Hello and welcome to this week's edition of The Coaching Inn. I'm your host, Claire Pedrick, and today I am absolutely delighted to be with a bunch of fabulous coaches who are trained by 3D Coaching. So what's not to like? Just a reminder, if you want to be lovely to us, do review our podcast, The Coaching Inn, on the platform where you listen to your podcasts. Like is great, feedback is amazing. That would be lovely. Thank you.
remember that we have on the 28th of March, we have an open day at the Coaching Inn all day when you're welcome to come along and chat and drink tea or coffee or whatever is the drink for your time zone. And we'll be open from 8am UK to 6pm UK. And one of the 3D Coaching team will be there all day and I'll be there for almost all the day except when I go get my lunch. So, Ros Hoare Rich, Lis Whybrow Matt Ward and Deborah, welcome to The Coaching Inn. So what did you do?
Rich, tell us about start here. Start Here Well, I guess we have been working together for four years. And there's two things. One, we've talked about how we want to make coaching feel accessible to people. And we noticed that if you're not perhaps a senior person in an organization, you might have access to coaching and that's improving, but knowing where to start, particularly knowing who to work with.
If you haven't got lots of resources behind you, people to assist you or people already on a roster or something, a partnership already in place, it's quite tricky. Where do you start? Do you just Google coaches and suddenly you've got the entire internet's worth of coaches? How do you know who's right for you? And if you haven't coached before, how does it set it up? How do you start? How do you deliver it even?
It just feels like there are some things in the way of it feeling as easy as it might. Both you have the parallel of the fitness industry. There was a time when the idea of personal training was a very exclusive thing. And it wasn't for everyday boating. changed. And maybe we could do something a bit similar by making it. an easier starting point. a sort of ready-made group of coaches. So you've already got a short list of people that you might want to work with, who are quite different.
So we share some common values, but with different people with very different backgrounds. And so that was the sort of what's going on for people who might want coaching bit. The other bit is that, as you know, an awful lot of coaches do work on their own and That can be brilliant. can be very fulfilling. can be people's preferred way of working, but it can also be quite lonely.
And especially if you're relatively new to coaching, you're trying to build something, there's lots of challenges about how you build a business, how you find your way through the different challenges working with all kinds of different people. So we've met regularly, typically on a Friday for a very long time, however many years it is. and we've really enjoyed that support of working together.
And I guess the link was, hang on, we're supposed to be coaches who are about walking alongside people and having these conversations. That's what we do with each other. We don't have to work alone as coaches. We can work together. so the idea of the collective being a way to make it easier for people to get started who might want to coach also for coaches to come together. in a fairly new set up. not a company, we're just a bunch of people working together.
So we can recommend, we can have conversations about our own coaches. we might recommend someone else in the collective who might be better suited to a particular person. Nice. Which is a great reassurance to an aspiring person who comes to you to know that you will feel really free to go. It's not me, it's somebody else. Exactly. Yeah, I think we recognize everyone's got different, different talents and backgrounds.
And whilst we all follow the same kind of coaching based on the things we learned with, with 3D in particular, and with yourself, people do naturally feel often more comfortable with someone who might have some similarities with them in their background. yeah, but you all know how to get to the heart of the matter. I know that. So let's find out about each of your journeys and what's the difference that you bring to the coaching collective. Let's start with you, Ros. Yeah, so I'm Ros.
My background is an HR background over many, many years. And so I've sort of been informally coaching and mentoring and having those one-to-one conversations for a long time. But I think it was back in 21, Claire, when I came across your course, was called which has completely gone out of my name, Transforming Conversations. There we go. thought, do you know what? I'd love to look at that in more detail.
And I'll really honest, I didn't even really even then think about the fact that it was actually necessarily about coaching. I just thought that sounds like something I would like to participate in. And as I became more aware that it was around coaching and having really enjoyed it and found it beneficial in my practice, I just wanted to take it further. so...
From that I have started coaching in a more formal sense over four years, developed my learning, developed my practice, developed my understanding and started a little fledgling business alongside what I do on a day to day. Nice and so what's the uniqueness that you bring to the collective Ros? I think it is that I have got this HR background. I also work in the charity sector, but a business background. also work in the charity sector and I also work with church leaders.
So I understand the world of the church. So those are the of the contexts that I operate in. Hello. For me, think I came across coaching when I worked in ordained ministry for a long while and working as a university chaplain for lot of that time in higher education. and then moved up to Scotland and started working with Church of Scotland for a whole jumble of reasons why I landed up here. And they were doing some coaching, offering some coaching within their ministry development area.
And I looked at that and thought, that's interesting. And just started talking to people who were involved with that, discovering a bit more, finding it difficult for me to actually engage with receiving coaching because I wasn't the right fit within the organization to get it, which is something Rich touched on. Yeah. on. But then just spotting opportunities to discover a bit more. And again, seeing the 3D course was the start point for me to actually get involved in doing some coaching myself.
And I've loved it. It's really enriched the work I do. I was in ordained ministry and over time I've moved from that to doing a whole lot of training stuff within ministry, as far as doing at Church of Scotland. And I've now missed students too much, missed the chaos of universities. I'm now back working at university. as a student support manager, but within that role using a whole lot of the coaching skills.
Most of my coaching is within the context of my work rather than external work, but I'm hoping to grow that part of my life as well. So lots of stuff with people with transitions, transition points in life, whether they're coming to university or leaving university, lots of work with staff as well, particularly around now at the moment in that space around resilience and what that is.
and how people might develop that sort of adaptive capacity to actually change and adapt in a really difficult, demanding environment. So higher education, transition, and I'm guessing Gen Z. Yeah, absolutely. And trying to make sense of that and working with people who come with very, different perspectives and approaches is really, really interesting. And it keeps me connected and alive, really. Great, thank you Matt. Debs Hello. I came to coaching a while ago.
My background is in education, so I was a teacher for 24 years and really embraced coaching within that context. It was brought into the school and the training that I received there. And from that, I used it a lot with the kind of middle and senior leaders of the school and people coping with workload and pressure and decision making and those sorts of things. And then I thought, I thought, I don't think I want to mark books anymore. Maybe I'll just be a group.
So I've moved over to doing that full time, which has been brilliant, but just transporting that idea of just the wonder of seeing people connect the dots for themselves and working out what they need to do and how powerful it is for people to feel empowered in making their own decisions. So I've used it a lot as a parent as well. I was just like, gosh, this is brilliant. brilliant. As your children get older, you don't need to sort of do so much.
them, but start to do things with them and support them as they learn to make decisions. So that's really my background, I guess. Yeah. guess. I'm hearing you, with that education. Education, so people who've sort of just stepped up into leadership positions in all sorts of businesses as well. Some of them have got neurodivergence as well. I've come across that a lot in education. So some have, some haven't. And that's been a real gift as well just to empower really. Great, thank you.
So Rich, you talked about the collective, now I'll talk about you. Yes. So my background originally is marketing and innovation. So developing new products and services about 10 years in, in Boots Head Office and T-Mobile, early days of mobile internet, kind of stuff. And then about 10 years in specialist innovation consultancies. And I still do that kind of work.
I was fortunate actually from very early on in my career to have some form of coaching from, from about 1999 in various forms, but then I was very lucky. probably about five years ago to work with a coach who was recommended, who was absolutely fantastic. And she recommended you and that's the connection originally with, 3D. well, one of the things I've realized is that there's something missing from a lot of the world of kind of marketing and innovation.
I, if you want to do new stuff, you have to get people to behave differently, whether that's customers who are buying your stuff, but probably more importantly, If you're really doing new stuff, you've got to do stuff differently in your organization, as an individual. team, and you've got to change processes or, new technologies, et cetera.
So I think, so for me, I'm particularly interested in people who are in that world and who are trying to create new things, product services, experiences, and are often hitting obstacles. And I think the coaching part is typically missing. it's. You can set a strategy and a direction you can design, you can create prototypes, but at some point you've got to make this thing a real scalable thing and you hear all kinds of obstacles.
And I think we underestimate typically how personal those obstacles are. I've got to be a slightly different person or I've got to behave in a slightly different way in order to work with new people, overcome those obstacles, create that new thing. So that's. That's my particular area of interest is how you overcome the barriers to change that we all hit when we try and create new things. Yeah. And I heard inside there, Rich, there was something about consistently and genuinely.
in terms of the change that people need to make in order to be able to do that. as in how, how sort of permanent that change needs to be. I just sense that coaching can support people to be able to be genuine and real and consistent. Yeah, when you say that, it makes me think of is there's a sort of accusation sometimes in the world of innovation and stuff, of innovation in theatre.
there are lots of things that are being and how to arm innovation which relates to the role of improvisation as well. you know well. but there is a risk sometimes that you can run very fast with new ideas. in the field and that you can throw lot of energy into that but the hard bit comes in maintaining that change.
over time because it can easily exhaust people, burn out people so yeah that consistency of incremental changes my coaching work is called Move One Thing deliberately because I think it can often be overwhelming if you feel like you've got to change too many things about yourself in one go. And that was my own experience sometimes in the past that, you're telling me I'm great at this, but I need to fix this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.
suddenly it's overwhelming and you just stand still. whether it's specific to new products and service innovation, or whether it's just how people want to change in general, keeping it, let's change one thing and then see where that might go. can often build up into much greater, larger change over time. Thank you. So Lis tell us about you. Well, I've had a bit of an odd journey to get to this point, I suppose, because I was 35 years a qualified solicitor.
I still am a qualified solicitor, but actually faced burnout and various other things and I was just exhausted and fed up with practicing in the legal field but had no idea what to do. So I had a conversation with an amazing person who suggested that I came on to the Transforming Conversations course and I had actually seen a life coach myself because I knew that actually things needed to change before I'd had that experience of the Transforming Conversations course.
But actually I wouldn't have known where to start in terms of having meaningful conversations that could lead to change because being a lawyer, I just had conversations to ascertain information from people rather than to actually work with somebody to enable them to make decisions for themselves. that was my journey. as Rich said at the beginning, we all met on that Transforming Conversations in 2021.
And since then, I've decided to use the experience I had within the law, which was working with people preparing for death and people who had been bereaved in sorting out their affairs after death, I recognise that people weren't really empowered to make some decisions for themselves in that situation.
They felt totally disempowered by the whole process, but actually, more importantly, probably not really listened to and not enabled to make some really important decisions at critical life changing points.
And so I have moved into an area of specialism dealing with people who are either bereaved or preparing for end of life or for being bereaved and making sure that actually that journey can be as empowering as possible and change is forced upon people in that situation, but actually equipping them.
to actually make decisions for themselves has been truly amazing and a real privilege to walk alongside people who discover for themselves that this new normal situation for them can look exciting and can look different, will look different from what they were perhaps envisioning for themselves, but it doesn't have to be all bleak. and bringing hope into those otherwise seemingly hopeless situations is pure joy. you Wow. I love the breadth of what you're offering.
You know, from young people through to older people through to all kinds of different sectors. What a genius thing for you to decide to make your offer together. What's your dream? I think... Oh, don't. was a stunned silence there. Maybe we'd all gone off into some sort of misty-eyed dreaming about what might be. I think that the working together so that actually we keep each other sharp is quite important to us.
Our regular Friday conversations quite often involve some practice with each other to keep our skills going. pushing ourselves to keep working and thinking and developing. That's important. I think there's something I'm going to head off into sociology. Well, there's a guy called Zygmunt Bauman who came up with a theory that was called security freedom paradox. And this sense that actually in a consumer society, we like to have huge freedom to choose stuff. We want all the choice in the world.
But then we're almost terrified of making the wrong choice. And I hope that what we do in the collective is we offer some security. We all come with shared values. We all come with a level of training that we're proud of and think people can trust us because of. So there's that security, but there's a freedom. Actually, there's some choice here. And actually, within the knowledge we've got in the room, we can help people find the right person to start with. And we very much start here.
coach rather than necessarily this is your forever journey coach. Start here is quite important. Where are you going to begin? And we hope that people find their way to us as a good, safe, secure place to begin that journey.
Nice and I love how much you how you know each other and that that knowledge that knowing predates the collective and that you have and that you have capital in your relationship with each other that's gone on for a long time and through coaching and giving feedback there are levels of trust and knowing that will be that yeah that are going to serve the people that you're coaching. What a great thing. think the other dream Rich touched upon early on is to make coaching accessible for all.
That it's not just something for businesses to invest their high flyers in, but it's for everyday folk who want to address some perhaps thorny issue or feel something's blocking them moving forward. And that could be in their personal life, in their work life, whatever. But actually, I suppose My dream and I think it's our collective dream is that this shouldn't be just for those top echelons, that should be for everyone, if they want it.
Nice. Claire, you asked about a dream and you're making me think of as a Tim Minchin graduation speech that I absolutely love and I come back to quite often. And he's got a brilliant section in that that sort of talks about the fact that you don't have to have this crazy massive dream necessarily. And he talks about I won't get the words right, but he talks about something like being kind of relentlessly focused on the thing that's right in front of you.
And I'm reading a lot of of Oliver Perkins stuff as well at the moment, 4,000 weeks of meditation for mortals. a lot of stuff that's familiar around trying to be present in the now. So to answer your question, I don't think we have a grand dream yet. Maybe we will. Maybe the first bit was just getting together and getting a website live and all those things that you have to do. But I think in the short term for me, if we start to get people coming back to us and saying, you've made this easy.
that you've made this feel such a... smooth, comfortable, straightforward, plain speaking process or introduction to coaching. That's a win. know, whether that's one people or a hundred people, it doesn't really matter at this stage. is starting off and people saying, I thought there was something in this for me. I wasn't really sure. I didn't know where to start. So I've been putting it off for ages.
Those are the people who deserve to have brilliant coaching because it could unlock all kinds of things, hopefully. And that's a win. I think that's the short-term dream that we start to hear that from people that we've hit something and we're helping people to get started. And I hope that a win will be when you regularly say to people. I'm not the right person for this. And my colleague X is absolutely the right person for you.
And they don't need to have then cold call again, that they're already in the space and they can just switch to the person who is most appropriate for them. Yeah, I really like that. It was funny because what Rich said was, what came to my mind when he said, what's the dream was just sort of changing people's lives one conversation at a time. So yeah, just step by step, small things, but so powerful when you're stuck or you don't really know what to do, just to step out of that.
And that's what we're offering, a conversation to start things off and to help people find the right people to have that conversation with. with. Nice. love that analogy with a coach in sport. A coach in sport will often be tweaking, especially at a good level, will often be tweaking quite small things at a time. It's those little nudges in the right direction that can unlock something massive.
there's something also just by not assuming that everybody knows what coaching is and so really what we've also wants to say there isn't any question that's too stupid if if you actually don't quite understand what coaching is we've tried to put some explanation around what it is and how it might be helpful and whether this might be the right thing for you as well as trying to help you then find the right person who might be a good person to start with so really really making it
simple for people as well as have a place to start. So if I come to your website, which is, what's your website? StartHereCoach.com So if I come to your website, startherecoach.com, what happens next? On the front page you see all of our photographs with a little bit of blurb about us and basically a little bit of explanation about how we have come together.
And then as you progress through the pages, we start to unpack for you what coaching is and just break it down step by step and then give you places to explore more of our biography. point you to some of our other landing pages, websites, etc. But our faces are there on the front page as a group of people that you might want to consider. And if we're not the people, we can probably find somebody else that we can refer you on past us because we are only start here.
And we've got a page called Coaching Made Easy where we lay out five steps just to try and demystify how you get started. People might have heard of things like chemistry calls and if you're in the world of coaching that means something. If you're outside, don't think it does to most people. So where do you start? Do you have to have very specific goals and objectives for example or not? Is it different if you're... funding through a company or doing it yourself, those kind of questions.
Do you have to commit to lots of sessions or not? The answer is no, not necessarily. So yeah, so we've tried to lay out here's some easy steps that you can just read through and understand, okay, this is the way it normally works. So you're simplifying getting paid for it. Yes, oh I like that. phrase Yeah. I wonder where that comes from. I think you better keep that one.
I think you might mention on some of the previous podcasts, when you come from the outside world, the way coaching works is handy, not confusing, but interesting. Like everything else, there is an empathy in this care, so there is a bit of warmth. Yeah, I'm doing a talk this week. and point one is speak English or your natural language. Obviously you don't have to speak English if English isn't your first language, but speak normally and be you.
And that's what I love about you all because you're speaking normally and being you. And what a beautiful thing that is. So one of the things that I hear a lot in our supervision community and around the place from coaches is how isolated it can feel as a solo practitioner. So I'm just really interested to know what's been the benefit for you of traveling together. for four years. I think it's that- we all value each other as a bunch of humans. We're friends.
We're friends that actually haven't met very often in real life, partly because of the obvious first couple of years, and partly because we're in different parts of the country. We support each other. So we've had weeks where we've had our ups and downs of what coaching is like, what life is like, probably more importantly, stuff gets in the way. And I know that I've got a trusted group of people here. but I can pretty much say anything in front of, think.
And I know that they will be supportive of what's going on and the ups and downs in my life. And I hope that I'm able to do the same for them. And that includes the WhatsApp that's constantly buzzing. And that's why we can say with integrity, you should work with that person or that person, because we know each other well enough and we trust each other well enough that we're not just, we haven't just come together because we've gone, commercially, that's a really good idea, isn't it?
It just wasn't, there wasn't the origin of it. The origin was. we support each other, this seems to work well, it makes sense to be offering this to other people. Nice. personally benefited from each other's coaching and we've offered coaching to each other. And so we can speak firsthand of what it's like to be coached by the people in this collective. But also actually we can speak firsthand to say, we think you should give coaching a go because we see the benefits of it.
So for those that haven't tried coaching yet. you know, we want to sing the praises of coaching because we recognise it's much better, much nicer to go with somebody else or a group of other people than to go it alone in certain situations. Thinking through something with somebody else brings whole new dimensions, perspectives, insights. Even if you aren't necessarily thinking that you're struggling with that particular thing, it just brings an extra dimension.
Nice. And I would say that it's back to what we said already, because we've got this WhatsApp group, suddenly you can think, I do need somebody to think this through with, who do I go to? And, you know, if anybody responds to that, I need to think through something from this group. I know that any one of this group is totally up for it and committed to the process.
which makes it so much easier because you don't have to explain yourself, you just arrive, you get started and some really great conversations happen and some clearer thinking. Great, so you've got, there are many benefits I'm noticing of the Collective and I should just fess up to our listeners that I did actually gatecrash. They had an in-person thing, which I did gatecrash and they are a fabulous group of people. were very welcome to meet us Claire. It was great to meet you in person as well.
It was fine because we worked together. We worked together. We've also made mistakes together. we've been able to still laugh about it. That's also the human bit. I don't think any of us are people who put on a big front. We are who we are. We get stuff wrong along the way. We learn from it. We move on and we support each other with that. And we're able to laugh when we stuff up as is.
always a lot of laughter when we're together, maybe it's because we stuff up a lot, but there's a lot of laughter. There is a lot of love and I think it comes from the honesty that we offer as well isn't there, there's a realness about it and that we are still learning and we'll always be learning together. It's got to be fun all the way. And we also hold each other accountable on the other side of that.
So we've had to create the website, put this thing together, decide what we're called, et cetera. There's stuff to be done together and we're not a company. there's no performance reviews and objectives. We're just a bunch of people working together. And that means we've got to be honest about, okay, I'm busy with some other stuff at the moment. Sorry, I can't do that. Okay, let's adjust along the way. So yeah, that means a lot that we can just be straightforward.
And I think carry that through into our coaching and just be like, you know, we're just straightforward. people sat with you to work through something and we are, we've all been around the block enough. Let's put it that way to know that life hits you with all kinds of stuff along the way. And, my experience with all of these people is the more I'm open about that and what's going on and why things might be trickier this week and why. we've got successes that we share with each other.
know, just got the thrill of work. I'm thinking it's going to be amazing. That support together is invaluable. So there's something about you being human together in all of its wholeness and bringing that to start here. Which is a great reason if you're looking for a coach, this is a great place to go. And if you are a coach, what a great thing to think about becoming part of a collective with people that you trust and where you can be fully human.
Because I think the more we are fully human in our work, the more that supports the people who we're coaching to be fully human. And it's easy to accidentally think that we have to put on the professional shell. And yes, we do need to be professional, but when we put the professional shell on, that makes it one degree harder for the person that we're coaching to take their professional shell off or make a little gap in it for the work to happen. So thank you, everyone.
everyone for coming, it's absolutely lovely to see where you are now, having seen you on day one of your show, well some of you on day one, some of you wasn't day one, so the website is startherepictures.com and I'll put everyone's links the description, show notes And yeah, as we finished our conversation, what's one word that you'd like to say to our listeners, everybody? I was gonna say get it going. Start here. Rich, that's- I'm with Ros, start here. Yeah, just get started.
See where it goes. get started. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. That's what they say, isn't it? So thank you for coming. Thank you listeners for listening. If you want to give a review on wherever you listen to your podcasts, that'll be absolutely fantastic. And we'll be back next week with another episode. Bye-bye.