Tag: hero

Episode 7:
Why Do Intelligent People Do Stupid Things? 

In this podcast episode, Richard Anderson is joined by Andrew Munro.

Andrew is a chartered psychologist with over 30 years experience in the corporate sector, a conference speaker, and author.
In this episode, we cover:
✅ intelligence and IQ testing 
✅ the part that intelligence plays in overall success

✅ how intelligence can lead to poor decision making 

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Episode 07 – Transcript 

Voiceover 0:00
Welcome to Psyched For Business, helping business leaders understand and apply cutting edge business psychology principles in the workplace.

Richard Anderson 0:10
Hi, and welcome to Psyched for Business. I’m your host, Richard Anderson, thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode, I’m joined by Andrew Munro. Andrew is a chartered psychologist with over 30 years experience in the corporate sector, as well as in consulting. He’s a conference speaker and author of many articles and books, including his latest A to Z and Back Again, Adventures and Misadventures in Talent World, which I have to say I’ve very much enjoyed. In this episode we’re going to be covering – Why do intelligent people do stupid things? I hope you enjoy it. Thanks again for listening.

So Andrew Munro, thank you very much for joining me. How are you doing?

Andrew Munro 0:49
All good Richard. And thanks for the invitation to join in another of your podcasts.

Richard Anderson 0:55
I’ve been really looking forward to having you on, Andrew, I know that we’ve been in conversation about this and other things for quite some time. And there’s a load of things that we could have focused this podcast around. But we’ve chosen a particular topic, and I think it’s going to be one that might be a little bit contentious, but we’ll see. So this whole notion of why do intelligent people do stupid things? That’s what we’ve chosen as a title. Okay, let’s maybe start with intelligence. I know that you’ve got some strong opinions and a lot of knowledge, ironically, on the on the subject. Definitely been some confusion, some controversies over the years when it comes to intelligence. But would you mind maybe starting by briefly summarizing those issues and giving us a bit of a background in the topic of intelligence?

Andrew Munro 1:37
You’re right, there’s been no end of controversies. Where to start? One, the lack of an agreed definition, the absence of a decent theory. Ian Deary, one of the world class researchers in this field, who does fantastic work has pointed out, we’re still a bit iffy theoretical thoughts, lots of models about methodology for debates about the causes and consequences of intelligence, a social impact of testing. In a very strange, historical quirk, both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, banned intelligence testing. For Hitler, the tests were too Jewish; for Stalin, the tests were too Bourgeois. So when we move into the world of intelligence and testing, we’re also moving into the world of ideology.

Richard Anderson 2:34
Okay, I know that we don’t have time maybe on this podcast to work through the entire history of intelligence and testing, although I know that will be a very, very interesting topic. But having done some research, of course, for this podcast, my understanding is that intelligence testing began as a bit of an educational diagnostic tool, and it was all about identifying which children would need additional support. But then after that, the emphasis shifted and testing was deployed as more of an assessment to identify who was smarter or more intelligent or cleverer than others.

Andrew Munro 3:08
That’s right, it did originate within education. And then it has moved on. I’m sure all of our listeners will be familiar with the concept of IQ. So this is calculated by dividing the test takers mental age, from their test responses, by their chronological age, then multiplying this number by 100.

Richard Anderson 3:31
How did that work? Or how does an IQ test work?

Andrew Munro 3:34
So individuals complete a series of tasks, and they vary. An example would be – Day is to night as sun is to blank.

Richard Anderson 3:47
Don’t make me answer that…

Andrew Munro 3:53
Then there was all the unfolded cubes, number sequences, there was any number of different formats. The overall score was then calibrated to indicate the extent to which the score was above or below that expected from your chronological age. So that’s way back, things have moved on. And IQ scores are now compared with a reference group, a norm group that allows you to see how your score compares with others who’ve also completed the test.

Richard Anderson 4:28
Which seems on the face of it, a little bit more robust. So am I right in thinking that the 11 Plus tests so that was obviously the test that children had in their last year of primary school, and all about did we get into grammar school or not? That was a variation of the IQ test, wasn’t it?

Andrew Munro 4:46
It was. So what began as an educational diagnostic tool turned into a kind of Hogwarts Sorting Hats. So this was oh, here we go back to the 1940s, and the 11 Plus was phased out in the 60s, although variations are still in use.

Richard Anderson 5:09
You’ve still got high IQ societies now, I’m familiar – not hugely familiar – but I’m familiar with the concept of Mensa, which I think you’ve got to get above a certain threshold, maybe

Andrew Munro 5:20
To join Mensa, you need to be above the threshold of an IQ of 132. So that’s one in 50 of the population. If that’s not enough for you, you might want to join the Prometheus society. Here the requirement is an IQ of 164. So I know bear with me, bear with me. Here, you’re in one in 30,000 of the population, right? Again, if that’s not enough, there’s another society if the Mega Society were needed IQ of 175, which is a one in a million in the population.

Richard Anderson 6:01
I can see you’ve got the t shirt on.

Andrew Munro 6:03
No, no, no. To jump ahead a wee bit. What is fascinating is the amount of bickering that goes on within and between these societies. And also, and we’ll come on to this a significant amount of weirdness.

Richard Anderson 6:23
So can I then check, is intelligence no more than a marker of how good somebody is academically?

Andrew Munro 6:30
That has been the major criticism, conventional IQ tests might be good at predicting educational attainment, but not much more than that. What has been problematic for these critics, is that of all the traits that psychologists have attempted to measure IQ, or what is now commonly known as general mental stability, stands out head and shoulders above other traits, and its predictive power of life outcomes. We’re not looking at massive correlations, but enough for general mental ability to be seen as an important factor.

Richard Anderson 7:12
Okay, so when you talk there about predictive power of life outcomes, what sorts of things do you mean is that like, maybe work, financial, relationships?

Andrew Munro 7:24
Yeah, and even things like your likelihood of not going to prison. But here we get or we move into a bit of a messy worlds, and a whole bunch of socio economic factors need to be part of the mix. And I know, Richard, you don’t want me to stray into politics, but there is a sense that social mobility has reduced. There is a widening gap between the haves and the have nots. However flawed the 11 Plus was, it was one of those gaps intended to address.

Richard Anderson 8:07
And I mean, it’s interesting, because I mean, we’ll have maybe the political discussion when we get to the pub, but maybe a topic for another time. But aren’t there lots of different types of intelligence, not just general mental ability.

Andrew Munro 8:21
Perhaps the most ambitious project was led by psychologist Guilford back in the 1950s. And he mapped out a model that identifies 180 intellectual abilities. I’m not going to list them out now, mainly because most of them were never found. More recently, Howard Gardner, and a lot of our listeners will be aware of his concept of multiple intelligence. And he suggested eight different types spatial, bodily, kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and so on. Even more recently, Robert Sternberg, first class guy, he argues for three, practical, our ability to get along in different contexts creative, how we come up with new ideas, and analytical how we evaluate information and solve problems. And I guess the analytical has been the focus of previous IQ type intelligence tests.

Richard Anderson 9:29
Obviously, in our world under the world of assessment, the current trend, or what I often see is this whole general mental ability being broken down into very specific aptitudes. So verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning, those sorts of things. And I have to say, I think this is a pretty good idea. I like it above like a general type of reasoning test. I mean, for me, I’ve always thought that I’ve been decent, I’m not saying brilliant, but decent at English, but certainly not good at maths. So I think I personally would fare far better in verbal reasoning tests than I would in numerical reasoning. Is that often the case?

Andrew Munro 10:07
So put to the test tests have distinct specific cognitive aptitudes are highly correlated, but and this is the big but at a certain level of general mental ability, the G general factor breaks up, ie you get lower correlations across different attitudes. And I think that probably explains why, back to your point about assessment, why specific aptitude tests are used more often selection than general IQ type tests

Richard Anderson 10:48
Would you mind just really quickly, if we’re taking the direction of exploring some of the other areas of intelligence that again, in our world that we we hear about quite regularly that are maybe different to cognitive? I’m thinking, Daniel Goleman, emotional intelligence, or again, as we call it, EQ, and how much more predictive that is than IQ?

Andrew Munro 11:08
Yeah I remember this going back to the 80s. As a claim has not aged all that well. The evidence base of the last 20-30 years hasn’t been brilliant. I see that Daniel’s been backpedaling since. Having said all that, I did come across a piece of research, that indicated emotional intelligence might be more critical factor for entrepreneurial success. So you need to look into that. But you’re right. There’s a whole bunch of intelligence, there’s like it’s almost like an alphabet soup. From the adversity quotient, spiritual intelligence, Zen intelligence.

Richard Anderson 11:54
It’s quite topical. Because within the last couple of weeks, I read an article on I think it was called the six cues of leadership maybe with all of these different different ones.

Andrew Munro 12:03
Different quotients yeah. And at this point, the concept of intelligence is getting so stretched to the point where meaning is lost. Richard Flynn, one of the key researchers in this field, proposed humorously, but I hope it was humorously, there’s a new type of intelligence that’s waiting to be discovered called stuffing beans up your nose.

Richard Anderson 12:33
So Andrew, would you would you mind just quickly pulling back and getting a sense of intelligence as part of the bigger framework of success? We’ve talked separately about maybe doing a podcast in the future around the dynamics of success, the levels and types and those sorts of things? But what would you say, if not intelligence, what is the biggest factor of success for you?

Andrew Munro 12:55
Luck. So this is success, and as you see, Richard’s willing to be a little bit more specific about the definition of success, but broadly, success is about time and place to be born at the right time, in the right place. So Warren Buffett’s investor, one of the wealthiest people on the planet, he makes the very honest point, if I’d been born 10,000 years ago, I would have been some animals lunch, because I can’t run very fast. And I can’t climb trees. And what Warren is saying, his success is largely an outcome of the modern day context in which he finds himself and his skill set, analyzing company data, making tough investment decisions, he found a niche. That’s the reason for his success.

Richard Anderson 13:58
Very, very fair point. And he articulates it very well as do you. Would you say, Are there any other factors that we can look at maybe aside luck? 

Andrew Munro 14:07
Our listeners will be horrified if we just say, luck, full stop. Is that it? So again, Warren Buffett proposed three other factors, integrity, intelligence, which we’ve talked about and we will talk about a little bit more, and energy.

Richard Anderson 14:29
It’s funny because I know that you’re a big fan of Warren, and I have to say I am too and I’ve watched a few of his YouTube videos now. I watched a very specific interview where he really nailed it on that point, and he says something along the lines of you really don’t want to hire an intelligent and motivated individual if they’re lacking integrity, if they don’t have that integrity, that’s very last person you want to hire. Of course, they’re going to be really, really smart. They’re going to be incredibly ambitious, but doing probably the wrong thing. In the wrong way, usually for themselves and not for other people. I thought he was bang on with that.

Andrew Munro 15:05
Exactly. And lots of recent examples to draw on from the worlds of politics and business. But I suspect if we go down that rabbit hole, we’re gonna be talking for the next three hours.

Richard Anderson 15:18
I was gonna say, I guess let’s not name any names on that. But we can we move on to the word stupidity, which this is the bit that I thought might be a little bit contentious when we chose this as a podcast title, but it’s quite hard hitting word, isn’t it? What do we mean by it?

Andrew Munro 15:36
It is a hard hitting word Richard. And we don’t mean stupid people. We mean stupid behavior. Stupidity comes from a Latin word that basically means are to be stumped. So this is stupidity, not about not simply lack of intelligence, but a kind of mindset of befuddlement. And we all experienced this, you know, what was I thinking? How could I have been so stupid? Daft is the Scottish equivalent?

Richard Anderson 16:09
Yes, we use daft as well.

Andrew Munro 16:13
But I’m not sure how it translates globally,

Richard Anderson 16:15
Maybe not. So stupid. Yeah. Makes more sense. Yeah.

Andrew Munro 16:19
My interest in the psychology of stupidity, was triggered by a comment by Charlie Munger, sidekick of Warren Buffett as that happens. And he highlights it a fundamental life principle. Before we do the smart stuff, stop the stupid stuff. For example, never do anything that you even want to explain to the paramedics don’t drink and drive.

Richard Anderson 16:46
Yeah, it’s when you listen to you talk about those that reminds me of I don’t know how familiar you are with the Darwin Awards? It was brought to my attention a few years ago. And I have to say I can just sit and scroll through that and just laugh because basically, for anybody who doesn’t know what the Darwin Awards are, essentially, it’s a website that records examples of people doing absolutely extraordinarily stupid things, or daft things as we might say, and actions that unfortunately, sometimes are resulting in their death. It is a bit dark when I think about one like that, but it is also quite funny. I don’t know how familiar you are,  you’ve said you’re familiar Andrew, but and one of the examples that I looked on there was a guy who thought he was so astute at kung fu that he decided to try and take a lion on with his bare hands. And you probably guessed…

Andrew Munro 17:34
Oddly enough, I noticed in the paper yesterday, Richard, that 10% of the population think they could win a fight with a chimpanzee. Well good luck, good luck. My favorite is the guy who tied 45 helium balloons to his garden chair. He wanted to float up and hover maybe 50 feet over his neighborhoods. You know, he took a few sandwiches and beers. At 16,000 feet, and I have read this and I keep laughing, he was in trouble. So he frantically began popping the balloons ending up entangled in a power line that blacked out the neighborhoods he was planning to hover over. When asked why he did it, Larry said, Larry our helium guy said “a man just can’t sit around”.

Richard Anderson 18:39
Brilliant. I love that. Absolutely fantastic. You know, reviewing the examples on the website. I mean, I have to say it seems no coincidence that these Darwin Awards are often won by young men who have had a bit too much to drink.

Andrew Munro 18:54
Indeed. So alcohol is one factor in stupidity. Others includes a fixed belief system that is embedded within our personal identities. And there’s a whole set of cognitive biases Daniel Kahneman and a whole others have explored. We seem to have two decision making systems system one instinctive and automatic and it gets a lot of stuff done quickly. System two, more thoughtful and reflective and we get into trouble when system one emotional triggers take over our judgment and decisions on task four is not suited.

Richard Anderson 19:43
Like the work of Daniel Kahneman and I also liked the analogy of the car that you will not be familiar with. You might have a powerful engine your cognitive horsepower as we like to call it but if you don’t know how you’re going to use the gears or the how use it is you’re in big trouble.

Andrew Munro 20:00
Exactly. If we forget to take the handbrake off, you’ll simply burn rubber, or your car breaks down because you haven’t had it serviced.

Richard Anderson 20:09
I get that and then, you know, we all do stupid stuff. Why don’t we go back to the very essence of the podcast and the question that we’re asking at the beginning? What makes intelligent people do stupid things? Do you think they’re more prone to stupidity either maybe, let’s say the average person.

Andrew Munro 20:29
So here’s an example. We’ll call it the James Bond villain factor. There’s a terrific book, the heretics guide to management? And the author’s pose an interesting question. How is it that James Bond has stayed alive long enough to star in so many movies? I don’t know what the last count is 25, I don’t know. Bonce has to contend with powerful adversaries. Phenomenal intellects. But for all the smarts evil. Sorry, I can’t stop laughing at this thought, evil mega geniuses are actually pretty dumb. And that’s of course drama. But there’s a fantastic clip from the spoof Austin Powers.

Richard Anderson 21:23
We’ll go on and why might intelligent people in that case, be particularly vulnerable to the daft stuff?

Andrew Munro 21:28
Have a go Richard?

Richard Anderson 21:31
Right put me on the spot? Well, I’m thinking maybe off the top of my head. I don’t know what what you might call it. But intellectual arrogance, let’s say. I mean, there’s that, is that one? 

Andrew Munro 21:43
Yes. The first hazard is that smart people overreach themselves. So this is the problem of the individual whose glittering intellectual brilliance over extends itself to take on problems outside their circle of competence. Lots of examples, but here’s one from history an exchange between Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer of the Sherlock Holmes books, and Houdini the magician and illusionist, so Holmes is the detective who applies the power of intelligence, logical, objective reasoning to solve crimes. Conan Doyle was also interested in the paranormal. So he invited Houdini to attend a seance in which a medium made contact with the other sides.

Richard Anderson 22:41
I’m interested to find out how did that work out then.

Andrew Munro 22:45
Well, Houdini, the illusionist, he identified the tricks of the trade cut quite quickly through the whole charade. Conan Doyle, the exemplar of critical reasoning was having none of Houdini’s explanation. And sadly, in a bitter breakup, the peer ended their relationship

Richard Anderson 23:09
Ended their relationship so it was all because of, I guess Conan Doyle’s intellectual arrogance convinced that, he you know, his critical reasoning skills or whatever were far superior to Houdini’s explanation to this trick. What a sad situation. But yeah, that’s a great example of intellectual arrogance.

Andrew Munro 23:28
Yes. And Houdini, reflecting on this episode, remarked as a rule, I have found out, the greater the brain has, and the better educated they are. The easier has been to mystify them. There’s a lot of research on conmen conwomen and they target more intelligent people. Interesting, isn’t it? The technical term is earned dogmatism. We think our brilliance in one fields gives us the right to apply our brilliance in other fields. And there’s even more interesting research on Nobel Prize winners who went on to make absolutely daft claims about their speciality.

Richard Anderson 24:20
Right. Okay, so we’ve established the intellectual arrogance is one factor. And what else is there please don’t ask me, Andrew, because I’m at the limit my knowledge on this subject.

Andrew Munro 24:33
It’s a bit related. And motivated reasoning is a process in which we are drawing our arguments to disconfirm opposing views to defend our position. So here, we want to protect our existing beliefs. If we think of our beliefs as possessions, we don’t want to lose them.

Richard Anderson 24:57
I have to say on that point, you see a lot of it, don’t you? on social media and Twitter and places like that, where somebody’s so wedded to a particular view, it doesn’t matter what anybody says they’re not going to change their mind. You think it’s I think it’s a bit of a pride thing. Would you say high intelligence equals excessive pride? Maybe not wanting to admit you’re wrong?

Andrew Munro 25:18
Yep. I’m sure ego is a massive factor. But again, there’s a bit of nuance. What’s is often neglected is that the correlation between self reported measures of intelligence and aptitudes is in fact pretty low. Some highly intelligent individuals rate themselves as you know, not especially smart. And some have relatively low intelligence see themselves as highly intelligent. The latter is obviously not a good combination.

Richard Anderson 25:52
Doesn’t, doesn’t sound good. Doesn’t sound good. 

Andrew Munro 25:55
But coming back to your points Richard, motivated reasoning is a bit different. Unsurprisingly, those with higher levels of intelligence, particularly as defined by analytical, logical, critical reasoning, they are particularly skilled at this, after a debate on some topic of disagreement, and the facts are presented to challenge the motivating reason as arguments. They don’t change their minds, they become even more entrenched in their opposition.

Richard Anderson 26:34
Okay, and can you think of any maybe any examples of motivated reasoning that you might be able to draw upon?

Andrew Munro 26:41
This one’s a bit tragic, actually, but it’s also telling how motivated reasoning works. Steve Jobs, an individual of extraordinary intelligence, and creativity, he applied the equivalence of motivated reasoning. He called this his reality distortion field, and allowed him to block out inconvenient facts and challenges to his ideas. Don’t let the noise of others opinions drown out your own inner voice. He was convinced, and others was wrong. And as a purposeful push to innovation to revolutionize their technology. But this outlook backfires and his own personal life will happen. Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he ignored the medical advice for treatments, he relied on a few quack remedies, herbal cures spiritual healing, a fruit juice diet, his extraordinary intelligence led him to believe unable to argue back to motivated reasoning and argue he knew better than adopters. And sadly, he died way, way before his time.

Richard Anderson 28:09
Yeah, of course he did. And yeah, I mean, that is a really, really sad example. But a good a good one for motivated reasoning. So you might be highly intelligent. But if you’ve got the wrong mindset, so we’ve talked, obviously, one based on arrogance, you mentioned before that expression entitled dogmatism, and also motivated reasoning, you might be your own worst enemy. We’ve talked about some really interesting things, in my view, and I hope the listeners feel the same, I’m sure they will. But can we conclude maybe, with the so what factor? So what does all this mean? What’s the practical implications of what we’ve discussed?

Andrew Munro 28:51
Lots. But three suggestions. The first is let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. intelligence matters, and it matters in most domains of life. But I would say we need to find more imaginative ways to measure it that are improvements on previous current cognitive tests.

Richard Anderson 29:15
Any ideas around how we could do that?

Andrew Munro 29:19
Well, we could go down the biological route, assess brain structures, physiological processes. Given the current state of neuro psychology, I would say we’re not remotely there yet. I can’t think of any candidates who would want to be shown down the corridor to be wired up to the electrodes as part of our selection process.

Richard Anderson 29:47
Yeah, you might get a bit of pushback on that one. But yeah, we’ll rule that one out and in that case, anything else?

Andrew Munro 29:53
Another direction to design tests that mirror more realistically, the requirements of the role within the selection process. Measures of abstract thinking, critical reasoning- they’re important, and they have their place. But we’ve had a century of test development and validation, and any number of advances in technology. And I’m sure we can do better scenarios based assessments, situational judgment tests, they all have promise. But I would say we’re not there yet.

Richard Anderson 30:32
Okay and how, obviously we’re not a test publisher, how are the test publishers, from what you see responding to this stuff?

Andrew Munro 30:41
Being candid, it’s not in their interest to change their operating model, or the legacy base of their clients, sunk cost investment and all of that, which is why I anticipate innovation, not through- in terms of cognitive testing- not through the psychometric tradition, but from I don’t know techie firms, who don’t have that history of past assumptions, and begin to look at the field with fresh eyes.

Richard Anderson 31:15
Yeah, so we talked about the biological route, not going to happen, potentially the test route showing some promise with the situational judgment test any any other recommendations,

Andrew Munro 31:25
We need our better decision making model to integrate different strands of information about the individual. So back to Warren Buffett’s- high levels of intelligence will not compensate for low levels of integrity, it only makes things worse. So we need to be a lot smarter, in how we build our understanding of individuals, whether it’s selection candidates, or promotion prospects, that factors in a whole range of requirements,

Richard Anderson 32:05
That’s a really good point, I have to say, in my experience, you’ll often see organizations throw a bunch of assessments at candidates, they’re not particularly systematic in any particular way, or how they weight the data from the assessment as part of a, like a proper coherent selection decision making strategy.

Andrew Munro 32:25
I have sat in so many selection reviews, Assessment Center wash ups, and the decision outcomes bore very little relationship to the assessment data. Yeah, I guess there’s a third theme Richard, which is one we should go beyond the individual to think of collective intelligence, and two sort of related thoughts. The days of personal intellectual heroics, are probably largely over, not completely. And it varies by discipline, but much of the focus, and this is about some of the work I’ve been doing in higher education, the focus is on collaboration. There’s no shortage of very smart people. But how can organizations create an environment that nurtures teams, not just within the university, but with other partnerships for greater creativity and innovation?

Richard Anderson 33:30
Yeah, and I have to say, that’s a pattern that I’m certainly seeing in a project or a lot of the projects that we get involved with of course the individual matters that’s that’s obvious. That’s read, that’s given. But the individual themselves can only optimize their impact within the workgroup. That part of it if you can’t be smart, by deploying others intelligence, you’re going to be you’re going to be constrained.

Andrew Munro 33:54
Exactly. And then over above the mutual work group, there’s the organizational context, and a context that can make stupidity, more or less likely. Lots of factors, foolish strategies, siloed functions, power dynamics, flawed incentive systems,

Richard Anderson 34:19
Obviously, as you would imagine, I did a bit of research for this podcast, and I do remember reading a book quite a long time ago, my memory was refreshed when I was doing that prep, and it’s called The Smartest Guys in the Room- Enron’s downfall. And for anybody listening who’s not familiar, but that was a firm that brought in the best the brightest from all these Ivy League universities and top tier consulting firms and the company was eventually brought down and it was not despite but because of its intelligence, but lack of integrity.

Andrew Munro 34:57
Yeah, brilliant example. The dynamics of organizational success and decline are complex. But here’s a thought experiment. If you wanted to sabotage a company, you know, one of your competitors, what would you do? You would bring in lots of smart people with low integrity, and reward them for the wrong results. Because when there’s no downsides to daft decision making, and failures rewarded, we shouldn’t expect anything more than stupid outcomes that trigger corporate decline.

Richard Anderson 35:40
Brilliant. So let’s summarize them. So we’ve talked about three ways forward. So how we measure intelligence in ways that are more accessible, and relevant in to today’s challenges. There’s also the need to see intelligence as only one piece within the overall jigsaw, of course, there are many pieces, and particularly for some roles, if we’re neglect integrity, then we’re going to get ourselves into big trouble. And also the importance of course of context and how organizations can set the scene through functional silos, political gamesmanship, denial about the future and so on. For intelligent people to do dumb things.

Andrew Munro 36:21
Yes. But I feel Richard, we’ve only scratched the surface either that or opened the can of worms on a complex, a very important set of issues. And we haven’t even touched on some of the complexities and controversies around intelligence, testing, bias, adverse impact. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff really, that we didn’t have time for.

Richard Anderson 36:54
Well, if you’re happy and willing, I would love to get you know, into those discussions in maybe future podcast to be continued, as they say. That’s right. Absolutely. Well, Andrew Munro, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me about this really interesting topic. I thoroughly enjoyed having you on this podcast. And yeah, great to speak.

Andrew Munro 37:16
Thanks, for sure. It’s my pleasure. Do we have time for a final soundbite? Yeah, why not? Go for it? All right, Alan Kay, one of the early computing pioneers. His ideas were pretty much stolen by everyone. He said, a change in perspective, is worth 80 IQ points. I truly believe that.

Richard Anderson 37:42
Absolutely. And I just want to remember, I know that some of these issues, of course, are going to be covered in your sequel to A to Z which I give a bit of an intro to at the very beginning. But how is the sequel coming along?

Andrew Munro 37:57
Pretty well. We’re hoping for release in spring 2023.

Richard Anderson 38:04
Brilliant, fantastic. Thank you very much, Andrew.

Voiceover 38:09
Thanks for listening to Psyched For Business – for show notes, resources and more visit evolveassess.com

Episode 6:
Positive Psychology – How We Can Flourish In Challenging Times

In this podcast episode, Richard Anderson is joined by Jackie Wade.

Jackie is founder of Flourissimo, and a positive psychology coaching practitioner. 

In this episode, we cover:

✅ positive psychology – what is it? 
✅ how to apply positive psychology to your business and life 

Subscribe to the podcast on your favourite platform:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Amazon/Audible

Pocketcasts

Other Platforms

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Episode 06 – Transcript 

Voiceover 0:00
Welcome to Psyched For Business, helping business leaders understand and apply cutting edge business psychology principles in the workplace.

Richard Anderson 0:10
Hi, and welcome to Psyched For Business. Thank you for joining me. I’m your host, Richard Anderson. In this episode, I’m joined by Jackie Wade. Jackie is founder at Flourissimo, and she’s a positive psychology coaching practitioner. In this episode, we talk all about the topic of positive psychology, what it is, and how you can apply it in business and life to get the most from your life and your work. I hope you enjoy the episode. Thanks again for listening.

So Jackie Wade, thank you very much for your time. How are you doing?

Jackie Wade 0:40
I’m doing great, Richard, thank you for inviting me.

Richard Anderson 0:43
Thanks so much joining all the way from France, which I understand you’ve had a nice time there for the last four months. And it’s great that we can do this, isn’t it?

Jackie Wade 0:50
Yeah, the power of Zoom. Honestly, one of the benefits of COVID is that we can work anywhere in the world and find our energies anywhere and still have these kinds of conversations.

Richard Anderson 0:59
Of course it is, yeah. So it’s really, really nice thing. And it’s funny because Jackie, you and I, and I don’t know if you know this, but we’ve been connected on LinkedIn for some time. And I’m probably talking the thick end of 10 years, if not more, and I’ll tell you where the connection initially came. I attended one of your sales training workshops through winning sales, I think 2010 2011, something like that. And I still remember – you’ll not remember me because I was just, I was an attendee, but I do remember the course. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. And one of the big things I remember doing that supported me in my career in sales. But anyway, there you go. That’s where the background…

Jackie Wade 1:32
That’s the connection. Yeah, God you’re bringing it back Richard, probably the Chamber of Commerce was it?

Richard Anderson 1:37
It was exactly the it was the Chamber of Commerce. It was my first job. I remember it, well thoroughly enjoyed it. But there you go. But you’ve you’ve, Jackie, taken a very interesting change of career or, or along those lines. But you’ve gone very deep in the area of positive psychology. And I’m really interested to get into why that maybe came about and what it was that got you interested in psychology after such a long career in just maybe working in sales, for example,

Jackie Wade 2:02
Let’s call it change or transition. Yeah, I suppose, for the audience clarifying that. For 20 years, I was involved in sales, sales training, I had a very international global career in business development, you probably tell from the accent, I’m Irish. So I kind of left Ireland emigrated, lived in Germany, and most of my corporate career was very much in sales and business development and working internationally for organizations. And then when my kids came along, which there’s three, that I think that was probably now looking back, that was kind of my first big transition, where I recognize that who I was, as a person didn’t sit well with corporate life, and the ability at the time to be a mom, and to work in international business development, etc. There was a real dilemma for me around what that felt like what that looked like. So I set up my own business to take some control of my career. And I’ve been really doing that for the last, gosh, you met me 10 years ago. So for about the last 20 years, that was wonderful, but towards the back end of it. And if not the back end, because I’m still I’m still running winning sales, I still do training, but coming at it from a slightly different angle. Towards the back end of it, something started to not feel quite right. For me, I think with my positive psychology hat on now. It was again, this clash of values, it was a sense of working with organizations and being in situations where I just felt there was this conflict between potentially what boards wanted what management wanted, and then the people I was working with. And over a number of years, I just found myself falling out of love with what I was doing. And I guess, you know, it’s also good to change. You know, I was doing that for a big period of my life. I’m in midlife, you know, and I think trying to think about the next phase of my life. There’s a positive psychology term that I’ve come across, which is middle essence, which I love, which is almost like adolescence, but in middle life, it’s about what’s the next phase? And what does that look like? And who do we want to be now that we’re growing up? So for me, that all came together, and it coincided a little bit with COVID. I was kind of on that journey anyway. And then COVID came along, and a lot of stuff stopped for me. And it gave me the opportunity to look around and think right, what do I really, really love and what interests me and – people. That’s what interests me, I love people. I love working with people. I love exploring what makes people tick, what makes people not take and so you could call that psychology, you know, the psychology of the human being and it was just an area that interested me. So I kind of started looking around and I came across positive psychology and hadn’t a clue what that was. I started looking at it, dabbling in it I did a course with Berkeley University in California called the Science of happiness again, I was a bit of Is there a science to happiness? This was all new stuff for me. But the fact that there is a science behind happy, why are some people happy? Why are some people not? What’s the science? I found that absolutely fascinating. And when I’d finished that, I thought, right, I want more of this because I could just see so much unhappiness. You know, I think the world we’re in, there’s so much unhappiness, there’s so much anxiety, depression.

Richard Anderson 5:28
That’s often all we hear about isn’t and what I love about the term positive psychology, and I know that we’re gonna get into the detail of it. But it’s nice to hear something talked about with the word positive, isn’t it? Because when it comes to emotions and feelings, we’re being told about negativity, or we’re experiencing negativity and kind of flipping that on its head and thinking, well there is a positive way to look at things, it’s nice – novel, but it’s nice.

Jackie Wade 5:50
I think it’s more than nice. I think it’s a necessity. It feels to me at the moment, we’re in this real challenging period in life, where we are being bombarded by cataclysmic events, going back to Brexit, and COVID, and Ukraine, and now everything that’s going on with the politics in the UK, and it’s hard to get through the day, I think, for many people without feeling absolutely overwhelmed. And so, for me, positive psychology is all about how can we flourish in challenging times. So it’s not, you know, sometimes I think positive psychology gets a bad name for happy clappy Pollyanna, let’s all be happy, and let’s park the negative, but actually, it’s it’s embracing the dark side, it’s understanding that life is full of tough stuff. You know, it really is, and that’s life. But how can we, as human beings, develop the skills to cope and to be resilient and to stay well, and to flourish? So so I kind of feel with positive psychology at the current time, it’s probably for many people enough to just focus on staying well and preserving our well being. And obviously, my passion initially is around human flourishing, and how can we actually thrive and ultimately, that’s what I want to do through my business. But if you like, positive psychology is almost helping people not become unwell. Because normal psychology for want of a better word or your regular psychology is often fixing people who are broken, whereas Positive Psychology, the focus is, I guess, helping people not get broken in the first place. If I was to put it in a very, I’m sure there’s lots of positive psychologists that wouldn’t like that definition. But it’s kind of, you know, in layman’s terms, it’s how do we stay well, and preserve our well being and look after ourselves, particularly in the current climate? So for me, it’s not a nice to have it’s an absolute essential way of living and being that I practice every day.

Richard Anderson 7:59
No, absolutely is I really liked this term that I have to say I’ve and I’ve said this on a previous podcast, with a lady called Amanda Mac and me when we were talking about mental fitness. But mental fitness as a term is something that I wasn’t particularly or fear with, I feel like I am a little bit more now. But kind of working on your mental fitness as if it were your physical fitness, being equipped to deal with challenging times. And you talk about recent events, the war that’s on you know, you’ve had COVID and challenging times will come up. And it’s about how best to deal with that. I mean, you mentioned right at the beginning Jackie about it was almost COVID, that kind of set, you in this particular direction. And maybe you know, the way that you thought about COVID There, you thought well, actually, I know this is a challenging time, but it’s put me on the route that I want to go down. And that’s going to be thinking positively and thinking about the plus side of what’s what’s happening, and maybe using it to your advantage or to better yourself. And I bet there’s a lot of people out there that have also used those challenging times. I mean, maybe through positive psychology, or certainly through positive thought to say, well, actually, yeah, we are in a very, very challenging time. Some people are dealing with this terribly badly, but let’s think it Are there any positives here? And can I apply them to my life, I mean, I use the COVID lose a hell of a lot of weight, and maybe probably a bit too much by wrong, but I lost a hell of a lot at the time when I started running and exercising and all sorts of things. So I do think mindset is a huge, huge thing and being positive is massive, isn’t it?

Jackie Wade 9:24
I think for me the word that’s really important, is choice. I am conscious of using this carefully because we’re both white middle class privilege, whatever that terminology that’s bandied around you know, and I know some of us have more choice than others but I think knowing that all of us somewhere have a choice around our some of our emotional fitness and choosing you know, where we focus our energy and whether it’s, you know, just take the simplest of things I worked in an environment for several years where bagel and plan office You know about 40 people in that open plan office, and it felt frowned upon to take lunch, you know, people use dash to the kitchen, grab a meal, get back to their desk, get back on the laptop, that was before positive psychology days. And it’s not rocket science. But for me taking a half an hour to go outside. And it still might have been a Gregg’s, it might have been the healthiest. But it was grab something and then sit in the park, or go for a walk or focus on something that energizes and then to come back to your desk. And I think just taking that little, you know, that’s a choice that, you know, we’re talking about working people, the choice to sit at your, you know, to get up and to work for 12 hours and stretch and just to be zapped at the end. And then to come home and be cross with your partner, your kids, your dog, your cat, because, of course, why wouldn’t you be? So recognizing that we have some really simple choices in life. And as you say, practicing emotional fitness or agility, it’s going to the gym and going to the mental gym can be something that you do before you go to work, it can be those 10 minutes, you know, the walk in the park, it can be in the evening, sitting outside, you know, in whether you have a garden, whether you have a balcony, whether you’ve nothing, but just stopping and thinking I’m alive, you know. So it doesn’t have to be huge, big things that take tons of time. But because we’ve probably come across this Richard, like negative stuff is it’s almost like weights negative is three times at least three times more heavy, you know, this research on YouTube, or Messi is famous, the three to one ratio, which some people have disputed, but regardless of whether it’s exactly three to one, or four to one or two to one, negative stuff, it’s like Velcro, it sticks. And when we have something negative going on, we ruminate and we get stuck in that pattern and it pulls us down. So to get out of that tar to just say stop, what we have to do is replace it with something that’s beautiful or Johannes,

Richard Anderson 12:03
I fully agree. And I think that negativity almost breeds negativity and rumination breeds rumination. It becomes habitual. I fully agree with what you’re saying, Jackie, there’s there’s almost no excuse to not get out for and think was Joe Rogan, I saw on another podcast, I was listening to a slightly more famous podcaster than myself, but so there’s, you know, there’s no excuse to not do 45 minutes exercise, whether that’s just getting out in the fresh air and, and walking or and that’s a choice thing. But I mean, how much of this do you think boils down to maybe a lack of awareness for people awareness that mental fitness is a thing and it doesn’t just happen overnight, or by accident, you need to work on this, I feel that we’re still probably probably still need to educate people that this is an important thing.

Jackie Wade 12:47
Yeah, and I think people prioritizing it. I think a lot of people know, it’s important, but I think unfortunately, it’s only when something goes wrong. It’s like everything, you know, often we don’t look at our diets until we’re being told that we’ve got high cholesterol or where, you know, it’s all of these things, you know, we don’t reduce our wine intake until, you know, all of these things. Unfortunately, as human beings, we often need that crisis moment to have that wake up call. But there’s so much going on at the moment around wellbeing. And and I think for me, the word well being, it’s worth stopping and reflecting on what that word means. Because I think it’s bandied about a lot. And I think organizations are playing lip service, a lot of them and you know, putting well being in their to do list or, you know, acknowledging that it’s important, but what is it exactly, and if we stop and think well being, it’s being well, and I think particularly in business, Richard and you know, this, you know, we’re, we’re doers, you know, we’re involved in human doing, not human being, we mentioned about the entrepreneurial side of things, when we first met as entrepreneurs and as business founders. And as running of it, you know, we’re focused on doing and striving and achieving, and this kind of habitual need to be on this what’s called hedonic treadmill, you know, constantly wanting more and achieving more and growing more, that’s a part of who we are as human beings. But actually, the being side has been left behind how can we be? How can we sit still and calm with ourselves and, or how can we be walk and just appreciate nature or, you know, that whole side of what Bing means I think for a lot of people, that’s quite uncomfortable, it’s quite uncomfortable to slow down or to stop and you know, those big maybe for some people too big existential questions. And I don’t even mean to, you know, want to go off down that path, but it’s that stopping and being with your family or being with your partner.

Richard Anderson 14:49
I don’t know how you know how much of this aligns to things like meditation and mindfulness, but I know that that’s always about focusing on being and being in the present moment and appreciating where you are and what doing without constantly having your mind gone a million miles an hour thinking about whatever the next thing is, and we’ve all been in commuted to work or whatever, where you can hardly remember the journey because you’ve been a million miles away and thought and one more, you know, what’s my next meeting going to, you know, what’s gonna happen in the next meeting? What’s my next business project or whatever it might be? And when we talk about being, is it that sort of thing? God? Would it be meditation? Or would it just be sitting in being present with yourself or going for a walk and being mindful? This is where I am. And I don’t have to think about anything or chew about anything. That’s just Let’s just enjoy the moment.

Jackie Wade 15:34
Yeah, definitely. Richard things like mindfulness and meditation, yoga, you know, when you talk about positive psychology, there’s a broad range of what we call interventions. And, you know, some of them, they’re not necessarily positive psychology interventions, but they’re all things that are focused on allowing people to get comfortable with being with themselves. And as long as we’re not, you know, when we’re not comfortable with being with ourselves, being in the moment, we’re uncomfortable with, we’re not present today and being comfortable with who we’re being we’re either anxious about what’s coming tomorrow, or later on in the day or next week, or we’re ruminating on what was yesterday. So most of us spend our time either in the past or in the future. And so the past is gone, and, you know, ruminating or being depressed about or regretting, it’s gone. And then the future hasn’t happened yet. So, you know, being anxious and as human beings, of course, I do the same, you know, I can’t stop myself thinking about wish I hadn’t. But it’s, I think it’s the self awareness and catching yourself and being able to say, I’m human, I’m sat here talking to you, I have the exact same issues that everyone who’s listening as and, you know, I didn’t sleep great on that middle aged woman going through all the great things we go through. And I didn’t have a great night’s sleep, because I’ve had a conversation before I went to bed, suddenly, a little bit and so I struggled, but I was able to then stop and think right, what’s going on here and actually meditate and meditate not only grace, you know, I’ve been to the Hindu Himalayas or wherever. And the Guru’s it’s, it’s literally just sitting and breathing. And finding a can within me, that stops me from ruminating about the call, I’ve had half an hour of separating, stops me getting angry about, you know, all of that stuff. So, the being is learning the habits that allow us to stay in the moment and manage the discomfort, because discomfort happens, and we’re going to have more of it. So we will have death in our lives, we’ll have divorce, we have redundancy, we love bankruptcy, that’s part of life. So I think part for me positive psychology and positive psychology interventions are around helping people giving people tools to allow them to navigate the challenges that are going to happen. And I think for me, that was a big lightbulb moment, because I think I thought positive psychology was going to help me be happy all the time. And instead what it’s doing is allowing me it’s resilience is being able to go through something difficult, but probably stay in that period for less time and bounce back quicker. Instead of sitting with it, you know, a thing that might have upset me for a day or a week or, and then I’d be angry with some you know, it’s allowing me to kind of still go through the emotion, it’s okay to be angry, it’s okay to be sad, it’s okay to be afraid. You know, positive psychology isn’t saying we shouldn’t have those negative emotions. Negative emotions are powerful. They’re human, they’re important, but it’s what we do with them. And whether we allow them to take us over and pull us down, or whether we have a way of finding some positive emotions to counterbalance then. So you’ve got the negative ones that are dark and heavy. So you need to kind of find some positive ones to counterbalance that, if you like. It makes

Richard Anderson 18:51
total sense. And it really works this sort of thing. And I’ve I’ve had examples in in my life where you find you know, you find yourself ruminating on something whether it might be at work, a difficult conversation, something that you have to do that’s completely out of your comfort zone, and it’s catching yourself ruminating the thing. And while these aren’t helpful thoughts, let’s think something more positive. I think you hit the nail on the head before Jackie, in my experience, when I’ve come across this sort of thing before it’s about building the habit, isn’t it because it’s great to be part of the plan but mindful of things like doing meditation and being present in the moment but I mean, I’ll give you an example. So I downloaded headspace app a few years ago and when I very first started evolve when it was just me as you can well imagine I know you’ve done this before but when you start a business and it’s just you by yourself there’s a hell of a lot of pressure on it was quite a stressful time and I was constantly thinking well what if what if what if I think one of the things that I did was download headspace I used it for a bit and got a lot of enjoyment from it. But then for whatever reason I got out of the habit of using it. But one thing that interests me a lot when it comes to we talk about positive and negative emotions. Why is it do you think that negative emotions seem to automatically become habitual, whereas positive emotions, I feel like you have to work on the habit all the time. But I don’t know whether that’s just to do with, you know, your defense mechanism or subconscious mind or something, but it’d be a lot easier if it was the other way around, wouldn’t it?

Jackie Wade 20:14
I don’t think so much of it is, you know, and I don’t want to go back into that, you know, most of us have heard of this fight flight and to win within our nature, instinctively, these emotions are there to protect us. You know, we were born the Stone Age caveman analogy that we always talk about, about it’s, you know, this idea that we needed either fight flight freeze, we needed, you know, that dinosaurs were coming out as, as the lions, tigers and bears, and we needed to be able to get that cortisol going fight them off. That was survival. But I think what’s happening now is we don’t have the lions and tigers and bears, although the kind of feels like that sometimes. But we still feel these, you know, we have these moments of stress. And then we stay, you know, that cortisol stays in our bodies, and we stay ruminating on stuff and we don’t release it. And, you know, this is where we then end up with health issues around, you know, heart attacks, you know, weight gain pains, aches, because we’re sat with these, I suppose what was meant to be short term emotions that would create, even if you think of anger, it’s okay to be angry, because that will allow us to have that burst of energy that will allow us to fight a cause. But if we’re angry every day with every person, then you know, we’ve got road rage, we’ve got really serious situations where people feel it’s okay to kill each other or to cut each other up. So it’s anger staying around, because you know, we’re not able to let it go. So that’s why we do need to practice the positive stuff. Because it’s not coming as naturally, the kind

Richard Anderson 21:45
of brain almost working against us, we’ve evolved past the point where we need that Uber particular, we always going to need it, but we need it for very different reasons now than we did at one time after the show, you talked before about values and your values, maybe not aligned into other people’s or the direction that you’re going in, I’d be really keen to get into the topic of values, because I do find it interesting. So where this kind of values tie into all of this

Jackie Wade 22:11
is such a big question. Let me try and give my version of it, I think our values is who we are. And so again, we use the word often authentic self, or I often call from Shakespeare to thine own self be true, we have values within us that some were born with, you know, some that we inherit, if we look at as an online tool that people can look at Core Values in Action, bia assessment.com, that looks at you know, talks about values, and virtues and strengths, those words can get, you know, combine. But I think if your value if you have a core value around, and one of my big values is love, you know, I was surprised when I did that, that my number, I think it came out and I went well is over value, I thought was better than that. That’s not a value. That’s just who I am. And that’s exactly it. So for me, to feel loved, and to love is a huge part of who I am. And so for me if I find myself in situations where and I use the word love in a broad context, but if I find myself in situations where I feel people are not being treated well or not being loved by their boss, you know, and I, again, I use that in a very liberal way. But that feels wrong to me, and no amount of kind of going well proffered and we need to focus on, I still think there’s a human and kind and loving way for us to deal with other human beings. And so I find it really important for me to be in environments where that’s respected. And my second value is gratitude. So again, for me, me being grateful and expressing gratitude is a very important thing for me. But I also need that back. Because it’s all it’s this kind of, how do we work? How do we not work? Well, and so for me, I see that in the workplace, my dissertation is on mastering and the reason I’m doing it on mattering is there’s huge evidence around, you know, people in the workplace feeling like they don’t matter. They’re not valued. They’re not seen, they’re not heard. And so we have things like the great resignation, or now we’re talking about sign of resignation. And some of that comes back to and I’ve seen it time and time again, the minions are the normal everyday people in the workforce, not feeling that what they do is appreciated or seen or heard, and people at higher levels in management or even within the team actually being able to say thank you, I value you. I appreciate you in my business rather than particularly in sales environments. You know, it’s a very throwaway culture. It’s very much you know, two three years targets continuously rising, wanting more and more and more, and people probably listening who are in sales will recognize it. If they’re in sales person, if they’re managing sales really well that’s the nature of it. But you know, this never ceasing kind of need to stretch people beyond looking for that last kind of flow. Ah, and so therefore, for me, those values around love around gratitude are huge for me. And so when I’m in an environment where I can’t express those, or I don’t feel it’s present, I really struggle and start floundering. So again, that comes back to positive psychology. And if we’re working in environments, as business owners or as employees, or if we’re in environments where our values are being crushed, but we can’t express our values, or when it’s not aligned with our values, we end up floundering, and we end up getting sick, doing less having days off, not feeling committed. So understanding the people in our business and understanding their values and their strengths and recognizing them and being able to play to them, you know, and that’s in relationships as well, it’s a huge part of why relationships go wrong, because people don’t feel seen, they don’t feel heard and understood. And people in relationships often have very different values, and there can be a values clash. So it’s important in relationships to talk about, you know, perhaps, we don’t do the marriage counseling until the marriage is breaking up. But we should be looking at it before we even get into the relationships. Are our values aligned? Do we have an alignment in our values that will allow us to have a relationship that there’s harmony? Identify answers, you

Richard Anderson 26:17
get those answers and answers really well, the reason I’m interested in values is because we do a lot of discussions around the whole topic of values, and how that aligns with company culture and how you develop a company culture. And I think the reason that I’m interested in this topic is because I know what my values are, and funnily enough, I did the VI Strengths Assessment, I’d encourage anybody who’s listening to this to do it, because it’s a really interesting exercise. But we haven’t officially documented the values here at evolve, but it’s something I’m really keen to do. But you mentioned it before there, it’s in relationships or or across the business, it’s important to find out what the people’s values are. And I’m really keen to do this across the team. So it can’t just be okay, well, what is Richard Anderson’s values, and therefore, everybody needs to adhere to these, and then it will automatically become your values, because that’s not how it works. But it’s so important to get the, I suppose the founding team, or the first few members of the team all bought into the values, subscribing to that completely. And essentially, that’s going to underpin your culture moving forward, isn’t it and staying true to it?

Jackie Wade 27:18
I think more than just buying into the values, it’s, it’s co creating the mind?

Richard Anderson 27:24
Absolutely.

Jackie Wade 27:25
I think what happens, and I’ve seen this time and time again, where organizations, you know, they bring in an agency and external agency, and we’d like the brand exercise as well, those two things, just the theory of the work, I’m not nothing against people, hiring external agency to do either of the above, but it becomes an exercise that comes from the top 10 comes it’s external, and then it works with the leadership team, or the management team. And a lot of the time is presented to the rest of the people and and then you’re looking for buy in culture is how we do business. How do we do business here, particularly in a founding organization, in those first few months, years, you know, how do we want to do business here? And then how do we hire in people that sit with those values? So we co create and collaborate around what that looks like. And then, you know, we grow and expand to reflect those cultures. And I think, certainly working in foundership, in founders with several years. I think that’s one of the challenges. How do founders keep, you know, most of the time when somebody sets up their business, it’s with a real desire to make a difference. And to make something better, you know, whether that’s a product, whether it’s a service, you decide to set up your own business, because you see something is broken, that you want to fix, or you want to make it better, and particularly young people, you know, they have this passion around, I work for a long time at Newcastle Uni with young founders, and they want to put things right. And then people get involved externally, you know, they’re looking for funding, and then they’ve got to do this pitch and then leave. And so many founders, in my view, end up going off track and being forced to kind of veer down a path that they never really intended, but to kind of get funding or finance or whatever that is, and they lose, they lose the values, they lose sight of the values and their original purpose in setting their business up.

Richard Anderson 29:15
And then the passion might end up winning or you know, the dynamic completely changes. And yeah,

Jackie Wade 29:20
yeah, and then they find, you know, sometimes it’s five years later, sometimes it’s 20 years later, you know, there’s a lot of research around that kind of midlife phase where people you know, think, oh my god, what have I created? What is this business about? In the meantime, I’ve lost my marriage. I’ve lost my kids. I don’t connect with I’ve haven’t got friends because I’ve been so focused on building this monster and feeding this monster and actually looking around and going, Oh, crikey. What have I created? I’m not saying that happens to everyone, I’m sure with lots of people, they’re thrilled because they’ve got, you know, achieved huge big things. But and so I’m not saying this applies across the board. But I think it’s really important in business to be clear on your why. And to me going back After the question, you asked about your values, your values to me or your what, you know, why am I doing this? What are my values around this? And how can I almost like reviewing your business plan on a annual basis? Or whatever it’s reviewing and looking at your core values and your why and has that changed? And are you moving away from that? Are you moving towards it? And hence, advice you seek? And you know, people are always happy to give you advice. But does that align with who you are, and what you want?

Richard Anderson 30:28
Because one thing’s for absolute? Sure If that changes, you’re going to find out about it at some stage on you. And you’re probably going to have a little bit of negativity, when it comes to think about, well, what am I doing? How’s this change? Why is the dynamic changed? It’s a very, very interesting topic. So just while we’re on the subject, journey of founders, because I know that you do a lot of work with founders, when you look at positive psychology. How does positive psychology connect with founders? So how can it be used with founders?

Jackie Wade 30:56
Yeah, great question, Richard. And if I’m being really honest, I’m working on that. Right now. I’m developing, I’m talking to a few different universities, and I’m looking at developing a program for founders to really focus on their, I’m going to call it psychological capital. And I think that’s the word really, because so much of founders focus is on the business and business capital, you know, cash flow, raising capital, we kind of started to talk a little bit more about human capital and recognizing that on the balance sheet, and social capital, how we network and how we build our social network. But I think the psychological capital is really interesting for founders of psychological capital in positive psychology, we talk about the hero model, and AGR Oh, and hero stands for the haters for hope, the ease for efficacy or self efficacy, the ability to steer your own ship, are as for resilience, and always optimism, so psychological capital really looks at those areas as founders, but I would go a step further and not even a step further with it further, I’d go step backward, and say, it kind of encompasses the things that we have talked about already, for me, wellbeing, and the founder prioritizing their well being and prioritizing, you know, we’ve all seen it, and we’ve all done it, and you know, that kind of 12 hours, 15 hours, nonstop. And we live in a culture where that’s embraced and that there are definitely times when that’s required, you know, we’re giving a pitch, or we’re up against some deadline, and we need to head down and work through the night, etc. But that’s not sustainable, and we burn out. And we create a culture within our business that’s not sustainable. We have people in our teams that come in often young people that are afraid to say, actually, this doesn’t work for me, and they’re looking at the founders and thinking we need to, I have to live like that. And I know a number of founders that really struggle with their mental health and, you know, their stress levels. And so I think it goes back to what I was saying earlier, remembering that you are the single most important thing in your organization and minding you, is your biggest job and responsibility. And doing that. And, and partly that’s going to the physical gym. You know, usually founders are quite good at the kind of tough stuff, usually they’ll pound the pavements and run etc. So I’ve gone to the gym, or, you know, do these big things, but actually taking time out to relax. And what’s interesting, there’s a model in positive psychology that’s called the broaden and build theory. And it looks at the upward spiral and the downward spiral. And without getting into it, there’s tons of research that tells us, if we sit still and calm, and go into a place of positive emotions, or a place of or gratitude, or, you know, whatever that calm space is, we are much more creative. Creativity thrives when we give ourselves space for to thrive, and living sometimes, because binders are in a perpetual agentic forward, you know, pace, it’s sometimes quite hard to kind of sit back and actually take stock and be reflective and be creative and find alternative solution. So, so I think for founders, recognizing the importance of their well being, and recognizing what that might look like for them, how they find time for their own well being, how they found time for their, you know, their team in the early stages, values, what are their values? What is their why, why did they set that up? Why did they go down this path in the first place and making sure that they don’t get diverted by people who may have their best interests in heart or may not have their best interests? You know, the the interests of the CEO and founder is not always aligned. So again, my advice is be careful when you’re getting into bed with you know, and is there a values alignment there, because sometimes young, inexperienced founders chase the cash and are very grateful for wherever they can get that from. So Again, you end up with a misalignment. So wellbeing looking after that finding the time to prioritize that values, your why, and then potentially the hero or, you know, looking at all of those elements, particularly self efficacy, this this, you know, taking control of what’s going on, and resilience, looking at how we stay resilient and how it’s a tough, tough, tough gig, running your own business. So you need to find, you know, resilience is something that we say founders, or you know, people, entrepreneurs are naturally resilient people, are they naturally resilient, some are, but some have to work at it. And I think, again, looking at different tools within positive psychology to help build resilience is a big part of what I do when I’m coaching founders.

Richard Anderson 35:44
I mean, I love this stuff. And I have to say, I would have been a brilliant candidate for it. I’m probably still it still wouldn’t be but but five years ago, I remember Utah, right, the beginning, there’s almost, I guess, need among some entrepreneurs, and I guess I wasn’t maybe one of them. When I started the business, then I had to work 12 hour days, every day, you know, I couldn’t lift my head or be at the detriment of the business, if I did, and whether it was at the detriment of the business, or whether I just thought that that was the right thing to do as a founder, I’m not sure yet. But there’s this, the certain actions that I took, and that was one of them that I really regret now, because it would have been infinitely better. If I just worked a normal kind of eight hour day, and then taking more time for myself. I mean, when when I started the business, I think my son was like three months, my firstborn, and I really regret not going out for more walks with him and taking advantage of my wife’s maternity leave and things like that, because I was starting the business. And really yet, of course, the business, it managed to survive and, you know, get past those times. But I don’t think I think it was in spite of that not certainly not because of work in the extra hours. So I love this this positive psychology stuff, I have to say,

Jackie Wade 36:49
there will be lots of people that will think very differently. And I think it depends on your goals. You know, I think if you are trying to grow in scale a business quickly if your goals are to make a shitload of money, build a business sellers, all of that stuff. So it depends on your goals. But I think sometimes as business startups, etc, we focus on those big ambitious scaling businesses. But actually, the reality is there are a lot of people, particularly post COVID, who are choosing to set up a business and they’re not setting out to set up a huge high scale, high growth business, they’re setting out to be independent, maybe to just be by themselves. And lots of people would dish that and say, I remember been told, Well, you’re not really an entrepreneur, because we don’t have any team. And maybe I didn’t, but I worked with tons of other businesses, my objective was to help others grow. And I deliberately didn’t want a big team, I didn’t want to hire loads of people for me, I’d set my business up to give me work life balance, so I could, you know, I left corporate life, so I could work with my, you know, be spend more time with my kids. So why would I give that up to run a huge business and take me away from? So all I’m saying is I’m not dishing across the I’m saying, Be clear why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Richard Anderson 37:59
I think it’s awareness change. And that’s, that’s the key thing it’s been aware of, of these things that there are different ways of doing this. And terminology I’ve heard this week a few times is all about life, work balance. I think that’s why I put the you know, this this post COVID stuff, but it is really, really interesting. So, Jerry, I can’t believe the time we’ve done around 40 minutes, there are there abouts, which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. I want just to kind of wrap up by giving you the opportunity to talk a little bit about Clarice Amol. And how you how you support or how you can support your clients and also how people can reach you if they want to get in touch. Yeah,

Jackie Wade 38:31
well, no big pitch, I think people have who’ve listened to the podcast will get a sense of who I am. And what’s important to me, when I set up my business, this new business I called it flourish symbol FL o u r is s IMO. And that’s made over the two words flourish, and EC Mo, which is Italian for to be at our most flourishing. So my passion, and everything I do is about helping people to flourish. And I do that in a number of ways. But you know, really, it’s about coaching and working with people to help them explore where they’re at and where they want to get to. It’s going into organizations and understanding how can I support a flourishing, thriving culture and organization that’s working with business owners, it’s working with leadership team to explore what is flourishing look like for our business? And how can we potentially embed some of the tools of positive psychology across the business? So we create a business where, you know, going back to what I said about my dissertation where people matter, you know, what people feel they matter and that’s where we, as business owners feel we matter not just to our business, but to our families and to society, or, you know, to communities. So, so I love you know, for me, I’ve kind of developed a model around mattering, which is going into organizations and helping to explore how does a business owner make a difference in matters? How do they look after themselves? They say I matter? How do they look after the people in their team so that the team feels they matter and how do they say Do the relationships with the children and their family so that they feel they matter not. And that sounds like a big ask. But there are ways once again, coming back to your point, once we’re self aware, we can work on that. So that’s my passion. It’s a work in progress. You know, this is, you know, my journey is I’m on this journey, and I’m evolving. For me, everything I’m doing right now is organic. It comes from a space of hearing and understanding what’s happening in our planet in my human space and my community, particularly in the Northeast, and how can I make a difference? And I’m open, I’m open to working at who I work with how I work with those people. And and, you know, my purpose and passion going forward is to make a difference, and to help in this space of flourishing and wellness. Yeah, it’s to make a difference and to be a light, you know, I feel there’s so much darkness so, so much darkness out there. If I can bring some light into an individual or an organization’s being done. That’s what I’m about.

Richard Anderson 40:56
I love the work you’re doing. You’re incredibly passionate about it. And that certainly comes across and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the discussion. Really appreciate you making the time and looking forward to catching up.

Jackie Wade 41:05
Thanks for the opportunity, Richard and good luck with podcasts.

Voiceover 41:08
Thanks for listening to Psyched for Business, for show notes, resources and more visit evolveassess.com

Episode 5:
Unblurring the lines between coaching and therapy – a unique approach

In this podcast episode, Richard Anderson is joined by Jon Barnes.

Jon is a lecturer in organisational transformation, a regular TEDx speaker, and an author on the topics of human growth in the workplace.

Jon is also Co-Founder of The Listening Collective, who have a very unique approach to coaching.

In this episode, we discuss:

✅ Unblurring the lines between coaching and therapy in the workplace
✅ How to maximise professional performance by providing coaches who are qualified therapists
✅ A little about our own fears, and how we can look at managing them

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Episode 05 – Transcript 

Voiceover 0:00
Welcome to Psyched for Business, helping business leaders understand and apply cutting-edge business psychology principles in the workplace.

Richard Anderson 0:11
Hi, and welcome to Psyched for Business. My name is Richard Anderson, thank you for joining me. In this episode, I’m joined by Jon Barnes, co-founder at the Listening Collective. Jon is a lecturer in organizational transformation, and a regular TEDx speaker and author around the topics of human growth in the workplace. And he’s worked with 1000s of leaders to adopt progressive ways of working, that have transformed their organizations. In this episode, Jon helps us to try and blur the lines between coaching and therapy in the workplace, and how providing coaches who are qualified therapists can go far deeper beneath the surface in order to maximize professional performance. Thanks for listening. Jon Barnes, thank you very much for joining me. How are you doing?

Jon Barnes 0:56
Yeah, good. Thanks for having me, man. Great to be here.

Richard Anderson 0:59
You’re very well, it’s a pleasure to have you. And it’s a pleasure to be speaking about this topic. It’s one that I’m very interested in, The Listening collective, which I know that we’ll get into and a huge amount of detail throughout the course of this podcast, you guys have got a very unique approach. But I guess just to set the scene, Jon, it will be really useful if you wouldn’t mind giving the audience a bit of background on yourself and how you came to form The Listening Collective.

Jon Barnes 1:21
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. A bit about myself first, the thing that’s had me tick in and got me working for my whole career really has been an interest in how we organize ourselves. We’re all familiar with the model that most of us have grown up with, which is an autocratic model. From school, you sit down and you kind of passively receive information from the boss at the front, you’re told where to sit, when you’re allowed to speak, what you’re allowed to wear, when you’re allowed to go to the toilet. And as far as I can tell, work is roughly the same. You have a boss instead of grades, you have pay grade instead of subjects, you have departments, the uniforms are roughly similar. And it’s kind of a continuation of that same autocratic system. And I see it not working for many reasons, partly just for human reasons, I think it stunts our growth, or let’s say it stunts our development. And when I say development, I mean, in the research sense of our adult development, the fact that it’s possible for us to grow into more complex ways of understanding the world. And it’s also just not that nice, as well as not that efficient or effective. It can be quite wasteful, not that there’s no role at all for autocracy or hierarchy. There definitely is some, but I’ve made my career out of trying to work with alternatives, typically, what is sometimes known in the field as self-organizing teams, or self-organization, that’s kind of my thing. Along the process of doing this, you know, we’re working with complexity. So it’s complex, and it’s nuanced. And it doesn’t work. And you tried to do this, but that happens. And there’s second and third-degree implications to everything. But the thing I keep coming up against, or keep having my curiosity piqued by, is that there’s all these ways we can organize ourselves far better in the 21st century, that are far more inclusive of complexity and nuanced. And yeah, all of those ways we might self-organize better, still, to me bring about the constant idea that how well are we are actually self-managing, like at managing myself, I have a self or at least a sense that I have a self. Like, I’m not sure how real that is. But that’s a full topic. And exactly, absolutely. But I certainly struggle to manage it. And I noticed that in the teams I work with, and particularly for leaders who are dealing with greater degrees of complexity, you know, a big organization, constant change, if you just look at the last few years, from pandemics to Ukraine, to energy crises to cost of living crises, leaders are having to deal with this. And it’s hard. And so it seems to me that for all the tools and processes in ways we can organize ourselves really well, fundamentally, our capacity to manage ourself is something we could all do with help with. And we can do with that help, because everyone can do with a bit of help. Like I say that in a loving, compassionate sense, but also because we can all grow and increase our capacity for performing. I don’t mean performing like playing a role, I mean, actually getting stuff done. And so The Listening Collective exists for that purpose – to help people and often leaders to navigate complexity to deal with change and to grow from there, really.

Richard Anderson 4:42
Jon, before we get into The Listening collective, right, how far would you go with this? You talk right at the beginning about when we’re children in schools and get told where to sit, what to do. I mean, how much do you think we should be looking at the areas of school and changing how that all works? Or is this just a workplace thing, just in your view?

Jon Barnes 4:58
I’ll answer it in two ways – my personal application of it is to the workplace. So I kind of go from the principle that or from the premise, let’s say that we, you know, school is incredible in lots of ways, by the way, before I go and give the downside like, it’s amazing. I’m even in a position in 2022, where I can criticize education. That says how far we’ve gone, and how far we’ve got and how great the world is, in many ways. However, I also think it, in many ways, stunts our development, for example, like the child’s brain is typically not ready to understand abstract concepts like maths until roughly 12 years old, yet, we start teaching it at five, which is, to my mind, slightly absurd, and a number of things that we also have our autonomy kind of stolen from us. So I see that it’s very important, but my professional application of this is that we as adults, grew up like that. And so there’s some unlearning and relearning to do for us. So adult education in some sense. And when I say that I really want to make clear to listeners, I include myself, as a novice and a student with a long way to go in that, that’s my professional interest. I am absolutely fascinated by education, it might be a whole other topic that I’ve done some research and have some experience in, but professionally, I put my work into adult education, let’s say.

Richard Anderson 6:17
Yeah, and I can tell you are very passionate about it, was just out of interest to see how far that spanned, if you like, fantastic. So that’s a brilliant background. I appreciate that, Jon. Talking about The Listening Collective itself – so I know that you guys are unique. And I’m sure you’ll talk through how you are unique, I think it’s very, very interesting, this whole debate that people have, and it’s an interesting topic of conversation, coaching versus therapy, and where the lines blur, or whether where the line goes between the two, I know that you’ve written articles on it, you’ve added LinkedIn threads on it, I did something fairly similar recently. But I’d be really keen to get into that topic, if you’d maybe be happy to discuss that in a bit of detail. So in terms of coaching, or business coaching, let’s say, traditionally, what does a business coach do?

Jon Barnes 7:06
Maybe first, just before I answer that, I don’t know to what degree I’m creating or observing this dichotomy, but the way I came across it was that I, myself was doing really well, in my career. There’s nothing broken. And actually, there was nothing, I wanted more, everything was great. But I thought, Well, I still want to grow. And I want to grow for the sake of it. Right? Not to undo a wrong, not to get this or get that, I just, for the sake of it. As I did that, I thought, well, you know, I should get a coach. Right? That’s what we do. And so I started thinking, Well, what, what would a coach get me, and this is where maybe I can just, I’m aware to listeners, I’m going to pigeonhole coaching. And I know I’m wrong. There’s as much diversity within the category of coaching as there is between the categories of coaching and therapy. And the same would be true for therapy. But fundamentally, I think, as a kind of cheap heuristic, we go to coaching to perform better, do more, do faster, and more, make better decisions. So these are all output-orientated things. And then there’s a huge variety as to how a coach deals with that. Fundamentally, it’s in order to achieve the output at the end, and it’s about the future. Whilst I saw a huge benefit in this, I kind of had the instinct that were I to even want those outputs. The problem is, you know, I felt at a level where I wanted, I wanted to grow, but I didn’t know for what output. I didn’t have an output in mind. And so in a way, what I was looking for, was not to look forward, but to look deeply and to understand myself more. And I kind of see myself as the tool that I’ve got to do and be anything or everything. And therefore it felt what I decided to do was not to get a coach, but to get a therapist. And then I was like, well, that’s interesting, because we go to therapy for our personal lives, not our professional lives. Yeah, I’m, I’m really sensing that since I’m my only tool. I’m the only tool to do my work with but I’m also my only tool to be a husband and a dad with – it’s the same tool. So that distinction doesn’t make sense to me right now. But then I was like, well with therapy, we go there to heal ourselves. And I mean that etymologically like a physiotherapist is to heal the body and a psychotherapist is to heal the psyche. And yeah, I was there with nothing on the surface, at least that needed healing. But I could tell that there was potential in me that I was yet to meet or understand, and that I needed to go deep to find that out. And so this was where this was born this coach versus therapy.

Richard Anderson 9:47
That was a self-observation that was just something that you realized was happening?

Jon Barnes 9:52
Absolutely. I’d add to that then observing what I see in workplaces, which is that I get demands from organizations is about people. So right, a head of HR or head of learning development or someone like that will come to me and have some people moan or desire for their team, which might be to perform better to make decisions better to handle conflict better, and what we go to our tools to do that with. And I find these tools incredibly valuable. But fundamentally, I also think they’re just tools. And like I said, the meta tool, the mother of all tools that I’ve got is me. As far as I can see, therapy is the best inter-relational tool we have. Right now. There’s now within that field, there’s so many modalities, some, I’m not particularly attracted to some I am. So this is this dichotomy kind of continuing now, what we’ve ended up doing, call it coaching by therapists, the way I’ve kind of tried to articulate it before is that typically what someone is bringing to us in our coaching sessions is some sort of professional situation or life, right, they have either a problem they’re trying to solve or an opportunity they’re trying to grasp. And as far as I can tell, coaching, would then try and move us forward into the future where we’re succeeding where we were on the flip side of this situation, and everything’s rosy. But having therapists as coaches, what we’re hoping to do is that you go from that professional life downwards, think of an iceberg with 10%, above the surface, and 90 percent beneath, we go deep instead of forward. So rather than going over the iceberg, we go underneath it into your personal processes, how you deal with conflict, what identities you hold, how you’re processing a particular situation, how you feel, just in certain situations, or how you make sense of things cognitively, for that matter. When you deep dive. If you go like literally deep sea diving, you’ll find, I don’t know, shipwrecks, but you’ll also find treasure chests. But certainly I would never go deep sea diving a shipwreck without a certified instructor, which is why at Listening Collective, our coaches are qualified, or in advanced training to be psychotherapists. And then you can emerge on the other side, having found some of those treasures, having explored the shipwreck that we all have, with the help of someone you feel safe with and you can emerge hopefully able to grasp those opportunities, but not only grasping those opportunities, you’re doing it with this far greater understanding of yourself, which allows you to grasp many other opportunities, I don’t even know what they might be at that point. But your tool, like yourself, hopefully is developed by them. So we feel this is like both meaningful, but also what it gets from coaching, which is really valuable is still a sense that, you know, if therapy can be kind of seen as looking backwards, and being a bit navel gazeley and a bit indulgent, what we’re taking from coaching is the ability to maybe look down and deep, but then look forward to have an actual impact, whether it’s in your workplace, or whatever it is, and coming back above the surface, right, not just staying down beneath. 

Richard Anderson 13:05
I mean, it’s really, really, interesting stuff, Jon. So if you’re working with an organization and leadership team, and you’re doing some coaching with them, they come to you with initially with the problem and you start to deep dive into that person, I guess how readily do they volunteer information about their past or challenges or whatever that might be? Because to me sitting on the other face of it, if I’m sitting with a business coach, and they start delving into that sort of area, it’s probably going to take a lot for me to want to volunteer? Do you ever see that as being a bit of a challenge? And if so, how do you circumnavigate it?

Jon Barnes 13:35
There’s a few elements to it. First of all, the way we work with clients is we typically contract for a number of hours, and typically a group of people that they’ll give this service access to internally, and those people are given a calendar. And then they can find their coach and start on those a one to one confidential sessions. And like I said, everyone’s qualified unit psychotherapy training is rigorous. And so you’re faced with someone who’s done the work themselves, they’ve seen their own shipwreck, and that can make you feel a bit safer. But nonetheless, what you pick up is true that can be resistant. The first thing to say is, that person only needs to book a session if they want to, no one’s making them book a session, or at least I really hope not, it’s certainly never asked that we put that pressure in my feeling is that we benefit from things quite often. And mostly when we ask for them and have some readiness to it. You know, I’m not going to say it’s not good to ever be pushed into things that you’re not sure of, but certainly, a willingness to be there is kind of key to any coaching, whether it’s coaching or therapy relationship. So that’s the first bit it’s voluntary, right? And the second part is, your coach or therapist is never there to pry into you. Not at all. We don’t know what to call them because we’re coaches who are therapists, maybe listeners is the best version of this. We’re here to do just that and listen, and it’s by listening that that person takes us where they feel comfortable going maybe to the edge of the shadow, then it’s their decision if bit by bit, they want to go there. And so that’s definitely something that our listeners are really used to working with is it’s just the real principle that we’ve, we follow you. And that feels really key. And actually just adding to that shadow point I had. I was getting some feedback from some clients recently. And there was this really great metaphor that came up that actually in order to, you know, think of any story big story, like I don’t know, Gandalf is a good one, right? He’s Gandalf the Grey, but it’s only once he falls into the mines of Moria. and face the Borg that he comes out Gandalf the White, so he had to go deep, and it had to get dark. So that’s kind of a key part of how we seem to develop that Hero’s Journey is seen everywhere, Luke Skywalker becomes a knight via the cave, you know it, you see it all the time, what you need is your Yoda there maybe to go with you. Like that’s quite key. But what came up in this conversation with the client was, the monsters are only scary in the dark, you don’t have stories of monsters where the light The light was shone on them, and they weren’t scary anymore. Monsters are only scary in the dark. And hopefully, getting to the edge of the areas that we feel vulnerable with is, is just about where you want to be. And then you go, you go there at your own pace or not at all, for that matter. That’s totally up to the coachee.

Richard Anderson 16:22
Brilliant, and when it comes to the therapy that you guys will, will offer and of course, you’re giving people the opportunity to speak you’re listening very intently when it comes to the therapy side of things. What are there any specific therapy that works better than others? Or is it case by case basis? How does that work?

Jon Barnes16:41
There’s two ways of answering that. One is the reason we’re call the Listening Collective, the listening modes really key. And that’s because of some age-old research. But that seems to still hold true from what I can gather, which I think Carl Rogers initiated, which was basically, that it seems that the success of a course of what he called the helping relationship, I want to be clear that we’re coaches, or we’re acting in their capacity of coaches, not therapists. But what he found was that modalities didn’t seem to matter nearly as much, at least, as the relationship between those two people. So he found that we’re, if empathy was present, congruence was present and unconditional positive regard were present, then the likelihood of this being beneficial to the person asking for help would increase, and the modality kind of didn’t matter so much. So that’s why listening is the absolute foundation, we come and meet you. And hopefully, this expression that it’s when we heard, we hear ourselves, you start to notice things you’re saying that make more or less sense. So that’s the first part to mention. Then in terms of the because our collective of coaches is growing. It’s like where to look, because actually, like I said earlier, there’s so much diversity within that field, we are currently showing a preference. And it’s actually a preference that the coaching world I think would relate to, it’s modalities that tend to meet people in the present moment. They don’t ask to go into your past, although those patterns can be useful.

Richard Anderson 18:14
Yeah. Because I think as a layman, and you know, I’m by no means an expert in these areas, but psychoanalysis would appear ostensibly to be very different than something like CBT cognitive behavioral therapy.

Jon Barnes 18:25
So yes, okay. Analysis is probably I’m not I’m not like saying there’s no value to psychoanalysis. But it’s certainly not something that we’re bringing into our sessions with clients who’ve got coaches who are trained Gestalt therapists. psychosynthesis is another one, which is really interesting because it is kind of a generalist. modality. So it includes lots of modalities like CBT, so more cognitive ones, Gastel focuses more on your emotional world and reactions to things. All they have in common certainly is meeting someone in the present, not with some remembered or pseudo remembered version of our past, we’re not there to do that at all. We meet people in the present, we go to whatever depths we go to, and we reemerge with hopefully a new future and new version of ourselves quite often, in mind, at least, that’s the fee, the feedback we’re getting is that that approach is more effective than what people have experienced in traditional coaching.

Richard Anderson 19:22
Okay, so Jon, one of the areas I’m keen to explore and how the listening collective would approach a particular situation, I’ll use me as a, you know, as a good example. So one of the challenges that I’ve had in the past is, for example, I’ve been a little bit hesitant to spend money, things like marketing, staffing, those types of things. And I guess, ultimately, when we dive a little bit deeper, that probably boils down to the fact that I don’t want to fail. I don’t want to spend all of the money. There’s a risk there. What happens if the business fails? And I guess for me, there’s probably an innate fear of failure there if we went very, very deep, but If you were a coach of mine as an example, how would you go about dealing with that particular scenario or approaching that scenario?

Jon Barnes 20:08
My key interest there goes into your fear of failure itself. Of course, one approach there is to look at all the possible simulations of how this particular decision you’re making could go right, like if you spent the money if you didn’t, if it went wrong, if it didn’t go wrong, and these are all really important, and useful tools, and many of our coaches would use them, no doubt themselves, like simulating and imagining versions of the future is definitely something that’s interesting. But what piques my interest, and I imagine, would pique many of our coaches interest who I remind the audience are far more qualified than I am, I would imagine, it’s, it’s interesting to me, certainly, the fear of failure itself, which, like you say, is something we all experience I certainly experience. But to go there could be interesting, like, how does your fear of failure? You know, what does that look like? First of all, like, biologically, do you experience? How do you experience fear? And what’s your relationship with failure? Is it something that exists in your personal life or in your past perhaps, and going into that could be interesting, not only because maybe it will help you make a good financial decision right now. But if your relationship to fear and to failure, and to both of those things, changes, many decisions you make in the different in the future, will change not only the decision, but how you feel about the decision and your process of making that decision can be really different. And maybe that kind of summarizes, it’s great that you’ve brought up an example that summarizes what we believe and we’re hearing from our clients is the difference between the way we coach and traditional business coaching, which is that we’re using this particular professional instance, for you to look at your own personal process, and then to reemerge, you know, with a greater capacity in your case for making decisions in general, now that you’ve got a different relationship to that particular monster of yours is yours, which is your fear of failure. And I hear you on that man. Yeah, I

Richard Anderson 22:06
Bet it’s quite a common thing to see you answer. Now. I was thinking maybe things like impostor syndrome and people speaking up in meetings, it’s all there’s always a reason isn’t it’s not doesn’t just happen that you know, you don’t want to speak up in meetings. It’s probably because you will want this thing to vote. Yeah. impostor syndrome. What if I get found out? It’s all that? What if catastrophizing in your head or whatever?

Jon Barnes 22:25
Yeah. And there’s different ways of looking at that, like CBT asks you to reframe that thought and to question the thought almost like a scientist, I find that incredibly valuable, but other tools to look into your emotional life or into your relationships and how it comes up there. This isn’t navel gazing, because it’s like doing that will help you reemerge with a greater capacity, a greater wisdom and ability to do stuff in of material consequence in the world. And something that came up for me, by the way, when you mentioned that list of you know, fear of failure, imposter syndrome, etc. Is this odd paradox that on some level, I think one thing I’m hearing a lot from our clients is the feeling that they come out, really valuing themselves, right, which is beautiful. And I could I could categorize that as realizing you’re special. Also, I’d hope. What many of us could learn is that you’re not special. You’re not the only one to have a fear of failure. You’re not the only ones who have impostor syndrome. I say that tongue in cheek because we should leave slightly like relieved,

Richard Anderson 23:27
Right? Don’t be anything other than a good thing. If you’re not the only one.

Jon Barnes 23:31
I think so just like you I have a fear of failure. I will love this tool

Richard Anderson 23:35
It’s good. It’s good. Good to hear. That doesn’t make me feel better. Jon, one of the comments I got on a LinkedIn post that I put out on this particular topic therapy versus coaching was when the challenge that somebody is having and use the example of fear of failure, maybe it’s not the best one. But if that is affecting somebody’s life every single day, and is that where it becomes a clinical issue isn’t the way you’d make a recommendation for is that where it gets into mental health?

Jon Barnes 24:02
Yeah, it’s interesting, all these lines are a slightly slippery, right. And we’re trying our best to delineate them whilst acknowledging complexity and nuance, which knows no lines. So that’s the odd balancing act, we’re playing with what we do see, so first of all, we’re a coaching service, right? businesses pay us to help people fundamentally in their view, perform better but the way in which we go about that is to look at our personal processes as humans, so we’re there for professional reasons, or be it in their professional reasons that have an incredibly big heart in the case of all our coaches. However, sometimes, you know, you start with a fear of failure in a boardroom and you go to places where you will what comes up over the course of a relationship and as trust builds is genuine trauma, mental health issues, daily suffering that is of a different degree, than a pure being scared of your power. Point presentation, right. And when we get to those places, what we’ve seen is that it’s useful for our coach to acknowledge that, that we’ve kind of, whilst we’re trying, whilst we’re using the fact that you and me are human beings, and that we’re connecting on that deeper human level in order to eventually circle back to our ability to perform better. There’s moments in life where what we need is just personal help. And we’ve actually made the decision that any of our coaches if in that situation, first of all, we just try and help that person. And we can, because we’re qualified to go there. So we’ve had some instances where that has become a personal therapeutic relationship between the coach and the coachee. We take no profit as a company at all. And it’s now considered a situation where that person needs personal help, then it’s up to the company as to whether they want to fund that or not. These are case by case scenarios. The certainly the only thing that matters to us at that point, is the person that happens because there’s more of us suffering, then we can tell. And like, you know, like everyone says mental health and trauma are not things that are visible, that are the reason we’re employed in the first place is for that professional context. But certainly, you know, the line is not as clear as we wish it was, it would be so great if you had a professional life and personal life. But that is in large parts an illusion that we have.

Richard Anderson 26:25
Just a couple of questions left. Jon, just very conscious of time, I’ve really enjoyed speaking about this, this particular subject, who would be the best candidates for coaching? In your view?

Jon Barnes 26:37
Yeah, I mean, it’s tricky. It’s tricky to just not answer everyone. But if I had to prioritize, what I’m really seeing is amongst leadership teams, the value of it for quite a few reasons. One is the leaders, I do think deal with a higher order of complexity by virtue of managing and leading others, but also often working in more abstract sections of work being slightly less hands on or more strategic or having a longer like time horizon to their thinking. And they’re often in charge of navigating huge amounts of change. The reason I think our particular coaching product is incredibly valuable for that is, first of all, that navigating Change is hard emotionally, mentally, it’s taxing is a real reason we burn out, we’re dealing with constant ambiguity. And yeah, kind of caveman system just wants constant certainty and linearity. And that’s certainly not the case in 2022, I think we can all finally see that. So leadership teams value it massively and really see, you know, the, the word we keep hearing is how effective is professionally for them. But definitely, therapeutically, like we wondered whether we should call it therapeutic coaching, because a lot of people leave with some, you know, I’m changing my voice to that relieved. So I think leadership teams can really, really benefit from it, we are seeing a trend that people in C suite or some sort of senior management team are valuing it and then offering it to their teams, as well. And that’s, again, in order to increase the complexity of your sense making and therefore work better. But also because, you know, we all need a bit of help, I think,

Richard Anderson 28:17
Of course we do. I absolutely. And just while we’re on that, if any leadership teams or any organizations generally want to get in touch with you, or the listening collective, Jon, what’s the best way for them to do that? 

Jon Barnes 28:27
Yeah, so just websites, probably the best place the listening collective.org You can send us a message and get in touch there. And there’s a bunch of fun things coming soon on there as well with some videos and other content. So meet us there and we’ll be on the other side of an email. Be great to chat. Fantastic.

Richard Anderson 28:45
We’ll put all the links within the article the blog article itself for this podcast, John Barnes. Thanks ever so much for your time. Really enjoy chatting.

Jon Barnes 28:53
Thanks, man. Take care. You too.

Voiceover 28:55
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