Alexi Robichaux || The Future of Coaching

They have collaborated with leading companies including Disney, Google, and Hilton Hotels to coach and mentor future leaders. Alexi holds a BA in Political science and nonprofit Management with summa cum lati distinction from the University of Southern California. In this episode, I talked to Alexi about the future of coaching. There are countless ways to practice coaching, but Alexi believes coaching must be rooted in science based techniques and reliable outcomes,

which is precisely what they do. A Better Up coaching is not a replacement for theirs, but it can help individuals become more resilient and purposeful in their daily lives. We also touch on the topics of self actualization, flow, languishing, imagination, and Alexi's vision for the future of coaching. I really enjoyed this conversation with someone who is really on the cutting edge of the science of the coaching profession. I'm

sure you can imagine. There are many many coaches with all different sorts of claim certificates and qualifications, and what I really like about Alexi is that he makes sure that his coaches are up to date on the latest information and knowledge that can help all people thrive. So, without further ado, I'll bring you Alexi Rubbishaw Alexi, I'm so glad to finally chat with you on the Psychology Podcast. Likewise, it's an honor to be here. Thanks for having me. Well,

you know it's an honor for me too. I love what you're doing it better. I'm such a fan, as you know, and I want to know more about the man behind it. I want to know more about you. Today we're focusing on you, and you know, i'd like to start with a little bit about how you even got interested in the coaching profession to begin with. Is this something that's been a very long time interest of years? Sure? Yeah, Well, I think there's about seven hundred people behind it now.

But I will say Scott, we are a huge fan of yours too. I still remember when we were like a ten person company, Eddie and I voluntelling the entire team to listen to the Psychology podcast every week so we can learn more. So thanks, thanks for continuing to do this and sharing so many insights over all the years. So coaching, yeah, I was really I guess fortunate in retrospect to stumble into coaching at a pretty young age.

So I had somebuddies in high school who got really excited about leadership development and what we called at the time life skill development. And you know, they were reading. They were reading everything from Napoleon Hill to Steve Covey to whatever books we could get our hands on. And my buddy John had this, I think what turned out to be a present prescient idea to start an after school club where we did peer to peer coaching and found local business and civic leaders as mentors to help

us at this intersection of leadership and life skills. And so I was probably around seventeen at the time and that became a huge part of my life. So nights and weekends I would be volunteering. We turned it into a five h one C three nonprofit and throughout college, throughout my young professional career, I was nights in weekends, continuing to coach and mentor at that point Millennials and then eventually gen Zers as they went through these similar

years in high school. And so Eddie, my co founder and better up, his little sister, went through the program. We had been friends at USC, but reconnected when he started coaching and mentoring nights and weekends with me with these students, and so that was kind of our baptism by fire, so to speak, in the world of coaching. And how in a roundabout way, I eventually ended up stumbling on psychology, positive psychology, and you know, all the

stuff we're able to do today in the world. Awesome. Well, what is coaching? How's personal coaching different from sports coaching? Sure? I think it is very core. I mean there's some similarities. I think at it's very core. A coach is typically an expert at really a structured process of inquiry that's focused on you making forward progress to your goals in alignment with your values. And a coach is not telling

you how to do it. A coach is giving you that feedback, they're giving you that accountability, They're giving you that support to really ask yourselves question. There's a socratic component to coaching of really like, hey, the answer is and within you, Scott. My job as a coach is to unlock that answer. What that answer is? Is your answer right? It's not me to give you the answer.

And yes, I think really good coaches do this with hundreds, if not thousands of clients in their career, so they can pattern match, they can you know, I know early when I was being coached, it was helpful to understand, Hey, this isn't unusual what you're going through. Other people have gone through this same passage. They've come out with these

types of outcomes, or they've made these life choices. But that's where coaching is different from mentorship, let's say, or even therapy or high school you know, soccer or football coaching. It's not inherently instructive. It's actually inquisitive at its core, and it's it's a it's a combined partnership to really help you answer these questions in a profound way for yourself. Yeah. I often hear sometimes the word co facilitation used or a coactive process. I know there's a that's a whole

there's a whole brand out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, there are a lot of brands out there in the coaching world. How do you know which brands are good which ones aren't? How do you I mean, would you say they're all great? I would not say that. I would I think there are just so many amazing coaches

out there. We do find that, you know, unlike something like therapy that is regulated by in the US by state and you know, boards, coaching doesn't really have a regulatory body, and so it means that it's a low barrier to entry. There's there's nothing stopping you today from launching up a website and saying you're a coach. There's nothing stopping me from doing that. And depending on the

type of coaching, maybe that's okay. But what we find when we you know, to the heart of your question, what we really advise people look for is what you want is reliability and repeatability in coaching, and that's what evidence based approaches bring. And so there are increasingly more schools of coaching, ways of coaching that are being informed by evidence based psychology and other behavioral sciences. And those aren't being used in a clinical setting. Coaching is not therapy,

nor should it be therapy or replace therapy. But using the science of positive psychology, the science of behavioral economics

sports psychology is a common one to pull from. There are still really like research back techniques and strategies that What that means when you're working with the coach who's trained in that is you're more likely to see the outcomes that are being espoused and you're more likely to have transparency into how you're improving and growing, which for me, as someone who is looking for help in my career as a young professional, still continuing to work with the

coach was so important to be able to like empirically measure how I'm improving over time as I'm making this time and this money investment in doing something like coaching. Yeah, tell me a little bit about the better business model. You have so many different types of coaches right over a better up. You can't pinpoint and say, well, we're all part of the conflag eleation model or whatever. I'm just made a short thing. Yeah sure, yeah, so we do.

We have a lot of coaches. We're very large. I think we're the largest mobile network in the world, but we have over three thousand. Yeah, it's I mean, thank you, It's taken us eight years, but you know, the team's

done a fantastic job. Yeah. So we're about three thousand coaches globally today and we do coach across different subject matters area to your point, and everything from leadership development really with a focus on the intersection of you know, inspiring leadership or center leadership all the way to things like sleep or nutrition or coaching for new parents, and so in each of these different verticals we really try to seek out or where we don't feel they're sufficient,

try to create some of these more evidence or science backed approaches to coaching. And so in our traditional you know, executive coaching skill set that's often used in the leadership development, we're looking for folks who have some of the more pre eminent international certifying bodies and then we actually help up level and upskill them in some of the latest research in science coming from you know, these labs that you pen where you're very familiar to Harvard, to other

institutions that are really trying to apply this in the workplace. So, yeah, the coaches come from different backgrounds what they all have in common is the standard is the standard paths related to training. And then at Better UP, I think one thing we need we do is they're using standard measurements and models, which allows us to understand how people are growing, help people as a coaching compare yourself to folks who may be in similar industries or in similar growth journeys.

But most importantly, it actually helps us give feedback for the coaches themselves on how they can become more effective. And I think this was the big kind of meta obstacle in coaching is historically it's been a black box intervention. You're my coach, Scott, we go into your office together, we have a great session, but did that really work over? Time is pretty subjectively mediated by how do I feel?

My feeling like I get better as opposed to be I would say, hey, we're actually measuring these behaviors and we're able to comparatively look and see how you're improving to people who are making similar investment. And so that's really helped us create this feedback flywheel both for the coaches but also for the coachee or the member as

we call them here at Better UP. I love that model and I also love that you continually offer them education for their education and the latest skills in the science. I love that so much, you know, I can't tell you how much I love that. Wonderful wonderful. Now, have you noticed a shift in the past couple of years to a need for more of a mental health A lot of people suffering at work right now? And I want to make very clear that there's a distinction between

coaching and therapy. Yes, coaching shouldn't serve that purpose of what therapy serves, but how can you still make a contribution? And have you noticed a greater need in the past couple of years that coaching profess that coaching profession can fill that need? Absolutely? Yeah, So to the first part

of your question, Scott, we have seen a shift. So the biggest and most precipitous shift, which isn't surprising when we think about what's happened in the world in the last two years, is we saw topics and conversations related to wellbeing themes increase as a percent mix of coaching conversations and focus areas people say growth goals in the application, as well as coaches actually code their sessions so that they can remember what was talked about, and we're able

to in a safe way anonymize and aggregate that data, and that's been the biggest shift. Now we've also seen career continue to be an important topic, so it's not like career in career advancement has dropped out, But what we've seen is that topics related to well being have really shifted higher related to some pre pandemic themes which would have been very common, which were often like things

like communication, career state, constant. But we've seen that shift and to your point, I think this is where coaching can really shine. You know, if we think about therapy, and we were fortunate enough to with one of our shared you know friends, Martin Seligman, write a piece on this. You know, if we think about therapy, therapy is a clinical intervention. It's really there for acute mental illness in many ways and to help treat and address mental illness.

But it wasn't design for prevention. It wasn't designed to, Hey, how can we help people cultivate almost in the way of fitness or hygiene or if you think of like a physical trainer versus doctor, who's the physical trainer on that spectrum of our mental healthfulness or our flourishing. And

that's where I think coaching can be really fundamental. It can help us cultivate these practices and skills which allow us to build our resilience, allow us to have better focus and energy, and actually allow us to almost have a stronger psychological immune system. To use the analogy, and that's not a medical intervention. That's like a personal trainer at the gym. Can I go to a doctor a

cardiologist and say, Hey, I'd like a workout plan. I don't know, no one ever tries it, but maybe a cardiologist would be like, I guess I'm qualified to give you a workout plan, Scott, I'm an MD. But they'd probably be like, you don't need me for a workout plan, Like, go get a physical trainer. They're more accessible, they're fractioning the costs, and they focus on weight training and prevention.

If you have a heart problem, call me. And So I think what's happening in society is there's this opportunity unity to, in a very honest way and a very safe way, say hey, what is therapy? What is the role of therapy? But just because something relates to our mental health, does not mean I need to go or should go to therapy. And that's not to say, by the way, that many therapists aren't doing coaching. In fact, when you break it down, many therapists are mixing and

coaching in their practice, and that's appropriate. A therapist should and can coach. A coach should not and cannot do therapy. Right, So there is a you got to be careful which direction you go. But what a coach can do is help in stress management. A coach can help on reframing, catching automatic negative thoughts. A coach can help on thinking about what someone else's side of the same facts and story are and how that may make them feel. So there's a host of practices a hope. A coach can

help on accountability. Are you taking your stats? Are you walking? So much of behavior change we know even the pitfall of so many people's experience of therapy is actually compliance and follow through. That Actually coaching can be a really effective, low cost and more accessible means of providing that physical fitness trainer to our prevention, onto our overall health. That's wonderful.

And I'm interested in things not just physical health or even mental health, but I'm interested in things like self actualization? Dare I say, and I think that this is something you care about too, is how can your coaches at better up in the workplace and other sector society. But let's focus in the workplace for a second. How can

these employees self actualize more? Because you can have very happy employees that aren't self actualizing, right, and you can have people with mental illnesses that are that are self actualized right. So both things are possible, so they're not necessarily the same thing. So how are some coaches at better of helping employees and managers help their manager employees as well as help the managers themselves they need help too,

you know, self actualize. Well, I'm glad you brought this up so fun fact, Scott, like the first thing I ever worked on with Better Up, I was already kind of toying with and tinkering with the idea in my head. But when I started to write things down, the first thing I ever wrote on is, Hey, here's a crazy idea. How come there's no company or brand that's focused on scaling self actualization? And for me, the answer was the

way to do that behaviorally would be through coaching. But the goal for Better Up was never to be a coaching company. The mission of Better Up is to help people live their life with greater clarity, purpose, and passion. If it wasn't such a mouthful, we would have just said to help the world self actualize. But we tried to break it down a little more experientially of what

that feels like when you're doing it. But nothing could be nearer and dearer to our heart than in some ways the spirit of Abraham Maslow related to we are trying to at its core fundamentally help people self actualize. So I'll I'll just say that at the start, a lot of alignment there, and I'll put in a plug for you because you deserve one. If you haven't read Scott's book Transcend, you need to go read it. It's awesome.

A I would call it a radical retreatment of Abraham Maslow, and I think in a really fun way disabuses a lot of the cultural literacy around what Maslow is thought to have said but probably didn't actually say, as well as applies in a really relevant and dynamic way. What does this mean behaviorally for my life? Like? What can I actually take away from this high falutant idea? Of self actualizing and how do I show up in the world in that way? So awesome read we love it

here at Better Up. I love the sailboat versus the pyramid. If you read the book you'll know what I'm talking about. So check it out. Thanks Alexi, I didn't pay you for He's not paying me to do this. By the way, we're just both maslow heads, all right, as we like to say, a Better Up. Yes. So work's a huge part of this. As you know, Abraham Aslow spent the last part of his career in Menlo Park studying work.

And this is like the core. One of the core insights that we were trying to bring to life with Better Up is this idea that management done well may be for the modern human and the most scalable way to bring flourishing and self actualization into the world. In fact, Maslow has this beautiful portion. You're familiar with the resays I've given up in therapy as a tool for that. Most people aren't going to go. When they do go there, don't stick with it. We know all the problems. Now

that's different if you're going for a clinical diagnosis. So we need to be careful how we characterize that. But for most people, his point is they go to work and they go home, and that manager impacting their life in a positive way is one of the most powerful intervention leverage we have. And so to your question, how are we doing this? Well, we have to ask what is self actualized? And there's a bunch of stuff in there.

But what really good coaching does, both if you're a direct report of a manager or if you're the manager themselves, is it helps people, first through a process of self discovery, ask these intentional questions of like what do I value in the world? How do I want to show up?

And the sad thing I realized in my life is no one at work was asking me as an executive to ask myself that, and no one at work was training me as an executive to think that it was in my might and best interest to ask my team back. I manage productivity, but I was in a creative economy, but the latent management model, I still had what's productivity? And the reality is, if we want to talk self actualization, so much of it starts with who are you, what

do you value? And are you showing up in alignment with those values? And whatever philosophy of coaching you're talking about. Almost all coaching starts at that intersection right there, of Scott, what's important to you in life? And what you'll find is most people don't know. Most people beyond some vageties of family, which is really important, they can't articulate why they value this. Do you actually value your job? Is your job important? Or is your job a mean to

the ends to spend more time with your family? Big question? And so going through this structure process, you know Martin Seligman Chris Peterson have the via character strengths. Going through this inventory of what are your values that you care about starts to paint this pathway in this journey of If you think of self actualization as closing the gap between what you value and how you show up, that's a really powerful lens to use coaching through. Wow. Wow,

I've never her to quite put that way before. It's beautiful. I'm wondering how better works on peak experience? Love it well? I think you know David Yaden's a mutual friend, right, I love him? Yeah, I love him. So we've done a lot of the great chapter in Peak Experiences in Scott's book, but there's a full literature emerging around. There's a lot of this for psychology geeks go goes back

to William James, so we work on them. We start probably on the spectrum with flow, so flow theory right, and I think for many people in a work context, in a performance context, I think flow is a great conveyor belt, revolving door on ramp, whatever metaphor you want to use into the peak experience spectrum. And what I think you're getting at Scott, but correct me is the difference is peak performance can still feel very extreme. It's

something you do, it's outside of you. The peak experience is actually about being immersed in something greater than yourself. And this is I think one of the counterintuitive gifts of Maslow and the whole humanistic Frankel, James frank All, the humanistic tradition of psychology, which is the counterintuitive truth is you self actualize by focusing on other people. If you focus on your own self actualization, you're probably just

going to be miserable and really unhappy. In my experience, been there, done that, it's a miserable place to be. If you focus on being part of a purpose bigger than yourself, immersing yourself in work that gives back to humanity, or even just your ecosystem, your neck of the woods of humanity, your community. What you find is you lose yourself in the work, you become immersed in the work,

you enter a flow state. But to your point, you encounter a potential peak experience, and the end result of that is overdoing that for a long time, maybe a lifetime, maybe just a few years, maybe a decade, is you really start to become more truly who you can be in terms of closing that gap between your values and how you're showing up. So I'll pause there, but you tell me, I mean, that's how we think about it, beautiful. I do treat peak experiences as synonymous with self transcendent

experiences that I do. I do, and the peak experiences just a phrase, mazleuse so, and I like to kind of keep using that language. But he did often refer to the phrase transcendent experiences. He didn't say self transcending. He said transcendent because he viewed transcendence as I do, as more of a synergy, like a synergenistic not a not a transcending of the self, but a merging of the self with the world in such a synergenistic way

that you're bringing your full powers to the table. But what is automatically good for you is automatically good for the world. So just by your being in the world, you are making the world a better place. That's how I view transcendence. And and in that model, it's you know, it's uh, you're not like diminishing yourself at all. I love that. Yeah, yeah, okay, So to get real philosophical with you, Scott, is it fair to say the latent mental model he's using is this like dialectic? Is this

like off Haven, This is like the synthesis? Is there like a Hegelian little thing in there in that? Well? For sure? Yeah, for sure. Uh. And in fact, he had a phrase call he called dichotomy transcendence, which he said that the transcenders, by the way, that's what I call. I have like an eight week online course, a transcend course. And when grad one of my team members taking it, yeah she's Karen Karen Lai. Yes, yeah, she's loving it. Yeah, wonderful.

So I have this transan course and when they graduate, we called him, You're now a transcender. So Transcender's major feature is having this dichotomy transcendence where you stop seeing the world in terms of in this black and white term that you know, you're either good or evil, you're either selfish or unselfish, even male female, Like you know,

we've all you know, republican democrat. You should go down the list of all the things in our society that at that at a higher level of consciousness, you actually can see how they're all part of a larger hole. So yes, philosophically, it's related to what you just said, but it's also just related to this notion Maso called dichomic transcendence. And I think Masill at its base actually saw himself as a philosopher. That's my feeling after reading

so much of his diary and things. He started off, you know, experimental psychology really rigorous, and then they got to a point where he was like, screw that, life is short. I'm gonna wax you know, profane about all

this stuff. But I think that's true in so many fields, like the best I feel like the best thinkers in so many fields really are natural philosophers, natural scientists when you break it down right, like they start to transcend no punintended, the vertical of psychology, and they're really just answering through that lens fundamental questions about what is the world, what's the human experience? How do we fit into it? I mean, I think of Martin Seligman as another one.

It's like he's a scientist, he's a clinician by training his science, but he's also kind of a philosopher and a lot of his stuff, And so I think it's beautiful. It's beautiful when people, to your point, they're not bound by those labels and they're not bound by those dichotomies, and they're actually really asking these deep, profound, conscious questions.

You get beautiful answers. Yeah, I think I actually segues into a question I wanted to ask you about all the places where this kind of innovation can happen and kind of thinking outside the box. So they have to be the academy. You know, you're obviously not the academy, and you're innovating in the coaching space, if I may so say so, we're trying. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you know the nonprofit space even the for profit away. Are you so horrible. Want to

make money, you know, and help the world. You know, I don't, I don't, I don't you know, work down on for profits unless sure corrupt? Yeah, you know, what, what can they do to really innovate this field? So they don't. You don't have to think like, oh, I need a PhD in coaching psychology to make any impact. In fact, that might make it less likely you'll make an impact. But who knows? What are your thoughts? I

have a lot of thoughts. So so Eddie and I were doing And this is why it's I'm glad you asked. It strikes near to my own experience. I have a lot of thoughts now out they're my thoughts, so they may not be the right thoughts, but I consider i'm interviewing you for the Psychology podcast or here here I am, so I did this in the nonprofit world, so I

think you're right. I think it's about intentionality, and it's about viewing what is the mission of the organization you're starting or you're part of, and what is the structure that best serves that mission? And one of the questions we had to ask. I found myself asking when building better up on and just even starting to do the envisioning on it, it was like, should this be a

for profit business? I was doing this with Eddie and the nonprofit space, and we ended up where you were, which is actually because we wanted to drive more innovation. We actually believe the for profit model was better, and coming from the nonprofit it felt a little at first. It was I would't say it felt a little dirty, but it was just like, really like, is it gonna

Are we going to deviate from our goal? And I think I had to eventually just internalize and be like, you know, I can take capitalism by its head or its tail, like wouldn't shouldn't it be the case that if a business is innovating and creating more human value in the world, it makes more profits? Like why do

I assume that can't work in that way? And so I think what it requires, though, is a core part of your mission or charter is this realization that when we advance science not just for better, but when we share that science we do a ton of publication, we win and everyone else wins. And so I think that's something that we've tried to stay with high integrity towards. Is Yes, I don't know how any PhDs working better up. It's at least over fifty. I mean it may be

near one hundred at this point. We got a lot of doctorates, a lot, we write a lot of grants. We sponsor a lot of professors and research departments at leading universities, and we make that knowledge available. We do peer review journal articles, we write HPR articles for the business world, and so I think the answer to your question is, yes, you can innovate. I actually think in some ways business can be a better platform when you need large groups of people, when you need quick access

to data. Businesses can be a great platform to do research on what it requires from the business. Though, is I think a really authentic understanding that this is not a distraction from your purpose. This is synergistic to your purpose, and you're advancing your purpose as a corporation and humanity at the same time. And that's why you make that investment, right, You're not using all the money to buy a yacht. Yeah,

I got it. But even in your value chain, it's like, you know, like we work with Sonya Lubermerski, we work with Martin Seligman, we work with Adam Grant, like we work with me. We work with you on you're on our science board. We work with David yayden right, And I remember we've had these moments with researchers like you

and David. Actually I think we're working on one paper of the team was with him, and to your point, they couldn't believe how quick we were able to date the data for this psychological scale we were building, and you know, they were kind of comparing, like, Wow, in academia, we'd have to go get a bunch of college freshmen to come to a psych lab to do this thing. And with a platform like better Up, we can get this out to hundreds of thousands of members to do

this by themselves or with their coach. And I think in that data set it was like truly like a twenty four hour turnaround to collect the data. And I just remember looking at this room full of researchers from Ivy League universities who were like, we've never seen something like that in our entire life. And so I think we all win. And social I mean, you know, so much of social science is really based on college freshmen.

If we're being honest, I joke, but it is. Isn't it cool that we're not actually to be able to base it on middle age people in the workplace while they're in situ in the workplace, not when they're at

a university reflecting on the workplace. It's extraordinarily exciting. Yeah, yeah, there's no doubt, and it's it's going to be more generalizable, trust me, and just focus in college freshmen, like most like evolutionary psychology researchers on college freshmen, and then they're generalizing to human meeting patterns across human history, and it's like, do you really want to do that based on frat boys? But anyway, you know what I'm saying, Yeah, I do

not like the college freshmen work. Yeah a college freshman, Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, it's not good. It's not good. So I love what you're doing. I love what you're doing. Now, I want

to talk about coaching philosophy for a second. What to what extent do you do your coaches over there take a human centric approach to coaching because I, as a umanistic psychologist, care very deeply about Carl Rogers' principles of unconditional positive regard of active listening, the idea that in a therapeutic context, the relationship is the most important thing. How does that Some of those ideas transfer over transfer

over to the coaching world over there. Yeah, a lot of a lot, for lack of a better word, philosophical or spiritual alignment. I think everyone should watch some of these car Roger tapes, right, I mean, I think they're just not even even managers. Right, He's obviously doing it in a clinical setting, But this idea about the regard for one another mutual regard. We look a lot at some of the research related to the alliance that came out of therapy, but the strength of do I feel seen?

Do I feel heard? Do I feel respected? So the answer is very humanistic in orientation, very human centric. We use different frameworks. We've used the stuff from the alliance. We actually used to when we first feel better. That's

how we measured. We use those item scales to measure the effectiveness of sessions is just like literally like the most evidence based research we look at, you know, we like act so we look at some of the you know, we're applying at non clinical settings, but taking some of the spirit and the principles from that, we look at

attachment theory. There's a bunch in there, and then we do look at kind of the canon, for lack of a better word, of some of the research that's come out around pods of psychology based coaching interventions, and there's some good work on how you can take everything from the gratitude exercises to character strengths and inventoring around that and incorporate that. But if I had to describe better US coaching as like a philosophical thing, I would say

it leans heavily. It's strengths based, it's a coactive approach, and it's centered around the human Great. That's great to hear. You know so many people right now. It's not that they're having mental health issues, but they're also not particularly happy. They're kind of languishing right They're kind of like people are kind of just like not excited about life right now. Can coaching move you from not negative fifty to zero, but from zero to five, ten, fifteen, forty, Yeah, it

turns out it can. I mean, I think Adam Grant, another one of our Science for members, did the World of favor when he wrote that New York Times op ed on languishing, and I mean, you're we had been reading Corey Key's work. You had probably read it too as a psychologist, So Adam, I think, really gave voice and added, you know this kind of like what to

do about it? Layer to this body of literature related to languishing, and what we find in our data says about fifty percent of the American workforce over the past years has been languishing. Not surprising, again, given everything everything that's happening, I wish we had been measuring this before the pandemic because my latent suspicion is it may have not been that much lower before, right when you look

at some of the engagement in the workplace data. But the reality is when you look at what I think Adam did so aptly, is what are like the micro interventions to unstuck yourself. It's a lot of what we talked about, and coaching is very helpful at it. It's about cultivating resilience. It's about focus and finding flow states to make work easy, to make work energizing. I think a lot of this is really about helping people remember and stumble back upon it can feel like you're stumping.

It should be intentional what it is to be psychologically engaged and get that flywheel of like everything from Goald attainment to I'm making progress. You're really at the core when I see languishing, you have a low sense of locus of control, often low sense of agency that you can unpact your environment. And so I think a lot of it is like kind of like relubricating that wheel. And coaching is so powerful there because you read that

article from Adam. These they're like very palatable, digestible baby steps. But I've been there. I have been measurably languishing. When you're in it, they feel like huge leaps. They do not feel like baby steps. And that's where I think a coach can be a really caring but also a disagreeable giver to use the give and take framework and help on helping you bridge that gap. You know, how do we structure your time Alexi so that you're you

get a flow state? Even if the coach isn't explicit about, well, that's what they're helping you do. They know, like really one of the great elixirs, the great cures for languishing is flow. So how do we help you slip into flow states? And how we design your work this week or how we design the next couple months of your life. Then you get in that flow state and you're alive. You're alive, and you're like, well, I haven't felt this alive in months, and then it's like, okay, how do

we replicate that? That becomes the coaching conversation. What was it in that flow state, Scott when you did that task? What made you feel like, Okay, how do we scale that feeling of aliveness? And you do that over months, over weeks, and what you find is you start to make a measurable difference. I mean, we see people improve their at resilience one hundred and thirty percent sometimes in the first year of coaching. And it's because not because

we have any like special powers. It's because we have that in tinsionality and that follow through and that accountability from an expert coach. Amazing. How do you measure a rate of change of resiliency? Yeah? How do you get acquire that number? Yeah? So we love the Fred Lusen stuff, hero sydecap, right, we're big fans of sydecap. We now use some of our own items. When we first started, the first assessment in better Up was literally psychological capital.

I remember going in there and buying all the individual It was like, you know, for users, buy all the licenses, and every time we had the new users, we had to buy more licenses. And we've modeled now we use some of our team has come up in our own whole person model with some they are reliable, they work, you know, they measure similarly a side cap with our

own item scales. But essentially we've been inspired by the work that Fred Luthen's and the team did on For those of you who aren't familiar, Hero is hope, self efficacy, resilience and optimism, and it's one of the most workplace researched measurements of really these psychological resources or your ability to perform and show up in that way. And so we take the inspiration and the model from his work. That's really cool. Well, tell me a little bit about

Better Up labs. What's coming out of those labs? Yeah, so better Up labs I mean, in some ways to your earlier question, if done well, all of Better Up is a lab, right, Like, we're creating products, we're innovating.

But we have a special group of better uppers here at Better Up who are researchers who focus on taking the data that we're generating, using the product, using the coaching, using all the interventions and experiences we're working on and doing research on that to yield that knowledge for the scientific community outside of Better Up and publish that and so other people can benefit from the work we're doing together. So Better Up Labs is really it's a research lab.

It's also a brokerage with leading research things like the Positive Psychology Center at you pen Sonia Lubermirski's Center at UCR doing some of the research there. Scott, we've worked on things together. I mean I'm not qualified to work on them, but the team has worked with you ontivity, yep, creativity. So some of the latest stuff they've been working on. They've worked on everything from purpose at work loneliness at work actually which ended up being prescient because we did

that right before the pandemic. The most recent work has actually been on psychological perspection, which Roy Baumeister, Martin Sellingman have been doing research on for years. We call that future mindedness and business speak. We find that resonates with business leaders morning better I think so I like perspection personally, but people in auto completes perspective half the time and then people get confused, so call it imagination. That's a good question. So we that's what I called it with

Marty at the Imagination Institute. Yeah, maybe we should. I think what we found is business leaders still wrongfully equate imagination with fluffy, soft ideas those goals if it only stays in imagination exactly, they view it as like a funnel stage. As the top of the funnel, I want the output. And I actually think John Seely Brown is one of our science board members that used to run zoox Park, has a great phrase which is pragmatic imagination.

This is what you really after. But whatever reason, we call it future mindedness. And that's been the latest research and essentially it's found where your questions are headed is Hey, it's a skill set people can learn and be coached

on related to better creative outputs, better imagination. You can practice imagination, as we say it, better up and you can get better at the practice of imagination and a big part of that are skills related to, you know, not falling in love with your best idea, being objective evaluating it. So the latest research you can read about it at better up dot com is on future mindedness.

In this intersection of imagination, creativity and performance in the workplace, which is what we're finding is really resonating with what businesses and so many people their professional life or struggling with right now in a supply chain constrained world, a macroeconomic downturn, yet the need to come up with new solutions is higher than ever before. Yeah, So when businesses

think of creativity, does the word innovation resonate with them more? Again, just for some reasons why imagination doesn't resonate with them as much? Does everything have to be so goal oriented in life all the time for most business leaders? Sadly, yes, but if they work with a better coach, they may discover the en Counterintuitively, sometimes just letting things be you will actually make more progress. But yes, I think innovation is often thought of as the whole practice, like the

whole kit and kaboodle. The life cycle is innovation imagination, And again I don't think it's right, but I think imagination gets pinned towards the start of that process. It's like blue sky thinking, let's be imaginative, and then it's like, hey, but we got to ship something and that's not imagination. And to your point, actually it is. It's a life stage of imagination. As JSB would say, it's a whole different type of thinking. It's abductive reasoning. It's not deductive,

it's not inductive. It's that Sherlock owned site thinking where you interpolate and fill in the gaps. That's actually the job to be done, and that's in the middle of that funnel, and we underappreciate that. But semantic, you know, semantically, I think for a lot of reasons, people just anchor imagination as step one of a multi step process instead of realizing it is the entire process. Yeah, now you personally you've done coaching. Yeah, Like, can anyone hire you anymore?

You're like untouchable. No, no no, no, I'm unqualified. I don't meet our I don't I'm no longer qualified to be a coach and better up, which is probably a good thing for the world. So Yes, in the earliest version of the product, Eddie and I were in the earliest version of the product, you got two coaches. You got a clinician who was doing coaching on well being, not in a therapy capability, but they had that background. You got a business coach, and Yes, in the first version

of the app. Eddie and I were two of the five business coaches you could have gotten. I still work with a coach. I work actually with the coach that helped inspire better up so on eight plus years with that coach. And then I also work with so she's off the platform, she predates the platform. Then I actually work with one of our executive coaches. We have an offering for senior leaders. I work with one of the

coaches on that product. Within the product as well. So as I have to say, I need a ton of coaching. I used to actually have three coaches, but it just personally got too much to manage, like three coaching conversations, so I dropped down too. But yeah, I need a lot of help Scott. So, yeah, I'm good coach. Are you Are you ICF certified? I'm not. No, that's why you don't qualify. That's why I don't qualify it. Yeah, or you can be board certified, and there's a you

can be there's a European one. Now there are other things. Yeah, but they're all the equivalent of ICY after their per organizations. Yeah, so I don't unfortunately got Now do you miss do you miss coaching? Like actually having clients personally one on one. Do you miss that? Well, my clients were about you know, fourteen to fifteen when I did it, so until we did better up, So I do. I still mentor, and I think, you know, there's some coaching that happens internally

with younger staffers and team members. I coach a lot of entrepreneurs, although it's not it's you know, they would, It's more like mentorship. There's some coaching in there because I know some of the coaching skills. So I think that keeps my you know, that keeps it close to my heart. So I don't like mismiss it, but I love it. I have had to in my own work and my own coaching realize that the best use of my time at this stage is not an hour of

me coaching someone one on one. It's an hour of me continuing to scale better up where hundreds of thousands of people in that hour can be coached. And but yes, I mean this feels like a coaching conversation in some ways,

like we're and I love it. It might ask me powerful questions you always always, Scott, I think of coaching it is, so yeah, I do, I do miss it, but I've I've made my piece that I had to kind of hang up my cleat, so to speak, and I'm able to still channel that through mentorship, and I think in a way that keeps that part of me still turned on it, like lights are on there and I feel like I'm still doing some work. So what what do you see as the future of coaching? What's

what's what are you most excited about? I think, I mean, I think it's embeddedness. For me, It's like I've always said this, I don't know if you're here a Star Wars fan. I am, but okay, great so fun fact, I have a baby do on May fourth, so may the fourth be with us, so we're looking forward to that. But the doctor was like, I hope you're a Star Wars fan. I was like, oh, one hundred percent, it's your due dates May fourth. I was like, awesome, Okay.

So I often use this analogy, and no one's there yet. I think better up's the closest. But we're still We've got a lot of work to do, which is what we all really want is Yoda on our back in the swamp, right. We want coaching embedded in our context and so so much of coaching. And this is what frustrated me with going to therapy and coaching early on is it was a destination I had to go to, and so much of context and so much of potential

learning was lost in that journey. And the time you go once a week for fifty minutes six days occurs, I kind of forget what happened and then I'm spend thirty minutes of my session reviewing with the coach. And so the whole goal of Better Up has yes, been to expand access, but really to micro tithese coaching so that it can be woven in your context. So for me, the future of coaching, the through line here is embeddedness.

How do we embed coaching where it's not just bounded in one on one sessions, but it can be through text, it can be through interactions, It can be woven in your life context in a way where you're pulling it in. It's not intrusive, it's not you know, pushing you, but

you're able to call on content you need it. Yeah. No, yeah, I think that's the future and we're not there yet, but likew cool to be if you go to your Alexa and start having a coaching conversation with someone, right, Wow, But then that opens it up to a whole even more of a wild rest of unregulation and unregulated coaching. As long as alexis certified, well, Alexi would use a service like Alexa would go rount you to a better up coach. Alexa's just Alexa's just a wind Yeah, yeah, exactly,

It's just it just becomes the hardware. But imagine if you know you, you, you and your spouse have an imprecise interactions like to say or something, you and your partner, you know, get in a fight, and imagine if you you know you, you're not talking to your coach for seven days. Well already, with better UF, you could talk to someone immediately, which is a huge innovation and that's just powerful. But imagine if you didn't even have to go to your phone. It could just be like, hey,

you're in your room. It's like hey, Alexa, I want to talk to someone about this. And you have that skill and that's like, okay, what do you want to talk about? Just how to fight with my partner? All right, let's get you a relationship coach right now, just right here in your cozy chair, you don't have to go anywhere. Let's debrief on that conversation and talk about that. So we're we're not there yet, but I think for me that embeddedness, not for the sagram embeddedness, but for the

sake of the immediacy and the fidelity of learning. That feels real. That to me feels like what we should be doing with technology. Yeah, the potential there seems really exciting.

And you know, especially when the meta verse gets more developed or even augmented reality, imagine like you know, you're walking around with these these embedded glasses in your brain that allow you to augment it, and then you get like advice on like let's say you on a date with a girl or something, and you have like a dating coach who's like able to talk in your brain about what to say. I don't know, I have an imagination, Alexi,

I have. I love it. I love it, Alexi. I want to end this interview by saying, I truly truly respect you and your work you're doing. A big fan of Better Up. Would not have had you on the podcast if I wasn't. But I'm also a big fan of yours and the principles which and values upon which you apply in your life broadly. So thank you for being on my podcast. I really appreciate it. Thanks for

having me Scott you. I reciprocate everything you said. You have truly been like a luminary in terms of We've learned so much in building better up really from your podcast and your episodes, and we've really enjoyed the collaboration with you personally beyond that, So thank you for the opportunity to share our story and excited to keep building the future together and using our imagination. Yes me too. I look forward to getting this episode out there. Thanks

for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusycology podcast dot com or on our YouTube page The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.