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 this week's edition of The Coaching In. I'm Claire Pedrick and this is another episode which is giving you a bit of a tantalising look at one of the chapters of the new book that comes out in November, The Human Behind the Coach.
And it is my great pleasure to be in conversation with my friend, Dr. Gary Crotas, former doctor, dancer, all sorts of interesting things. Currently coach and leadership person. Welcome, Gary. Thank you so much for inviting me. It's my great pleasure to be here and talk about, well, I don't know what we're going to talk about actually. You haven't told me what we're going to talk about.
So I'm looking forward to our conversation very So just for those listeners who haven't heard you on the podcast before, just give us a little bit of a whistle stop tour of what you want us to hear about you, Gary. What I want you to hear about me. So I'm a coach and a podcaster and an emerging speaker. I have an eclectic background.
I started my training as a doctor, I trained as medical doctor and a PhD, then I my late 20s figured out I didn't want to be a doctor and became a strategy consultant for about 10 years. And then in my late 30s figured out I should get a proper job and I went into retail. So I worked in retail in corporate leadership, senior leadership roles in mother care and self -care group.
And in the pandemic, I realized that I wanted to pursue the thing that made me really happy, which was spending time in coaching conversations with people. And so I went and did my formal coaching training in 2020. and started building out this kind of adventure of coaching along the way. The first thing I did actually, when I was four years old, I started going to ballroom dancing classes. So my identity is as strongly as a dancer as it is as all the other things.
I was a little competitive dancer when I was growing up in a white shirt and a black bow tie. And then I did it a bit at university. And then I took a few years and came back to it in my late 20s, met my now wife to compete together and we became professional competitive ballroom dancers traveling around the world. And I retired about 10 years ago, but still involved in the dance world as part of the Rombeur organisations where I'm on the board of the Rombeur school and an exams organisation.
So I'm still very much closely connected with the dance world. Great. And Gary is host of the Unlock Roman podcast. And there is an episode and I will put it in the show notes where Gary has a great conversation with our friend Beatrice Zornak, which talks a lot about his dancing career. So I'm not going to talk to you about that bit, Gary. But I was a really good episode. Everybody must listen.
You and I over the over time have had lots of conversations about the dance of coaching and what the similarity is between dancing and conversation. And that's what I want to talk to you about today, Gary. Okay. What we what we see. So coming in cold without having had any time to prepare this at all. What are your first thoughts about about what we see in the conversation and what makes dancing such a great word. That's a great question. One of the things that...
I'd love to be able to explain to people about partner dancing, particularly for me, ballroom dancing. So ballroom dancing in the ballroom style. So I tail suit, long flowing dress, kind of thing. That's what Mildred and I did, my wife and I did. The thing that people see is the outward expression. And unless you are yourself the dancer, you can never actually experience what it feels like inside.
And there's a characteristic that it feels like that when I'd say to you, coaching is like this, this is what I'm describing, but it's difficult for people to empathise if they haven't been there and done it. So what I describe in dancing is how incredibly sensitive you are to connection, to balance, to touch, to movement. So when we were at the highest level of our achievement, which was high level, wasn't quite world champion, we would go to world championships.
So we were training with the best in the world. You could move an almost imperceptible amount and your partner could pick that up almost instantaneously and could create a reflected action of the thing you'd done. So I would think about, almost like moving a rib. that was in contact with my partner, I was probably moving it less than a centimetre.
But because of that sort of connection we developed over time in movement, under stress, in a competition, my partner could pick up on that and feel that and respond to it and react to it. And so when I'm in a coaching conversation, lot of people talk to me about presence. And for me, actually, when coaching is really effective, it feels that connected, like incredibly connected.
And you will probably see it in other teams where being absolutely aligned with each other, absolutely in sync is critical. I think maybe rowing is a good example. If one person's a tiny bit out, you notice and the whole thing breaks apart. In something like tennis, it's just not so subtle. know, one person meet the front, person meet at the back, meet different positions, they kind of make it work. Cricket, a bit like that. Rowing.
If you're half a millimetre out, you'll notice and the boat will start to be less efficient. That's what it feels like in dancing. And that's the, when I'm in a coaching conversation and it's really connected, it's like that. It's like you're just right with each other in that So that deep sense of connection, you probably don't realize what you dropped in as you began to answer that question. You said in partner dancing.
Yes. And I wonder when people listen to the concept of the dance of coaching, whether they think about partner or whether they just think about dance. And it's very particular. So there's, there's three types of dance you can think about. One is a dancer on their own, think a ballet dancer in the middle of the stage dancing on their own.
Then there's partner dancing, which could be ballroom dancing, it could be a pas de deux in the ballet, it could be, you know, you see the sort of acrobatic rock and roll type things that you see sometimes in Britain's Got Talent.
And then this group dancing, think on a West End stage and everybody's dancing in unison, that isn't the same, because there everybody's learned the same choreography, they're dancing to the same piece of music, they've learned to all do this choreography in the same way at the same moment, but not because they're responding to the person next to them, because they just happen to be simultaneous.
If you look at something like Riverdance, actually that is more like partner dancing because they will respond to the person next to them and they do the big cannon across the stage, that kind of thing. That's actually deeply, closely connected. But that's the bit. it's always interesting for me when you watch Strictly each year and you have these people that have never danced before and they have been highly successful in whatever else they've done.
They go into the dance studio and they start learning to dance something like the foxtrot. And one of the things that so commonly they say is One, it feels so intimate is a word they use. And they're also slightly blown away by doing something that feels nothing like anything they've ever done before. And they're getting just the beginnings of that sense of building a connection with somebody. Because for most people, there's probably very little that you ever do in life that's quite like that.
And as a dancer, mean, dancing is a little bit like playing the violin get properly good at it, those people have done it for 25, 30 years. You it's not a thing like, you know, there are lots of sports where people say, you know, you're in the Olympic team, when did you start? And they say four years ago, at the last Olympics, I was inspired to learn bobsleigh or something.
You know, you can't become a world class dancer in four years, be it a ballet dancer or a ballroom dancer or contemporary dancer, you can't become a world class violinist in four years, either. It takes time and refinement. And I think that's probably true in coaching too, actually, when I think about it. You know, you can be highly competent, you can display as an effective coach. Are you an effective coach? Are you really creating that deep connection with a little bit of experience?
Probably not. It's not a bad thing. It's just, the reality is, takes time and the time is not in the facts you're learning any more than the time is in the learning of the dance choreography. The time is in figuring out how to stop thinking about the choreography and just being present in the dance. You said there's something about the difference between learning and responding. So we can learn coaching so we can know how to do it.
But the art of true and deep, deep, deep connection and partnership is, as you say, those micro -rhythmic movements, the equivalent of the micro movement of the rib in the moment. So I can remember having a conversation with you where you said, I haven't really thought about the connection between coaching and dancing.
And that was a bit of an unlocked moment in my vernacular because I realized that my life has always felt, my life in the working world has always felt like I've had two full -time careers. So when I was at work as a strategist, people knew that in my spare time, I was a dancer and they would have mostly thought of it as some kind of quite significant hobby. And then the following Monday, we'd be in the dance studio in an industrial estate in a village just north of Bologna in Italy.
And they thought that we were full -time dancers who had some kind of side hustle that we did somehow in the UK that earned a little bit of money to pay for what we did full -time, which was the dancing. And so I think I'd realized that I'd compartmentalized that coaching was an element of the working because it was leadership and executive coaching.
And I had always drawn on stories from the dance world because actually what I learned over the years and developed over the years in my head about peak performance and the whole sort of holistic mindset that helps you to be an exceptional performer, that came from the dance world because where I was exposed to people that were the very best in the world of what they did, but they were mainly the dancers.
And I talked about it in coaching, I would sort of bring it anecdotes and things, but I hadn't connected this thing, which is about the connection and the presence and the, in a way, intensity of being in the dance. into the coaching session.
And I think that, and I suppose it's true for many coaches, that when you go into your formal coaching training, first, it's not the first time you've coached, you know, so I've for many, many, many years had conversations with people, some of which were not coaching at all, some of which were coaching like, and certainly, you know, none were infused with the technical understanding of what coaching is and isn't and the ethics and all those good things that you do in your coaching training.
But I think When I was then in coaching conversations after my training, I was trying for a long time, I still do, you know, to do things the right way, to contract in the right way, to set things up effectively, to close a conversation nicely and all those good kinds of things. want to do that? The presence bit is not really trained because it's not, I don't know, it's not trainable, but it's not on the agenda of the coaching training course.
And so I through then the years since I did my initial training, I have connected more into letting go of the coaching I think I'm supposed to be doing and leaning more into just me naturally as a coach, which is me in presence with the person and curious. and I think in the dance world. It's funny actually, people say to me, you know, what's your favorite dancing?
And I say, The best dancing I ever saw wasn't in the competition because in the competition there are rules, there are outfits, are, you know, the spotlights, whatever. If you go to the outskirts of this little village, Molinella, on a Monday night and you walk through the door of a very unimpressive, slightly corrugated iron looking industrial unit, which is where the headquarters of this Academy called Team Diablo is.
On a Monday night and you walk through the doors, the lights will be down, the music is loud. They have like these spotlights to kind of create the atmosphere of sort of excitement competition. And then you've got all of these young kids with so much energy and drive. And within that room, you've got half of best couples in the world, the top 10 couples in the world, five of them are in this room. And they all want to outdo each other on the dance floor.
And there's no judges and there's no winning and there's no anything. It's just them all doing the thing they're passionate about and brilliantly talented at doing. And if I could spend time in the dance world and just see one thing, I want to get back there and see that because it's like unadulterated. unprepossessing, you know, purity of just energetic, passionate dance. And it's not perfect, but it's more amazing than the most perfect dance.
And that's the thing in coaching that when you lose yourself in the conversation, and there's an art to it, because as a coach, you need to not entirely lose, for example, a sense of time, but essentially, you've got to be in that conversation, not thinking about what's just happened, not thinking about what's about to happen, not thinking about what questions coming next.
You said a really powerful thing to me and other people in one of our supervision groups, which I think at the time was an emerging thought for you, which was what to do when the other person's silent. And you said, when they're silent, we need to be silent too, because where we pick them up when return into the conversation, we need to be where they are then and not where they were when they started being silent. And that idea of staying with them in that presence is really powerful.
And I think the most powerful conversations I have with people, sometimes in coaching conversations, but actually very often in a podcast conversation, actually, is in with that sense of, of, of intense presence. As you're telling me what I said to you, I'm noticing in a different way. The thing about staying with them in the silence is that in the silence, they're silently moving. Right. So we can't wait for them where they were when they went into it, we've got to move silently with them.
So that when they come out of it with And I'm really struck. You we've talked about, you and I have talked about dance quite a few times in conversation, but I'm really struck How in every single moment we need to do the micro response to the other or indeed follow where they're going or or something and. Alistair Bradley calls it flow. Cause what you've described, I think from your Monday nights in the village is, is those dances are in flow.
may not be technically perfect, but they are in flow and they're doing amazing and wonderful things. So that partnering thing really is simply in service of flowing around, isn't We did some work with a ballet dancer when we were doing one of the competitions disciplines that we did was called show dance. And the show dance is a bit like Strictly where you're the only couple on the floor, you choose the music, you choose the choreography and you're doing a show.
We worked with a professional ballet dancer to help us with elements of the show we were doing. We were doing a Swan Lake themed ballroom show. And she said, I've never seen high level ballroom dancing before. What's incredibly striking is you never stop. In ballet, you're always moving from position to position to position to position. At each point you stop. In arabesque or in whatever, you know, whatever the position is, it's moment to moment, balance to balance.
In ballroom dancing, the moment of collection in the movement is with your weight halfway between your feet. So to, you think about ballroom dancers coming together and closing their feet. And if you get the dancer to think about the moment of closing, then they keep stopping and it looks very jerky. They go, now I've arrived, now I've arrived, now I've arrived.
If you get them instead to focus on hitting the point where they are halfway through the step, now I'm partway through the step, now I'm partway through the next step, I'm partway through the next step, I'm partway through the next step, then you achieve the flow. They're doing the same thing. They're still moving their feet, they're moving their legs. But where they're now, now, now, now is the moment of between their feet instead of the moment of on their balance. Boom!
That was my insight noise myself. Because that helps me understand even better this concept that actually in coaching, it's all about the transition moments. so one, you've made a different sense for me of the thing that's been emerging for the last few weeks, which is, I think that in many conversations, we do question answer. So I ask you a question, you give me the answer. And then I regroup even for a micro microsecond and then I ask you another question and there's no flow in that.
I never feel a moment of arrival in a coaching conversation. No, because it's answer question. not question I don't know that you've even described that. just go, we're on our way somewhere. Yeah, exactly. The interest in my mind when you're talking about the silence and going with them in the silence is I think there is a corridor somewhere in Heathrow Airport with parallel travellers. And you're standing on one and they're standing on the other one.
But whether you're in conversation or not in conversation in that moment, you're both still travelling at very constant four miles per hour along the corridor. It's that kind of sense of parallel travelators. It's why I am intensely comfortable with incredibly long periods of silence. And actually, I interviewed two people on the podcast called Justin Zorn and Lee Mars, who wrote a book called Golden that was all about finding silence, and they talked to people of all different walks of life.
And they said, what is the most intense silence you've ever experienced? And what they said was interesting was that many people described really noisy times. And they said, you know, so that I think I'm sure I'm remembering this correctly, there was a lumberjack who said, a moment of silence for me is when I'm up the tree chopping it down. Because what they were describing was in flow. Because for them, they felt like their mind was quiet.
And it was this really interesting reframing of the idea of silence from auditory silence to actual flow state silence. Your mind is quiet because you're just in the flow. It might be a noisy flow because you're a lumberjack, whatever it was. And in that podcast, the only time I've ever done this, but I said, let's have a minute when we don't talk. And then I want to ask you just what came to mind. And it was a really fascinating thing and you'd never do if you weren't on a podcast.
But I think the same in coaching that, that when I'm, when I'm working, when I'm talking with coaches, particularly coaches that have recently come out of their training, they feel under pressure to ask the next question, to come up with the great question, the powerful question that unlocks the thing. And, and that's the thing letting go of feeling that you have to fill the space is powerful, you get to a different place.
And actually, was at this event last week, that we were talking about just before we came on, that I was in the audience. And on stage was Simon Sinek and Stephen Bartlett in conversation at Royal Festival Hall. And Stephen Bartlett, I think, is a fantastic interviewer, particularly for 29 or however old he is. I think back to me at 29, I think, you know, there's no way I would be on stage at Royal Festival Hall interviewing Simon Sinek or other people he's had on his podcast.
But what I did really notice with him is he wasn't comfortable with silence. And when Simon had finished talking, he would come in with his next question, he'd be sort of keen to find out the next thing. And I was sitting there going, if you just sat on your hands another five seconds, you would have an even more profound insight from Simon, because you could see he was ready to go to the next level. It didn't because the next question came in.
And it was very interesting observing something that was set up as an interview and going, what more would you have got if you'd been comfortable not to need to ask the next question? And that's about preloading, isn't it? And I'm guessing that in dance, you can't preload the next step in the same way that in coaching, you can't preload the next question, you've just got to wait for it to emerge in that moment of partnership.
Well, one of the characteristics about ballroom dancing, which is unusual, compared with something like ballet dancing, is that there's a bunch of other couples on the floor at the same time. So you don't actually know what choreography you're going to do, because there might not be space.
You know, there are a lot of highly capable and highly trained stage dancers who are not brilliant artists because they can't break through to being individual because it's so rehearsed and prepared and it's perfect, technically perfect and emotionally disengaged. In ballroom dancing, there's also technically perfect and disengaged because they've slightly learned it by rote.
But the fact that in ballroom dancing, you have to be able to connect and communicate because you know, at some point you're going to have to change your choreography and dance it like you didn't change it. You know, that is an art school floor craft. It's an art that requires huge sort of development over time of those connections.
You know, you have five physical points of connection as a dancer, as ballroom dancer, you know, your body or the leg, your hands and your right wrist and the lady's left arm, you those are the five points connection. You've got to figure out ways to in a very, very subtle way, communicate by, you know, a little bit like driving a car, you don't think about the movements you're making when driving a car. It's very, very subtle.
And it's like that, you know, it becomes almost subliminal what you're doing. But it's why it's very difficult to form a successful partnership. you've only danced together for six months or a year, because you just haven't developed that nuance of connection. And some of the best couples in the world danced together 20, 30 years. And that makes it really powerful, Lawcraft. Yeah, someone's in the way, you've got to pivot, but try not to let anyone notice that it wasn't what you intended to do.
And that's dancing in the moment, isn't it? It is. And when you think about you know, at the more sophisticated level, ballroom dancing is not. you know, always the man going forward and the lady going backwards. Sometimes it's the lady going forwards, the man going backwards. Sometimes you're in different body positions. So sometimes you're more side by side, more in front of each other.
Sometimes you're stopping, sometimes you're accelerating, you know, there's all sorts of different things that you can, you can do and you are responding in the shapes you create to the other person, you know, the shape is the couple together. It's interesting, know, genuinely ballroom dancing people are, if you looked at ballroom dancing 20, 30 years ago and you compared with the best ballet dancers of that time, the best ballet dancers were far, far ahead of the best ballroom dancers.
If you look today at the best ballroom dancers in the world and compare with the best ballet dancers, they're equivalent standard now. And the acceleration has been the development of really sophisticated nuance of the best artistic dancers. And the training has changed actually. So this is interesting. And I've talked a little bit about this on another podcast where in the old days, people were trained to ballroom dance from the floor up. And the metaphor that was used was cup and saucer.
So they said to move the cup and saucer across the floor, you need to move the which means you need to think about your feet. You need to know where your feet go, literally your map of foot placements on the floor, your footwork, your heels and toes, how to use the muscles in your feet to move. Once you figure that out, then worry about your posture and your head and your arms. That's the cup. But if your saucer isn't moving effectively, the cup's never going to look any good.
So we all trained in that way, which was a really tentative way to train because We go into competitions with poor posture, poor head and poor arms and get chucked out the first round. So we didn't get any experience and we didn't get any confidence. And then in other countries, they started to teach the children, they just said, stand up really straight, stick your arms out like this, put your head up like that and don't worry about your feet.
And it was unsophisticated, but the kids threw all their energy into it. They had a lot of fun. The judges marked it because they liked the energy and the posture and all this So got loads of practice because they were doing five rounds instead of one, and they were getting success. They were motivated to go back and train some more. The ones with cup and saucer had to learn the posture and everything else. The ones with the posture had to learn how to use their feet.
The same scale of challenge for the two of them, but one was getting five times as much experience in the competition. That is exactly equivalent to the coach who goes, first I will master the questions and psychology and the technicalities of coaching, and then I will learn to become a natural coach. Compared with one that goes, not going to worry at all about that stuff, but I'm just going to have some meaningful conversations with people and then I'll learn the technicalities over time.
Both of them need to learn as much as each other in the bit that they don't naturally do. But one is going to get much better results early on, because they're going to have natural conversations with people. So they're going to have more experience, more people want to work with them, they'll probably accelerate quicker.
And that's what happened in the ballroom world that by, and it was particularly outside the UK, they just went that this is no way to teach an art, you know, to go get really obsessed about the technicalities because you've created something so constrained that it's very difficult to break out from that.
The dancing always looks a little bit formulaic, you know, for 30 years, when I'd be dancing for 30 years, my teacher was saying, it looks like you're thinking about And I said, well, I am because for 30 years, my teacher's been going, no, don't do that. that's wrong. That's wrong. Don't do that. So I'm going around the floor, trying not to get it wrong. I'm worrying about what would happen if I got it wrong.
And then we were in Canada, competition, and this little couple from China, probably 12, were practicing when we were practicing, we were a professional couple. And the little boy stuck was a good posture and he stuck his arms out and he started just sort of dancing across the floor straight towards us.
And we were like, well, you know, they'll appreciate that we're the professional couple and they're only 12 so they will give way because you know, and he didn't, he just kept coming until literally he barreled into us. And, and I was like, that's a really strange thing to do. It's a bit rude, actually. And then we thought about it and we went, but somebody's told him to do that. Somebody's told him you never your arms down, you never quit, you just keep going.
Because where you are right now, I'm just telling you, just do it. Don't worry about getting it wrong. Don't worry about what might happen. Just do that thing. We'll figure out the rest over the next 20 years of your career. That's what they were being taught. That's what I, when I'm talking to coaches who have written that sort of coaching imposter syndrome thing, the thing I say most commonly is none of us perfect coaches. So don't try and be one because that's an impossible goal.
Just do coaching and do your best and know whether, you you'll know, you'll know if you're, if it's good. And you're the person you're working with is going to know if it's good. And how can you be in flow when you're looking at your feet and counting one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. When we used to teach, used to, did some time running a school here in the UK. And we would sometimes have people coming in to do wedding dance lessons and things like that.
And it's the weirdest thing that you see all the time when people come in for a ballroom dancing lesson for the first time, they come in walking normally like humans, vertically upwards, they look around their feet, they go left, right, left, right, they don't fall over whilst they're doing And then you say, right now we're going to start to dance. And they immediately start standing in this very contorted way and they start looking at their feet worrying about, do they know where they are?
And then you say, walk forward on your left foot and they move their right foot and then they trip up. And you go, but you could do the walking thing about five minutes ago, but as soon as I assigned the word waltz to what you were doing, it changed. So one of the most powerful ways. to teach somebody to dance is to do something that I could never tell the people that taught me because they would think I was breaking all the rules. I said, I want you to do no dancing steps at all.
So we're dancing the foxtrot. When the man dances the foxtrot, they start from the right foot and they take five steps forward. So I said, I literally, I want you to walk forward five steps. 12345, they could do that. And then I said, you're now going to turn just over a quarter of a turn and now you're going to walk back with three steps. They can do that. When you said, I want you to dance five steps forward, all sorts of weird footwork came out.
Like they would dance it all on their toes or they would dance it all on their heels, which is really hard to do. Actually with dancing, if you just walk, you start on your heel, you roll through the foot until your toe is touching the floor and then you move to your next. what happens in normal walking.
But to get people to be able to do it, you had to detach them from the word dancing as in you are currently dancing and go, you're just going to walk forward five steps and then you're going to walk backwards. And once you get comfortable with that action, we'll add a few little bits that make it a little bit more like dancing. So a little bit of body rotation or a bit of sway or something like that, but tiny, tiny touches.
And very quickly they would become actually, they would look like very competent dancers because it's no more simple, no more complex than that. Much harder was when people thought they were dancing. So they would start with this sort of grotesquely exaggerated set of body contortions. And actually they would, they could spend the next year trying to undo them. And I went, well, whoever told you to do that in the first place?
And actually they'd had teachers that went dancing looks like this, dancing feels like this, you know, it's kind of the same in coaching that we can all have conversations with people. And you memorably on the other moment said, coaching is just conversation between two people about one of us. And that is, that's exactly the thing in teaching somebody to dance.
It's you're walking in a different pair of shoes, really, you know, they've got suede soles instead of rubber soles, but they could be rubber soles, frankly. And you would look better than the contorted couple, even if you were doing no dancing at all, but you would just walking normally looking ahead. You know, it's very It sounds normal. Yeah, but it's that makes it sound like dancing is easy. The coaching is easy. And I don't think it is easy. But it is simple. That's interesting.
So not easy, but simple. It's difficult to be simple. But I do think there's something about... If you can avoid ever getting to the place where you started thinking it was very complex, very convoluted, very contorted. So you've got all these things now you have to undo. If you can start simple and then become more refined, more sophisticated, more experienced. I feel like that's a good way to go because all of the contortions.
are the things that are really difficult to get out of the habit of doing, because they're so extreme. You see on Strictly, people do this thing, there's a step called a throwaway oversway, which is the kind of big sort of star shaped thing where the woman sticks her left leg back and the man sticks his right leg back and then they're in a shape. In a throwaway oversway, the man is looking in a very natural direction, which is straightforward.
But on Strictly, for some reason, when they do it, they all feel that they have twist their head to the right by about 90 degrees and they have to look over to the right and then they almost fall over and they go, well, that's just not where you're to be looking. You're supposed to look where you are, like just straightforward, like normal. You just got your right leg back when you do it and the lady's got her left leg back. But someone's saying, no, it should be this contorted twisted position.
It doesn't look good. It's kind of that in coaching that the contortions don't work well either. A contortion for me is, in coaching, is applying a coaching tool or a coaching approach because you think it will be helpful as opposed to it's right in the flow. I, early on, I felt I learned a bunch of tools and I wanted to try them out. And they were interesting to try out. But as I've relaxed more into going with the flow, think I've, I just hope I'll ever do that.
It comes through the fact that I know them, that I've, you know, that's useful, but I don't feel the need to have impact with the tool. I'm thinking about that in the moment, that idea of what are my contortions in coaching has got, that's quite an interesting idea. What a great question. My question that I'm going away with is what are the five contract points?
And what's interesting in dancing is, and again, you see this on Strictly, the celebrities come to Strictly and they see those five contact points as uncomfortable and unusual intimacy because they're not used to having those contact points with a person that they're not married to or in a relationship with. And the professional dancers, you're just dancing with the And literally, there's nothing more to it than well, when you're dancing the walls, we're standing like this.
All the important parts of the body are not actually in contact. But you are in contact in these very different places and you do kind of have to mutually be comfortable with the idea that they're in contact in that way. But I think that the contact points in coaching again can create sense of intimacy that is not real, particularly for a coachee that hasn't had that experience before. Particularly when you're in these deep flow conversations about significant topics.
I've had a couple of conversations recently with people who've got emotional thinking about the deep topics. slightly, unfortunately, both of them were on stage, which was great. But, and, and we'd had the conversations in advance and said, you know, I don't feel deeply emotional when we're having this conversation because it's normal to be in this conversation. It's not a, it's not an inappropriately intimate conversation to be in as a coach.
you might feel And we're kind of got to navigate through some of those feelings sometimes, you know, and that's sort of in your contract, in your setup. But yeah, people can be quite shocked actually, if they've never been in a conversation about something that's really important to them. And then suddenly they're in a coaching conversation and the coach is good enough to help them in a psychologically safe way be in that space. That's interesting. We'll have to talk again.
Thank you, Gary. you know, listeners do leave comments on one of the podcast sites if you're listening and you want to just share what you're learning from this conversation, because I'm just bouncing into new ideas all the time, Gary. Thank you. How do people get in touch with you, Gary, if they want to pick up a conversation with you about coaching? So my website is garycrotest And I'm on LinkedIn, I'm very active on LinkedIn.
So delighted for anybody to reach out to me through the website or on LinkedIn and have a conversation. Great. Thank you. And thank you, Gary, for coming. And thank you, everyone, for listening. Would love to hear what you think. So have a good week, everyone. Bye If you've enjoyed what you've heard today, we'd love you to share the podcast with a friend or leave a comment on social media.
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