Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction

00:02:20: Idea for action 1: three-minute mind maps

00:04:17: Idea for action 2: thinker vs doer default

00:06:28: Useful resource

00:06:46: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Helen Tupper: So, we're now on day 4 of the Squiggly Career Skills Sprint and today's skill is all about coaching yourself.  And this is a really important skill for your Squiggly Career.  I think regular listeners will know that, because we've got a book called You Coach You, this is something we really care about, but we're going to give you the super-short summary so you can take action with this skill today.

So, what is coaching yourself all about and why does it matter?  It's really about increasing your self-awareness so you understand a bit more about why you might be feeling or responding a certain way to a situation, but it's also about taking action.  It's the awareness and the action that coaching yourself results in.  And when you are able to coach yourself, one of the really helpful things is that it reduces your dependency on other people for your development. 

So, I don't always have to go to Sarah for her advice about what I should do in my career.  And it's not that you can't go and get some of that support, of course that is really useful, but often it's better if you start with yourself first, because then you get through hard times quicker and the actions that you take are more likely to be effective because you've generated them.  So, I feel like it's like a bit of a super-skill in a Squiggly Career when we crack this one.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I don't think we are suggesting that this replaces career conversations.  I think what we find from our learners and the feedback we get from our community is, if you learn to coach yourself, you sort of get halfway there and then you almost use a career conversation in a more useful way to fill in the gaps when you get stuck.  And I think people don't give themselves enough credit that everyone can learn to have this coaching capability.  I think people feel like, "Oh, no, this is too hard, or I'm not a qualified coach, I need to go and talk to someone else".  

But actually, when you start to learn these skills, once you've got a bit of a framework and you start practising, everyone's brilliant at this, we've all got the capability to do it.  And then I think you go, "Well then, who can help me with the bits that I don't know, or who could be a really useful sounding board for the thoughts that I've already had?" So, like you say, sometimes I think you can just move forward by yourself and you can just make progress, or sometimes I think it just increases the quality of your career conversations.

Helen Tupper: But I also think when you develop it for yourself, you can also use this as a skill with other people.  So, if I get good at coaching myself, actually when I do have a career conversation with Sarah because she wants to talk to me about something, some of those skills that I've honed I can use with other people.  So, what is your idea for action for coaching yourself?

Sarah Ellis: Well, I think we've got to make this really practical, and I would recommend using coaching questions with three-minute mind maps, and we can all fit three minutes into a day, I think; I think most people feel that that's realistic.  But if we just say, "Well, just do a three-minute mind map about your career?"

Helen Tupper: Yeah, it's a bit daunting.

Sarah Ellis: And vague.  So, it's like daunting and abstract, which is never a good combination.  Whereas instead, if you use a coach-yourself question, and that goes in the centre of your mind map, and then you just go, "Right, I'm just going to spend three minutes answering this question".  And the thing that I would encourage you to do if you have a go at this exercise, is use all of the three minutes.

Helen Tupper: That's true.

Sarah Ellis: Even if after two minutes, you've finished, just stay with it, because sometimes in the last ten seconds of that three minutes, that's when you have a bit of an aha insight or you come up with something you've not thought of before.  So, some good questions could be, "What do I want to be true in 12 months' time that isn't true today?"  Or, "What learning goals have I got?"  Or, "Who could support me to go further and faster in my career", or even just, "What roles would I like to explore in my career to progress in my career for the next 6 to 12 months". 

So, you set your own question.  I would do one question at once, make sure they're an open question, and I think it can be helpful to do the same question every day for a week.  So, you could do a three-minute mind map every day on a different question, so then you've done five by the end of a week; or you could think, "Well, this question is so important and quite a big question, quite a zoomed-out question, I'll keep coming back to it.  I'll just do three minutes and I'll come back the next day.  Do I notice anything new, has anything else sprung to mind kind of in the meantime?" When we do this live in workshops, everyone has quite a different experience of it.  Some people are like, "That three minutes took a lifetime", and other people are like, "I'm just getting started".  So again, you might want to adapt it a bit based on how you experience it, but I would encourage everyone to do at least three minutes.

Helen Tupper: I also think Sarah is the queen of questions, like you've always got a good question.

Sarah Ellis: I'll take that; Queen of Question!.

Helen Tupper: You can have that one.  Mine is all about understanding your thinker versus doer default.  So, Sarah is more of a thinker than me, for example, so she's highly reflective, spends time in her head, will consider things for quite a long time and will consider multiple options.  That's just the nature of being a thinker.  I'm a doer, which means I'm all about action.  So, you give me an idea and I've already run with it and I'm already on it, I'm already thinking about how we fix it fast and get it done.  It's just that, it's just my doer nature. 

The reason you want to understand your doer default is, we are trying to get awareness, what thinkers are great at, and action, what doers are great at, and both in equal measure.  And so, your default is pulling you more to one of those traits. So, if you are a doer like me, it's really useful how you bring a bit of Sarah in.  So, questions, for example, it's not my nature to ask reflective questions and to spend three minutes thinking about it.  It's just not my nature.  So actually, your action is really good to balance out my natural way of responding to it.  Whereas, what would you, as a natural thinker, how would you bring a bit of me into your world?

Sarah Ellis: I would still ask questions, but I would ask how questions rather than why questions.  So, thinkers tend to ask why, like, "Why is this important?  Why does this matter to make…"  Your face!  You're like, "I don't need to know why"!  Whereas, you would ask how, "How do we move forward?  How do we make this happen?"

Helen Tupper: "What do we need to do first?"

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, or a what do we need to do, which is a very action-focused question.  So, yeah, if I wanted to swap shoes with you and just put on your high and comfortable shoes that you wear, I would just get into that, "What's going to give me momentum?  How do I make some progress with pace?"  I probably would be asking myself, "What's the first thing I could do?  How could I be further ahead by the end of today than I am right now?"

Helen Tupper: It already sounds like me!

Sarah Ellis: I've spent enough time with you, I know it does!  And so actually, that's sometimes a real unlocker.  Sometimes the way that people even do this exercise is, they sort of have like an empty chair.  They literally go, "I'm going to visualise that person, or I'm going to move physically and pretend to be that person".  But I think you'd be surprised sometimes how just seeing your problem from a different perspective just means you can make some progress in a way that you couldn't before.  You sort of escape your own thinking, which is really useful.

\Helen Tupper: Yeah, really, really useful.

Sarah Ellis: So, we've got a useful free resource for you here, which is 21 Coach-Yourself Questions, so there'll be a link to that in the show notes.  And if you would like to dive a bit deeper, we do have a book called, You Coach You.  We did debate whether it feels a bit salesy to mention it, but we were like, "We have written a book on this topic".  So, we decided it was okay to mention that as well.

Helen Tupper: So, that is the end of today's skill.  And tomorrow, we're going to be back talking about influencing.  So, thanks so much for listening and bye for now.