being and the followers well-being or, you know, just everybody else in the organisation. And actually, it works both ways. You know, they're interlinked. that makes it really complex to unravel and to unpick and to also take ownership of, know, what actually, what does this belong to me?
you we quite often, know, I've spoken a lot about this as well, you know, talking about leaders and encouraging them to model mentally healthy habits. So for example, not having lunch at their desk or at their zoom screen. And, you know, encourage then other people in the organization to go and do the same to have a break.
But the flip side is, is, you know, what actually if that, you know, right now that they're doing that because they're letting off some steam because they've been stressed, they've had a late morning. So actually they need to eat their lunch in front of their Zoom screen because otherwise later they're going to feel worse because they took 20 minutes out. I know that there'll be people listening going like, no, that's wrong. We must take a break. And that is right.
But I'm just demonstrating how much, you know, there's so much complexity in it. And there's so many unknowns that It's, think the world of work is changing. People are owning their wellbeing a lot more now, but also, you know, not just that, know, they're owning, you know, complex health diagnosis that work a lot more as well.
So we are talking more openly, but I think with that, there will be, this disclosure and actually saying, no, actually I'm going to have my lunch at my desk today because I don't know, I need to leave early because it's flexible working. I've got to do this or whatever it is. So if there was one thing that you could leave our listeners with, that would really make a difference to the way that they engage around the mental health agenda, what would it be? Don't be frightened to listen.
Thinking of you and your simplifying coaching, I would definitely say listening, and we have those skills as coaches, sitting there with somebody while they're sharing how they're feeling does not make you responsible for it. We don't have to do anything about it. And you don't have to unzip it. We can just listen. We can just say, it's okay. Tell me.
Yeah. Yeah. And I will follow that up with a part B, which is, you know, if if you're encountering this more and more, then do some training, go and upskill. Yeah, absolutely. And the mental health aware training is brilliant, it? Yeah, it's a really good, generic understanding of how things might show up and thinking about signposting. Yeah. And for those of you outside the UK, it's probably worth having a look at mental health aware UK. that what call it?
Mental health first aid UK, they're called, they? And just see what their some of the things they're writing, because I think they've done more to normalise mental health in their workplace than anyone else. Yeah, they have and they actually started in Australia. So it's a huge international set up now. Yeah, brilliant. So Verity, thank you for joining me at the Coaching Inn. If people would like to contact you to talk more about this, how do they do that?
So LinkedIn is probably the best place to find me because You can send me a message if you want to know more, that's fine. So that's just LinkedIn and Verity Simcox. There aren't many Verity Simcoxes on there. We'll pop that in the show notes. Thank you. And that's about it really. Great. Well, thank you so much for coming. Thank you for having me. It's been, feels like a long time. It's lovely to talk to you and see you again. Indeed. Indeed.
I'm seeing some people this week face to face and you joined in my little joke on Twitter, which we're all going to find out how short I am. I already know how short you are. But after all this time on Zoom, I've been shocked at people's heights. yeah. There's a thing which takes us back to where we started about how you sit. Anyway, thank you, Verity. It's been a pleasure to have you here at the pub. Thank you. And goodbye, everybody. Bye bye. Bye.