I find that really sad. Yes, you've spent the last twenty years or more looking after other people, one way or another. You've worked hard to build a career. Maybe you feel you've reached a plateau there too, that no one is going to promote a woman in the second half of her life.

But you could have another thirty years ahead of you. That's perhaps a third of your life. What are you going to do with those years? Some dusting?

You've lived life. You have all that experience. You've been through joys and traumas, love and heartbreak, realised ambitions and abandoned dreams.

Now, as the final third of your life approaches, as many of your responsibilities drop away, perhaps as your pension investments come good, surely, maybe, possibly... you get to do what you really want?

When I was made redundant after 20 years of full-time employment, an outplacement coach asked me what I really wanted and what was stopping me. She had an answer to every obstacle. And I gradually realised the only thing stopping me was my attitude. Not because what I wanted wasn't possible, but because I didn't believe it was possible.

Life is there to be lived.

It might be a career change. Maybe you want to step away from chasing the hierarchy. A sideways (or even a downward) move into something you find more motivating or meaningful. Start your own business. Leave the corporate world and run a charity or take on non-exec roles that use your experience in a different way. Maybe you want to go travelling. Or set up a garden centre. Or go and shake up your local Citizen’s Advice Bureau. Or maybe you want to push for the top. Why shouldn’t you be CEO? Given everything you have to offer? (Yes, I hear the voice in your head arguing with that statement. Let’s argue back!)

Transitions are not easy. It’s hard to let go of your familiar world, the sense of identity you have from your work, the expectations of those around you. It’s a risk. Of course it is. But not doing it is also a risk. The risk of a life unfulfilled. An abiding sense of disappointment, that you let yourself down, that you had something else to offer that you kept safely locked away in that dark mental cupboard.

There are consequences whichever way you go. Why not shoot for something you really want, rather than what you think you “ought” to be doing?

What's really stopping you?

There are consequences and compromises in almost every decision. Some are driven by an urgent imperative and so maybe seem more straightforward. Others are a matter of judgement, and managing the multiplicity of opinions about the right choice.

Almost every one of those decisions affects a person. Moving to a new office. Stopping a particular product. Moving your manufacturing operation somewhere else. Needing fewer people. Introducing new ways of working or a new IT system.

People are where it gets complicated. Some people are threatened by change. Others are energised. Some people challenge your every thought process. Some say nothing but quietly resist everything you try to achieve. Some are outright aggressive. Others might support you to your face but undermine you behind your back.

You can never please all the people all the time, and that’s especially true as a senior leader. I see it repeatedly, leaders spending huge amounts of time and emotional energy on the (often quite small number of) people who resist or don’t like it. Of course you can’t ignore it, but sometimes you have to accept that some people won’t be with you.

That means you have to find confidence from within. You need to be convinced that you’re doing the right thing, for the right reasons. You need to be able to withstand the hostility you might face. You need to be stand firmly and calmly in what you believe. You need to develop the capacity to make and communicate tough decisions, and how to hold your line with the very small number of people who won’t get on board.

Developing your capacity to do this stuff is a crucial part of your growth as a leader. If you instinctively dislike conflict (you are not alone!), this might be one of the hardest things you need to learn. You may never be entirely comfortable with it, but you can certainly develop the ability to manage your tendency to avoid it and learn to trust that you know how to do it as well as these things can be done. As with many things in life, the more we do it, the easier it gets and the more we embed the skills we need.

Getting some help is crucial, knowing you can talk it through with someone who can guide and advise you, someone you can put your head in your hands with and admit you hate it or messed it up without fear of consequences. You need that support from somewhere in your working life. Hopefully you will have a trusted colleague you can rely on, but if not, look for a coach or a mentor., within or beyond your organisation.

These things are always easier when you’re not on your own.

Research shows that high-achieving women experience a social backlash because the way senior leaders are expected to behave goes against unconscious expectations about how women are supposed to behave.

Why is this?

Women - and men - are conditioned to expect certain behaviours and attitudes from each other which are still very much based on their gender. This is still true, even in 2024. Girls are supposed to be caring, to take care of others, to set aside their own needs in favour of other people's, to provide an oiling of the social wheels that enable groups to get on well together. Boys are expected to be brave, strong, not to cry, to be assertive, to take charge, to be decisive and 'commanding'.

In adult life, these under-the-surface expectations influence how we response to the people around us. There are a set of assumptions about what good leadership looks like, which tend to be based on the way boys are conditioned to behave. When women demonstrate these traits, because they are not in line with what we unconsciously expect, we tend not to like those women. We are all susceptible to this conditioning which is why women tend not to like assertive, authoritative women just as much as men do. One area where becoming aware of our unconscious biases can make a real difference.

So if you're a woman in a leadership position, what are you supposed to do?

It's a complicated challenge.

The first thing is to recognise this is not personal. Most people are completely unaware of what might be causing them discomfort when they encounter a woman leader displaying assertive, authoritative, decisive behaviours. As a woman leader, you need to learn to manage your instinctive reactions when it feels like people are withdrawing from you or disliking your authority. If you allow your defensive reactions to dictate how you behave, you will unintentionally stoke even more resistance. So it's in your interests to notice when you are provoked and learn how to manage how you respond.

The second thing is to learn how to operate in a way which minimises the negative responses from those around you. That means stepping away from the full-on "I'm in charge here" and finding a different way to enact your leadership authority.

It means knowing what your purpose as a leader is. What do you want to achieve? What sort of leader do you want to be? What really matters to you? Which battles are worth it, and which are just counter-productive? When do you need to make a stand and when can you let it go?

If you have a really clear idea of what you stand for and what really matters, you can operate calmly and confidently, based on a sense of purpose that is bigger than just you, and which people instinctively respond to more positively. It won't necessarily eradicate the unconscious biases but it gives you a much better chance of achieving your aims and being taken seriously as a senior leader.

It's not easy, being a senior woman leader. Having someone who can support you as you work out how to operate in a way which minimises negative reactions, can make a real difference in how you step into your leadership power. If you’d like to talk about how I can help you, drop me a message and let’s have a chat.

I’ve been there. I’ve stayed in jobs where I spent quite possibly three or four years moaning about how unhappy, unfulfilled, unappreciated, bored I was. I definitely stayed in a marriage that was well past its sell-by date before I found a way to end it. I mean by about seven or eight years. I’m nothing if not a ‘hang in there because the alternative is too scary’ kind of person.

Loyalty is an excellent trait. So is not giving up at the first hurdle. Stubbornness can see you through enormous obstacles and out the other side to successes you couldn’t have dreamt of.

But fear - of failure, being alone, upsetting someone else - is not a good way to make big life decisions.

Of course, we don’t all do it like this. Some people are out of there at the first sign of trouble. No questions, no excuses, just gone. Decisive, no nonsense, possibly too hasty?

Which are you? And why are we like it?

Psychologists put this down, at least in part, to our Attachment Style. In other words, the relationships we had with our earliest care givers (usually but not always parents) influence the way we behave in relationships for the rest of our lives. If we couldn’t rely on our care givers to reliably meet our needs, or if they were ‘critical parents’ or just a bit neglectful or absent, it can set the pattern for how we form, and end, relationships.

Did you feel unconditionally loved, even when you behaved badly? Did your parents withhold praise in case it made you big-headed or complacent? Was your parents' affection dependent on how hard you worked and the grades you got at school? (This is the classic ‘I got 98% in an exam and my dad wanted to know why I hadn’t got 100%' parenting approach that often gets recounted to me in coaching sessions - if you’re a driven high-achiever, this might be where it comes from!)

Having spent a lot of time working through this stuff for myself, I now understand where my tendency to hang on long beyond the point where it makes any sense comes from, whether it’s a job or a personal relationship. I would constantly worry that I wasn’t good enough for anyone else to want me, that if this relationship broke down, I’d never find another one, that I couldn’t possibly leave this job because the next one would surely be worse. Objectively, of course, these things are almost never true. I did find love again, and I have moved from one job to another perfectly successfully, often to my great benefit. I’ve had to work hard to learn that people won’t run a mile if I hold a contrary opinion to them and it’s okay to say I don’t want to go to that party or no, that isn’t the right decision for this team. In fact, I have found to my delight that people respond well to knowing what I will and won’t put up with and often have a great deal more respect for me when I say no to something, or hold my ground on a point of principle, than if I vacillated with the wind and was unclear or unpredictable.

So it’s worth spending a bit of time thinking about how your early experiences might have made you feel and how they show up today in your life. Especially if you’re a senior leader, you need to avoid inflicting your early conditioning on the people who work for you. They deserve a leader who can set aside their own triggers and give a team what it actually needs to function well.

If you’d like some help with that, drop me a message and let’s have a chat. I guarantee the chat itself will be interesting, even if you decide I’m not the right person for you.

People are complicated. Think about yourself for a moment. What really upsets you? What makes you anxious? What conversations do you dread? What people do you find it hardest to get along with? How do you feel when you’re put on the spot and you don’t know the answer?

If I asked the person next to you at work, I’d get a completely different list. You know how some people don’t mind a good argument, while others are paralysed by fear and will do almost anything to avoid one? How some people can have a “robust exchange of views”, forget it and move on, while others brood for days or weeks about what it all means and whether anything will ever be the same again?

Multiply that by all the people in your team. And your peer group. Your senior leadership team. Your organisation’s executive team. All those other teams. Your suppliers. Your customers.

That’s a lot of people. Every single one of them has their own history, their own triggers, things that motivate them and things they hate.

As a leader, even if you spend a lot of time talking to your people individually, you’re unlikely to get to the bottom of every single person’s issues and needs. But you have to try, because that’s the only way you can create an environment that allows each person to flourish.

That means you have to get really good at observing and listening. When someone is opinionated or vocal in a team meeting, what does that say about their underlying motivation or intention? How does everyone else react? Are there people who leap in and put an alternative point of view? Are there people who seem to agree with everything that gets said and never express a counter-opinion? Are there some people who go quiet when things get a bit heated? Are there some people who leap in and offer to help while others look around for someone to blame?

All these things are clues about each person. Some of them are obvious, some of them are subtle. Some of them are what people don’t say as much as what they do.

Noticing the body language. Noticing energy levels. Noticing the emotional undercurrents.

These are fundamental to having high emotional intelligence. Picking up on the emotional language and being able to work with it, sometimes right there in the room with the whole team. Sometimes it’s waiting till you have a one-to-one conversation and inquiring into what was going on and what support a person needs. It means trying out different strategies with each person.

Sometimes we shy away from “personal” conversations and I get clients who say “but I’m not their therapist.” Of course you’re not but you do need to know something of what’s going on inside them, and the easiest way to do that is to ask.

And the foundation to being good at leading people is knowing yourself. Because when you’re trying to help someone else, you have to be able to manage your own reactions.

If you get triggered by someone, your defences will kick in and you will likely either attack or retreat. Neither option is likely to get a productive outcome. You need to be able to step back from your own emotional reaction and keep your rational brain in charge. You can have a rant later! For now, your job is to seek to understand them.

If I can help you do that, drop me a message and let’s have a chat.

#WomenLeaders #SelfAwareness #EmotionalIntelligence

Under normal circumstances, we are brought up in a social setting. We have carers (usually but not always our parents). We have siblings, an extended family, friends, neighbours. We belong to groups and communities. We go to school. From the moment we’re born, we’re learning how to fit in, by adopting behaviours that make us socially acceptable, that enable us to feel safe and connected to those around us on whom we depend for our survival and wellbeing.

These socially acceptable behaviours are often defined by our gender. Boys are encouraged to be brave, not cry, take risks. Girls are taught to play nicely, look after others and be polite. Research conducted for KPMG in 2015 revealed that over 80% of professional women in the US were taught as girls to be nice to others and to respect authority, and 77% were taught to be helpful. The same survey also showed that only 34% of professional women surveyed recall being taught how to share their opinions when they were young. 55% feel they had no grounding in how to be a leader. Less than half of them feel confident, and nearly two thirds of them don’t feel comfortable asking for a pay rise or a promotion.

In other words, women are socialised into traits which make them good team players, able to work with a wide range of people, absorb a lot of emotional context, and oil the wheels of working relationships. They are not taught how to stand up for themselves, challenge authority, have opinions, be unpopular or make tough decisions.

If you believe this research is dated, or that it will all be sorted when younger generations take over, I’ve just had a conversation with a client whose children participate in a school debating society. After a recent debate, which was conducted calmly and in normal speaking voices, my client’s 14 year old daughter was told by a 17 year old boy that she had been too aggressive and "noisy".

Still a way to go then.

When women are asked to step up into leadership positions, therefore, they have a whole load of historical conditioning that doesn’t help them. Of course, not all men feel instantly at ease in senior positions and many struggle to find their leadership identity - but they tend not to carry all this additional cultural baggage.

This cultural and social conditioning, unconsciously absorbed from early childhood, means that developing credibility and gravitas in senior leadership positions for many women involves changing the habits of a lifetime and is a tough challenge. It’s not enough to notice intellectually that something needs to change, because when we’re under pressure our ingrained habits kick in and we act spontaneously in the way we always have, like a reflex. And even if we can interrupt our habitual pattern, we often find ourselves paralysed by not knowing what to do instead.

When I work with women leaders, particularly those stepping into bigger jobs, I invite them to pay attention to their bodies as well as their minds. What habitual responses do they have when under pressure? What muscle memory is kicking in? Do they instinctively want to be helpful, nice to others, and respectful of authority? Do they shy away from expressing an opinion in the face of opposition from a more senior stakeholder or a vocal member of their team? Do they find themselves being preemptively aggressive as a defensive strategy against being challenged?

I believe senior leadership success comes from recognising these ingrained responses and learning to interrupt them. It means identifying new behaviours and strategies, finding low-risk settings in which to practice them (not the first time you have to stand up to your boss in public, or deliver tough messages at an all-staff meeting), and adapting those strategies when you see what impact they have. My coaching programmes deliberately run over a period of months so there is time for this experimentation and reflection process and so habits have time to get established before you are left to go it alone.

As part of this process, I also help women identify what really matters to them, because being grounded in the values and intentions behind their actions gives them confidence and credibility. When women can root themselves in a bigger sense of purpose, they are more able repeatedly to choose which path they want to tread, until it becomes manifest in every interaction.

Great leadership emerges from knowing what you stand for, using your strengths to maximum effect and replacing unhelpful conditioning with more productive behaviours, to create an authentic, grounded presence that motivates and inspires others.

If you’d like some help with finding your confidence, authority and impact as a senior woman leader, drop me a message and let’s talk.

Thanks to Kiana Bosman for the image via unsplash.

After all, we know the consequences of not doing it, because we live with them every day. The stress. The feeling of being overloaded and overwhelmed and of never getting anything done properly. Being totally occupied by a mountain of nitty gritty tasks while the other mountain of big strategic questions and actions never gets any attention. Compromising on the quality of what you do in order to get through the sheer volume. Not getting any credit for the amount of effort you put in, because you never deliver anything truly outstanding - and the self-recrimination because you kind of know what you should do about it but somehow you never do.

Why is saying no so hard?

As humans, we’re wired to be social animals. In our early evolution, we lived in small groups and we depended on each other to stay safe from predators and rival groups and to ensure we all had enough to eat. Babies who are emotionally neglected suffer long-term consequences, even when their physical needs are met. We need a sense of genuine connection to other humans in order to thrive.

So doing things that might carry a risk of being ostracised by our group feel highly dangerous.

We worry we will be cast aside by our team, peers or bosses. We worry our friends will stop liking us. We worry about losing our job, pay rise or promotion, or not being invited to parties. We worry on a fundamental level about being disliked.

And since our bodies are primed for survival, and staying connected and accepted by others is a primary survival need, no matter how hard our rational brain tells us we should say no, our muscle and neurological processes override our thinking and keep us doing what we imagine other people want and expect from us.

The consequences of saying yes

Saying yes to everything, whether we want to do it or not, devalues our commitment. Grudge and resentment are not good emotions to bring into our interpersonal relationships. People around us know we’re overloaded (possibly because we tell them so. A lot!) and start to resent us in return for not standing up for ourselves more. We start to resent ourselves and our self-esteem diminishes. We develop a victim mentality about life. “If only I weren’t so busy.” “No one understands what it’s like.” “No one appreciates what I do.” “I don’t know why I bother.” That doesn’t make us an attractive person to be around, it doesn’t make us feel good about ourselves, and it doesn’t help us to change.

The consequences to us as individuals of always saying yes have a real cost to our relationships, our self-respect, and our sense of fulfilment and achievement in life.

Professionally, as a member of a team or organisation, we might have a certain value because we take on stuff that no one else really wants and we push on through mountains of crap that other (more selfish?) people avoid. But actually, we miss important deadlines, we let people down and, quite possibly, the quality of our work is compromised because we are so rushed and overloaded we don’t have time to think things through properly or do anything to a really high standard. The people around us start to lose respect for us as professionals. They don’t appreciate our constant complaints about how busy we are - we’re all busy! And they don’t appreciate the substandard results we deliver to the team.

We have to recognise that saying yes to everything eventually becomes counterproductive, creating exactly the reactions in other people we are trying to avoid.

Learning to say no

To be able to say no, we have to learn some new habits, and we have to learn how to do it in a way which doesn’t blow the baby down the plughole along with the bath water.

Understand the consequences of no

Firstly, we have to understand the consequences of our “no” to those around us. They are going to be surprised, possibly even angry. They are going to wonder what’s come over us. They’re going to resent us for suddenly not being the reliable dumping-ground for all that work. They’re going to be frustrated at having to find someone else to do it, or having to make choices about what doesn’t get done.

We have to acknowledge the implications for the other person, out loud, to show that we understand their point of view.

We may need to make some kind of offer, to sweeten the pill. We might offer to find someone else to help out. We might offer to train or mentor that person because for someone else it could be a development opportunity.

We might need to point out the strategic consequences of continuing to focus on operational demands at the expense of strategic priorities. Keeping the show on the road is important, but not if it stops you noticing a massive boulder ahead. If the wheels are going to come off when you hit that huge pothole, what’s the point of continually pumping up the tyres or revving the engine?

We have to speak to the concerns of the other person. We have to show that we understand how things look from their perspective and appreciate that there may be tensions in what we both want from work and life.

Why does it matter to you?

Then we have to articulate why it’s important for us to say no. That we are cracking under the strain or are deeply unsatisfied in our work. That we care enough about something to say no to a lot of other things. That we want the chance to do an important piece of work really well, rather than a lot of work not-very-well.

We have to hold steady to our own priorities and needs and be willing to articulate those. Not in an aggressive way, but calmly and confidently, grounded in the knowledge of why it matters and what’s really important to us.

Keep focused on the benefits

We may have to work on reminding ourselves of the benefits of making this change. The calm that might descend on our lives when we are in control and not pushing beyond our limits. The satisfaction that comes from a job well done, or a self-respecting boundary upheld. The recognition from others of the quality of our work. Maybe even a bonus or a promotion. The joy of having time and energy for our friends and family, or ourselves. The ability to recharge without the nagging fear of all that remains undone.

We also need to keep reminding ourselves that only we truly care about our own mental health, wellbeing, sense of achievement and work-life balance. We may be surrounded by people we like, in a functioning and enjoyable team, but when it comes down to it, organisations are hungry monsters and they will take everything we have to offer unless we draw a line and are prepared to stick to it. The only person with a genuine vested interest in our own life is us.

Say no to the request, not the person

We have to learn how to say no to the request, the task, the specific piece of work, but not to the person and the productive working relationship we value so highly.

It’s not life and death

And we also need to keep reminding ourselves that we are no longer roaming the savannah, hunting for scarce food and warding off hungry lions. If someone takes against us for standing up for ourselves, then we can mostly manage without them.

Leading the way

Finally, it turns out that many people are struggling to manage their priorities and their boundaries and seeing someone else do it earns their respect, even admiration. And they learn from watching it happen. If you want your team to be more focused on priorities, able to set aside distractions and keep on track despite multiple competing demands, you have to lead the way. Show them how to do it well, and show them the benefits that arise. Show them the positive outcomes from delivering high quality work that really makes a difference.

Need help?

You might have got this far and still not feel you can actually put a “no” into practice. If that’s the case, drop me a message and let’s talk about how I can help you. Together we can plan out your rationale, your approach, your tone, your body language, how to manage your own emotions and the reactions you might get. We can practice together and identify opportunities for low-risk experimentation in the real world.

I’m here for you every step of the way, supporting you, guiding you, pushing you when necessary, cheerleading and congratulating. You don’t have to do it alone.

Ungrateful? Probably. And there are plenty of circumstances when I’m happy to accept help. But I’ve just realised that when someone presents me with what they see as a solution to some of life’s challenges, I have all sorts of counter-reactions. Who are you to tell me what to do? I’m perfectly capable of sorting out my own life, thank you. (Even when the evidence might suggest otherwise!) Thanks, but you don’t actually understand the complexities of the situation and no, it’s not the same as when it happened to you.

Yes, all very petulant child.

I realised today that this is classic “drama triangle” territory.

The drama triangle was developed by Stephen Karpman in 1968. He was a student of Eric Berne, the creator of Transactional Analysis, how we switch between different “roles” in our relationships (parent, child, adult). Karpman extended the idea to describe behaviours that fall into the categories of Persecutor, Rescuer and Victim.

As Persecutor, we can be judgemental, blaming, critical. As a Victim, we do “poor me”, refusing to take responsibility for ourselves and blaming everyone else for our situation. As Rescuer, we see others as helpless and needing to be saved (from the situation and, sometimes, from themselves).

I recently found myself feeling very Victim when someone else did what I felt was Rescuer - here’s THE answer to your problem, it’s simple, I can fix it for you. It made me feel helpless, inadequate, resentful and immediately mentally checking off all the reasons why their solution wouldn’t work.

Definitely ungrateful!

The adult truth is that the solution is a good one. Yes, there are (genuine) hurdles to overcome in order to implement it, but that doesn’t diminish the quality of the solution. It requires a certain humility on my part to accept the offer and a certain groundedness to explain why I can’t just snap it up straight away and need to pave the way first, but it IS a solution and a very welcome one.

It was a bit of a shock to realise I react so badly to being rescued. I was brought up in a household where self-sufficiency, staying calm, pulling oneself together and not making a fuss were highly prized, so it’s not really surprising that I see being rescued as a sign of weakness. But that’s not a helpful attitude and means I spend a lot of time struggling with problems on my own before finally admitting tired, frustrated defeat and letting someone else in.

I see this in leaders a lot. Apart from their upbringing, leaders believe they are supposed to know all the answers, be strong and assertive, and never show any weakness. No wonder so many of them struggle with stress, burnout and professional loneliness.

I also, though, see a tendency to rescue, particularly in women who were brought up to be caring, collaborative, team players. Look after others. Put other people’s needs before your own and do whatever it takes to help out with other people’s problems. If you do it a lot, it teaches the people around you that you will fix all their problems so they don’t need to bother thinking for themselves, thereby also leading to stress and burnout. Not to mention resentment when you suddenly notice that everyone leaves it all to you and you’re overworked and tired and trapped in the minutiae of operational problems rather than any kind of strategic leadership work.

We all slip into all of these roles from time to time. Sometimes we can cycle round the drama triangle multiple times in one conversation. Pay attention next time you’re in a frustrating meeting and see if you can spot which role you’re in at any given moment. Then ask yourself how helpful that is (clue: probably not at all) and how you need to manage yourself differently to step out of the triangle, access your inner grown-up and change the dynamics of the conversation.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on the drama triangle and how it shows up in your leadership.

And if you’d like my help to find your confidence, authority, impact and inner adult, drop me a message and let’s talk.

Mostly people write about procrastination as a bad thing to be tamed and overcome. Of course they have a point, when procrastination can lead to missed deadlines, a backlog, and a load of negative mental chatter when we beat ourselves up for being rubbish.

But what if procrastination, in some circumstances, has a useful purpose?

Here’s what I notice about my own procrastination.

It often happens when I feel stuck or uncertain. I have questions in my mind about what I’m doing, or why. Or exactly how to tackle something. I’m sure some people would power on through, holding themselves to the task however painful. And on occasion of course I do that. I don’t like to miss deadlines, I don’t like to let other people down. But there are lots of things I do that are not deadline-driven, they just need to be done sometime. Possibly there is some sort of timeframe attached - people shouldn’t have to wait weeks (days?) for a reply to an email. But they don’t necessarily need it right now.

And here’s what I notice about my own procrastination. Yes, some of it is fear of making a mistake or upsetting someone or making a fool of myself.

But some of it is because I’m just not ready.

I’ve noticed repeatedly that sometimes an email takes a while to brew. It needs time to form itself. What am I actually trying to say to this person? What form of words do I need to get the message across with the right emotional quality? What is that nagging feeling in my gut really trying to tell me? Do I need to let a heated emotional reaction settle before I do anything about this?

The thoughts take time to come forward. They lurk in my subconscious and they don’t come out to order. They have a momentum of their own.

Or there’s the phone call I need to make. I’m not a lover of the phone. I haven’t yet worked out why I have quite such a phobic dislike of it but I will go to quite some lengths to avoid calling someone.

And then sometimes I just feel ready. I’ve got the right amount of extrovert energy, and I just grab the phone and bang, the job’s done. But I have to be in the right energetic mood. And when I force myself to do it regardless, I’m clumsy, inarticulate, I forget half the points I needed to make or questions I needed to ask. I make a hash of it, and create a new critical monologue in my head about why I didn’t just wait and get myself together.

And then there’s those weird serendipitous moments when you leave something and the problem goes away. The other person decides they don’t need that thing after all, or they’ve found the answer a different way. Someone else steps in and sorts it. I do wonder, in my more woo-woo moments, if the universe isn’t looking out for me in some way, that some sort of magical energy is holding me back from doing something because it’s just not mine to do or because there is a solution on its way that doesn’t need my energy or engagement to make it happen.

This might be a bit way-out for some of you. But when you find yourself procrastinating, rather than getting cross with yourself, instead try a bit of curious inquiry. Why do I feel like this? What would help this flow more smoothly? Who else could I involve? What might happen if I leave this? What might happen if I push through? How much time can I give myself to think about this? What other solutions might there be?

This is not just an alternative way to unblock yourself. You’ll also learn something about yourself and your needs. Most of us spend a lot of time busily meeting everyone else’s needs and paying no attention to our own, to our own detriment. Take that time to understand yourself better, to appreciate your strengths, and to make space for something to happen in its own timeframe and using its own energy.

Procrastination as a source of learning, rather than self-criticism.

This approach gives you thinking time. Time to work out what you know and what you don’t know. How big a problem this actually is. Who is best placed to solve it. How urgent or important it is. What you need to put in motion that addresses the problem without taking it all on your own shoulders.

By overcoming your belief that you should know everything and developing the skills that encourage and support other people to think creatively, you start to build your team’s capability to analyse, problem-solve and take responsibility. It’s in your interests to get other people to think for themselves, otherwise it always comes back to you.

This is also why I spend so much time in coaching sessions unpicking the problem. So often I see people arrive with a question or a problem and by simply peeling away the layers, paying attention to the feelings, and exploring it from every possible angle, deeper understanding emerges which produces a wider range of possible solutions. Sometimes the solution is to do nothing. It’s not my problem. It’s not a big enough problem to merit the time and energy it would take to fix it. The learning that might arise from not fixing it is more valuable than making it go away. I can’t tell you how many times a client will reach their own conclusion just from talking it through. They don’t need to be told the answer or offered suggestions. The answer emerges from the exploration.

Learning to do that as a leader is a hugely valuable skill. By allowing your team the space to think it through for themselves, you are helping to build their problem-solving muscles, and their capacity for taking and holding responsibility. It builds trust between you when they realise you believe in them. It creates a sense of ownership for issues and over time means they get fixed without you needing to be involved at all. It may feel time-consuming to coach your team through it at the beginning but it will save you so much time (and stress!) in the long run and leave your head clear for issues where you, and only you, can add real value.

This, or a variation of this, comes up often in my work with women leaders. It’s a really common issue and, like many common issues, has validity. Most of us need a bit of feedback from other people, to know how we’re doing, to feel valued and recognised, and to motivate us.

Problems arise, though, if we rely entirely or largely on external validation. If we have no sense for ourselves of what we’re good at, whether we did the right thing (even if we didn’t get the desired outcome), whether we’re following a path that satisfies and fulfils us rather than our boss or our organisation, then our self-worth and self-confidence is entirely in the hands of other people.

That’s a lot of power to hand over.

You can’t please everyone all of the time, no matter how hard you try. Other people have different values, ways of working and priorities to you, and with the best will in the world there are going to be variances and disagreements.

Also, other people are worried about their own performance, To Do list and professional reputation. They’re not spending half as much time thinking about you as you are. They’re busy. Distracted. Focused on something that maybe you can’t see. Doing what's important to them, for whatever reason.

People will have different values to you. What gives you a sense of purpose or achievement may mean nothing to them. Why would they think to give you acknowledgement or praise for something that doesn’t even consciously register with them?

So relying entirely on other people’s feedback is laying yourself open to huge disappointment. And you have no way of navigating yourself through the choices and challenges that life presents if your inner compass is entirely dependent on someone else’s opinion.

To be psychologically healthy, we need a bit of both. Of course it’s important to know how you’re coming across, what impact you’re having, whether you’re doing what’s expected. But it’s also important to know what matters to you, whether you did your best, whether you did the right thing not the easy or popular thing. That you did a good job even if no one else noticed. To be able to rely on your own judgement, independently of others. That's about taking responsibility for yourself. Staying true to your intention, beliefs and values, and being the person you want to be, regardless of what anyone else thinks.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it exist? Sometimes, even if no one else notices, you are the best person to judge the quality of your existence and the contribution you are making to the world.

Photo courtesy of Dominic Vogl via unsplash

Sometimes things don’t go as you expect. My plan for the week was to produce more words, to feel I’d made real progress on my current project, to reconnect with it and rediscover my motivation. It actually took half the week just to read the work I already had and get back into the zone with it, and then there was a load of input that raised many questions about what I’m doing and how to do it. That doesn’t mean the week was a waste of time just because I didn’t achieve what I set out to achieve, but it certainly meant a mental adjustment to let go of those expectations and allow the value of new learning to emerge.

People give you conflicting advice. There is no one right answer. There were two tutors on the retreat, and they had very different views about the way forward for my work. What to do? My response has been to sit with both sets of feedback, to give proper consideration to the questions raised, to treat all the advice with respect and as a learning opportunity. I still don’t know what advice I’m going to take but when I choose a path it will be better informed for having stopped and allowed my thoughts, and my intuition, to breathe.

Trust your intuition. Only you know what really matters. You are the one immersed in your project (whether that’s work, or an ambition, like my writing, or your personal life). You know what you hope for, what your intentions are, how you see it shaping up over time. Yes, listen to other people, consider what else you could be doing, learn how things are received by others, but don’t be bounced off course from something you believe in your heart to be right.

There are endless ideas in the world. There were 13 of us on the retreat, plus the tutors. Everyone had an idea for at least one writing project, often more. Every single one of them is a great idea, a great story, a great possibility. Just because of lots of people are trying to do the same as you (write a story, start a business, pursue a goal) doesn’t mean there isn’t room for yours. It’s a world of plenty.

Every human being has a unique take on life. Even starting from the same idea, the imagination veers off in very different directions. In one of my tutorials I found myself thinking: “But that’s not MY idea. This character isn’t like that. That’s not the trajectory of the story.” How often do we find ourselves in a disagreement because someone else sees things completely differently to us? We should see that as an asset, something to be utilised to mutual benefit, not something to fall out over.

Sometimes you need a bit of space. I realised half way through the week that this is the first time since Covid hit that I've been with a group of people (other than my family) 24/7 for a whole week. As an introvert, I find that exhausting, and I’ve learnt over time that it’s okay (in fact, vital) to step away and spend some time on my own.

People manage themselves and their creativity in different ways. As I watched the smokers congregating in the garden below the window where I was writing, I wondered how they were getting anything done. I’m tied to my keyboard (not getting anything done, by the way!), they’re hanging about out there chatting. Or going on a bike ride. Or a long walk. Or driving 40 minutes to get to the outdoor sea pool for a swim. How is that making the best use of a writing retreat? But that’s how some people get in touch with their imagination. That’s how some people solve problems. That’s how some people re-charge. We don’t need to shut ourselves together in a meeting room until we have thrashed out the answer. Sometimes that’s the least productive way of working, especially in complex, ambiguous situations. My most productive moment of the week came as I was falling asleep one night and thoughts arrived and I wrote them down, and they were the basis of what I wrote the next day.

A change of scene changes your perceptions. On the retreat, my writing came into focus where, in every day life, it is very background. The rest of my life retreated (pun intended). Seeing life from a different angle helped me put some things into perspective that had really been bugging me. And that perspective has lasted since I’ve been back.

Some people are annoying. Yep. Even on a writing retreat where you have a common interest and a common goal and everyone wants everyone to succeed. That person who winds you up probably tells you more about YOU than about them. Get over yourself. Let it go.

You can learn things wherever you are if you are open, curious and thoughtful. Life is full of opportunities if you take the time to see them. Grab it with both hands.

Shame is an internally-directed sense of inadequacy, unworthiness, dishonour, regret, or disconnection. It causes us to perceive ourselves as defective, ugly, incompetent, or stupid. We feel ashamed not because of what we do, but because of who we are. For these reasons, we hide. In social contexts, we avoid the emergence of shame in order not to feel valueless, inadequate, or deficient.

We all have shame. Its psychological purpose is to stop us upsetting the norms of our social groups so we can stay connected and inside the group - maintaining a sense of belonging - by pushing us towards “accepted” behaviours. But shame is a pernicious feeling, keeps us small, invisible, not-brave, and it festers in the darkness and the silence.

Brene Brown is perhaps the best known researcher of shame, because of her hugely successful 2011 TED talk. I periodically re-watch that talk because the messages are so powerful and so empowering. Embrace your vulnerabilities, they are what make you human and lovable and powerful, and being those things makes you successful and, perhaps most importantly, happy and fulfilled. They are also what enable other people to connect to you on a very human level.

In another of her TED talks, Brene also says: Empathy is the antidote to shame. That’s empathy towards ourselves and our experience and our feelings about ourselves. Once we allow ourselves to feel empathy, we begin to treat ourselves with compassion, understanding, kindness. We realise that we are not defective, merely human, and that our experience, all of it, is what makes us the people we are today.

That realisation enables us to let go of shame, and to recognise that we can choose how we move through life. We may not be able to stop the feelings of shame entirely, but we can decide how to behave in the face of them. We can step forward and have that conversation. We can connect with others. We can take risks. We can push ourselves. We can, to use that well-known expression, feel the fear and do it anyway.

And by doing, even in the face of shame, our confidence and self-belief grow. We learn to stand tall, to open our arms and embrace the world around us, to trust our experience and move forward towards the life we want to be living.

When we’re under pressure, by which I mean anything that we feel less than confident about or feel might upset someone or cause a negative reaction, our defence mechanisms kick in. Those mechanisms emanate from the part of our brain designed to keep us alive when under threat. They bypass the rational bit of the brain and drive our physical behaviour, mostly usually our fight/flight response.

You might think you’re immune from this response, but you’re not. Our bodies are still running Stone Age software which assumes that both threats and survival are physical processes. We rarely face physical threats in the modern workplace but our bodies treat that annoying colleague, that sarcastic email, that difficult conversation, as a physical threat, and trigger a physical reaction, because that’s the only mechanism available.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, your cortisol and adrenalin are raised, your heart beats faster, your breath gets faster and higher in your chest, your blood is diverted to major organs and muscles and away from the periphery (which unfortunately includes your pre-frontal cortex, the conscious, intellectual bit of your brain), priming you for action and reducing your capacity for rational thought. That curt email you catapult straight back, that cutting put-down that leaps out of your mouth, or that frozen inability to speak are the modern equivalent of running away or picking up a weapon.

Unless and until we can notice our physical responses and learn to manage them more effectively when we’re under pressure, we are unlikely to be able to access all the knowledge we’ve acquired and put it into practice. That’s why we spend several hours after a disastrous conversation thinking of all the things we should have said but couldn’t bring to mind in the heat of the moment.

Your body reacts much more quickly than your conscious, rational brain. If a bus is coming at you, you need to get out of the way, fast, not stand there analysing your options. It makes sense, in the right context, but the modern office is not the right context for our Stone Age physiology.

Mind over matter only happens when our matter is calm. We can learn to calm the stress response, even when we’re not sure why it’s kicked off. That churning in your stomach? The clenched jaw? Shoulders up round your ears? Those are the clues that you need to make a few seconds of space to calm your body down so your mind can take over. As a first step, your breath is the super-power that allows you to re-gain control, but we have to practice repeatedly if we want it to be easily available to us in that confrontational meeting or that tetchy email exchange.

Otherwise the matter remains very much in charge.

Mostly we do this when we’re dissatisfied. We might be starting to feel it’s time for a new role, a bigger challenge, or perhaps less of a challenge. We might not like the culture of our organisation or team. We might be struggling to build a productive relationship with our boss.

There is a tendency to push these complex, challenging thoughts to one side and hope they will resolve themselves. The boss will get less prickly, or you’ll learn to deal with them better, or a headhunter will call with the perfect job. Or if you just knuckle down and work harder, it will all get better. Won’t it?

Eventually you will be propelled into action because your wait-and-see strategy won’t actually change much and you will reach the point where you can’t ignore your unhappiness any longer. At that point, any passing job starts to look appealing, simply for the escape hatch it might offer. Any port in a storm, right?

Except that means grasping at the nearest available thing, not the right thing. You are so desperate to stop feeling like this that you are prepared to make significant compromises just to get yourself into a new environment and away from this pain.

But what if you spent the time now, before it gets that bad, working out what you really want? Giving yourself the space to investigate, explore, talk to people (headhunters, former colleagues, your professional network) about what’s out there and what might be possible? Going to job interviews with an inquiring mindset, not a get-me-out-of-here attitude. It changes the way you come across during the interview and it means you have the possibility to say no to things that aren’t right, because you know what you’re looking for, things are still bearable, and you’re prepared to wait.

In the meantime, you can attempt to change the dynamics of the situation you’re in. If you know you're ready to leave, then a conversation with your boss about your poor working relationship or how bored/stressed/unsatisfied you are becomes much less scary. What have you got to lose by asking for what you really want?

It might feel luxurious, investing time and, perhaps, money in yourself when things are sort of not that bad. But making it a priority now, before it gets to crisis point, significantly increases your chances of a better outcome and is likely to produce a positive conclusion much earlier than if you try to pretend it’s not happening. Why get to breaking point before taking action? Why waste those precious days, months, years of your life waiting for divine intervention?

If you think I can help you clarify your priorities, values, what fulfils you, what you really want in your working life, do please drop me a message and let’s talk.

If you’re a client, or potential client, it might help you reflect on what you really want from coaching (or therapy) and therefore what sort of practitioner might be best placed to help you.

____________________________________________

For a while now I have considered myself to be an integrative practitioner - someone who draws on both coaching and therapeutic methodologies in the service of my clients. But what do I actually mean by that?

An integrative practitioner, to me, is a skilled helper who can:

·       support the client’s desire to create a different future

·       hold the space for, and work with, raw emotions

·       guide a client in their exploration of the messy reality of the past in order to move forward to something new.

Exploring the ‘deep’ benefits of integrative practice

I’ve experienced both therapy and coaching as a client, and I work as a coach, largely in an organisational context.  I’m starting my inquiries by reflecting on personal experience to clarify what I mean by “integrative practice” and why I think it has value. 

As a client, therapy has brought me face-to-face with my inner feelings, emotions and beliefs.  It enables me to recognise and understand the past and to be honest about the feelings I experience, then and now - the distress, the mess and the pain as well as joy and pleasure.  I don’t have to find solutions; awareness and acceptance are enough.  

Therapy has allowed me to accept more of myself, and acknowledge how my history and early experiences have created deeply-ingrained habits in how I respond to today’s experiences.  This in itself opens up choices about the future.

And yet I have sometimes struggled with therapy precisely because it doesn’t often ask the question “so what do you want to do about it?” 

Coaching, on the other hand, assumes mental health and resourcefulness in me as the client, and is generally focused on here-and-now issues and the desired future I want to build.  The coaching questions of “what might be possible”, “what do you want in your life/work/relationships”, “how might you get that”, “what do you need to do/say or stop to achieve that”, “what and who will help you” have enabled me to focus on what needs to change, and what I need to do to make change happen.  Answering these questions is what enables me, and my clients, to consciously move towards a desired future. 

But my experience as client and coach tells me that trying to create a new future without exploring the deeper questions that underpin our personality and way of being can often result in simplistic behavioural strategies that buckle under the pressures of real life, when our social and psychological history inevitably makes itself felt in the heat of the present moment.

In an inevitably simplistic summary, I believe therapy’s strengths are its focus on emotions, personal history and an acceptance of who a person is and how they got here.  It can lack future-focused momentum.  Coaching focuses on a desired future and the actions necessary to create it.  It sometimes lacks exploration of deeper psychological and emotional obstacles and how they can impede progress. 

Adopting a ’therapeutic-coaching’ integrative approach that truly serves my clients

Being in therapy and coaching, often in parallel, has been a winning combination when it comes to making profound personal change in my own life.  It seems to make sense to build on the best of both approaches in the service of my clients. 

And yet, I have largely been in the hands of either a therapist or a coach and it is me, the client, who is responsible for ‘integrating’ the experiences in order to harness the strengths and benefits of both.  If a client only receives coaching and has never had therapy, they often miss out on the benefits that arise from examining our past as a source of learning and change.  It seems to me this situation has arisen because the two disciplines have emerged separately and are, currently, regulated (or not) and accredited by separate professional bodies, with only a limited amount of formal integration (eg the BACP’s coaching arm), with a maintenance of rather strict boundaries around what is practiced in each, which makes it easier for professional oversight but doesn’t necessarily serve the needs of our clients.

I’ve become more and more comfortable when conversations with clients turn “deep” and personal. These clients didn’t consider themselves to be ill, but they were certainly distressed and impeded from doing their best work by the emotional turmoil of these “personal” events.  I have had clients who have been bereaved, experienced miscarriages, still births and infertility, been through infidelity and/or divorce, wrestled with the historical impact of difficult relationships with parents and siblings, and paddled (sometimes waded) in the waters of burnout and breakdown. 

All, arguably, topics more suited to the therapy room than coaching.  All were issues with impacts and consequences in the working lives of my clients which needed coping with, and learning to function with; not some time, maybe, one day, but NOW.  Yet my clients didn’t want to go to therapy - not least because they already had a trusted partner - me - with whom they could be honest, and processes they had already found helpful and productive.  The fact that it was also “therapeutic” did not escape either them or me. 

I have heard practitioners highly qualified in both disciplines describe situations where they have held back from offering a coaching process or solution to a therapy client (or vice versa) because of (arguably) arbitrary boundaries imposed by the label attached to the nature of the work.  They are qualified and competent.  The client needs it.  Who does it benefit to withhold such a gift? 

Some of the observations arising from my experience as both client and practitioner about what clients might actually be looking for in the person they have asked for help include:

·       “I want the support of a person who has seen the whole of me and who is therefore best placed to help me move forward.“

·       “I want to understand my ‘problems’, yes, but I also want to do something about them.” 

·       “I don’t want someone who will only fix me when I’m ill or dysfunctional and I also don’t want someone who only focuses on my future and my ‘best self’.“

·       “I want someone who can acknowledge that I sometimes have less-than-optimal mental and emotional functioning AND I have the ability to achieve my potential, that sometimes I’m a mess and sometimes I’m a winner.”

·       “I’m all one person so why can’t they be?” 

Moving forward: developing as an integrative practitioner

Increasingly, in response to the actual needs of my clients, I have begun to work more and more integratively, drawing on both therapeutic and coaching practices, to harness the strengths of each and offer my clients a deeper, more holistic approach to bringing about the changes they seek in their lives. 

My background and training is rooted in the world of executive coaching and Organisational Development, which includes a robust amount of psychological theory and practice.  In response to the deeper emotional and psychological questions which arise in the reality of the coaching room, I have also qualified as a Fusion Certified Therapeutic Coach, to deepen my professional capability. 

But integrative training and development (by which I mean integration across coaching and therapy, rather than the more traditional definition of working with a range of approaches within therapy alone) is hard to come by, as is professional supervision of integrative work. 

I’m not saying I think there is no difference between therapy and coaching - there is.  Some people want therapy, others want coaching, and for those who want both they still might want to see different practitioners.  It is a bit of a cognitive leap to imagine sitting in a corporate meeting room discussing how to be a more effective leader and then finding oneself in floods of tears about a childhood trauma, both because of the setting and because we don’t always want to let out that inner child with someone whose primary role is to support our professional development.  And managing the shifts in focus for those clients who do want to go deeper requires skill and attention from the practitioner as they support and guide exploration and change. 

I wonder, though, how we can move to a model where the overlaps (or is it a space? What actually is this bit in the middle?) between them can become more blended in the services some of us offer to clients, and where the training and development is available to ensure we are competent and capable to provide them?  What I hope for in an integrative practitioner is that they:

·       Are competent across the spectrum e.g. How do I know I’m working ethically and competently?

·       Can manage the shifts in the focus of the conversation e.g. Are there boundaries I won’t cross?

·       Can work with the client as a partner in making choices about the direction of the work e.g. Do my clients really know what they’re signing up for?  Do they have a clear choice, in the moment, about how deep to go?

Establishing this competence is more difficult than it sounds in a world which holds these things as separate professional disciplines, but this integrative work is happening in practice and, in the right hands, it is beneficial for clients.  It must surely be time that we move towards formal acknowledgement and professional support for it.