[00:01] Katie: Welcome to The Focus B show, where Katie Stoddart, high performance coach, interviews experts around the world in performance and mindfulness. Now here's your host. Katie.

[00:32] Katie: Welcome to another episode of The Focus Be Show. Today I'm here with Virginia Scrobish. Virginia is a consultant and executive coach, a bit like me, and she is also the author of The Archer's Bow. Thank you so much for joining the show, Virginia.

[00:50] Virginia: Thank you for having me here.

[00:52] Katie: It's a real pleasure and an honor. And I'm also reading your book at the moment and really enjoying it. And there's a few points that I'd like us to cover today because I think they're very insightful and can help a lot of people also.

[01:06] Virginia: Fine.

[01:07] Katie: The first point I'd like to dive into is one of the paradigms you mentioned in terms of success and failure. And you also explained that it's important to redefine success and failure. Could you tell us a bit more about this?

[01:22] Virginia: Yeah, this is actually huge and it's really interesting because the book is titled The Archer's Bow. And then the subtitle, which is very important, is that it's a book that will forever change the way you think about parenting. And this has a lot to do with the success and the failure part because there are a lot of books about how to raise your kids, where the title is how to Raise Your Kids for Success. And nobody ever actually says, what is success? People don't actually question that. And because in our coach training, we learn to question a lot of things, a lot of the things that people take for granted because we may have a different understanding of the same term. So I started to delve into the idea of success. And in truth, there's a place somewhere in the book where I define it a little bit as what our founding fathers in the US anyway considered it, which was the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And this is success for me. Now, this is important because a lot of times we think success is getting a good job, making money, being popular or being an influencer nowadays, I guess that would be one. And honestly, it can be a sign of success. The thing is, it should be success in the eyes of the person who achieves it. And very often we achieve success based on what we're told it is. And we're told that by people in our lives, particularly when we're very young, we're told to aim for all of these things. And if as children our dream is something else, very often it gets discounted. So that's one thing. The thing about success is really big because what I suggest is that we allow our children to define success by their own, using their own benchmark, let's say. And that takes a while for them to develop and it may shift too. So it's a learning process and failure is another funny one because we all know, everybody knows you're supposed to be able to fail. That's part of learning. Nobody in their life practically actually accepts failure. They say if at first you know that expression, if at first you don't succeed, then try and try again. Well, we try once we fail and we just throw in the towel and that's it. That happens a lot. Or even the thought of failure, you know, that what they call that, paralysis and analysis. Paralysis. Often that's the fear of failure before we even begin. So what I suggest is that even if we have these kind of beliefs, let's say, around success and failure, we can allow our children to grow up with a different way of looking at them so they can see failure as just one more learning, which is generally what children do. I mean, when kids play and they compete with each other and somebody loses and somebody wins, and then they just go back and do it again. But it's part of the process and we just dramatize it because as parents and then as adults in general, because we don't want our children to be disappointed or maybe we don't want to be disappointed. So the thing with failure is that if you are actually willing to fail, you will go much farther than if you're not willing to fail. So if people are not willing, if they're afraid to fail, they're going to stay in that straight little narrow path that's very safe and nothing new really happens there. People who are creative and really get things going are people who are willing to fail. And usually we don't see the whole process of failure. We see that success at the end and so it makes it harder to understand. So that's a little bit about success and failure. And I should say that one of the reasons why this is a big deal is that as a coach and I work with people who are facing their own obstacles and a lot of those obstacles are self created based on their own limiting beliefs. Well, you know this because you're a coach as well. And a lot of it comes from their belief about failure and what that means and what's expected of them. Expectations is a really big deal. So anyway, I don't know if I've answered your question correctly. Let me just take a little yes, you did.

[06:23] Katie: I really like the way you shared the importance of how we look at success and how we look at failure and how we're told though failure is a great part of learning, but that it's sometimes hard to actually put this really in practice. And also, I'd like to say, for the listeners who don't know, virginia's book is on parenting. But I find that a lot of the lessons that Virginia shares can be applied to either entrepreneurship or leadership if you're leading teams. I also found there was a lot of analogies in terms of leadership, like not micromanaging, helping them have the potential, raise the potential from within. And also, obviously, it could be applied to parenting, which is the subject of the book. I also find it very interesting that this view on failure, I wonder, when is it that we become so upset by failure? Because I remember hearing once that a child learns to walk by falling X amount of times, a lot of times, and that doesn't stop a child from learning to walk. And so I'm wondering what happens to us in our psyche first, to suddenly become so resistant to failure that, as you said, even just the fear of it can block us. That's quite astounding.

[07:43] Virginia: Yeah, I've given all of these things a lot of thought. And I think one of the things I talk about in the book, and this is a little bit where I'm going to say this comes from is who we are versus what we do. And the view of us view of ourselves or the view that we have of ourselves or that we acquire in childhood comes very often from the way parents reward us for the good things we do. And when we don't do things well, I mean, when children don't do things well, they say you're bad, or whatever they say. But it makes it about children understand that. It's about who they are, like they're not good. I mean, a child can do something wrong. I mean, get something wrong or break something or do something silly or stupid as they will. And we as parents can say, no, you can't do that. That's a bad thing to do. And often I would say, I would always add, I love you, but you cannot do this. You're instilling the idea of as a child, you're okay. As a person, you're okay. So what happens is that just kind of fast forward to when we're adults. What happens is when we associate who we are with what we do, which is that what we've learned. That means that the way we perform. You get good grades, good boy, good girl. You didn't get good grades. What's wrong with you? We associate who we are with our performance. And so that carries over into adulthood. And so who's going to want to try to fail? I mean, you tell me. For me, many cases it's as simple as that. And failing is actually it becomes a big idea, a big deal in our minds. But I would say a lot of it comes from that. So I don't know if you have any more questions on that. I mean, to me that's a huge thing. It's also about how do you give children self confidence. And don't forget, you and I coach adults, but those adults were once children. And many of the fears, the obstacles that they perceive in what they're doing come from their own beliefs that they acquired in childhood and that's why I talk about that. Does that help?

[10:14] Katie: Yes, it is. Interesting, at the end of every question you're sort of wondering if there was the right answer. There's never a sort of right answer. I'm just looking at your perspective on these things and what you mean when you share them in the book. I feel that it's such an interesting point why we become so resistant to failure. And I was definitely reflecting on this while I was reading your book because I have like the hyperachiever syndrome. So my self worth is linked to my performance. I've worked on this. I don't feel as strongly I still work in high performance, but partly the reason I do this is because I want to help people have sustained high performance in their life and their business, but without being a hyperachiever I e without burning out overworking and feeling that their self worth is only linked to their performance. This is why I like to ally both high performance and mindfulness in this podcast. I talk about both topics because I feel they're related. So I always question myself in terms of am I working like at a high performance environment or self, but without somehow depending on it? It's a strange sort of balance. But I'm trying to say is through understanding failure and success, it can help us to manage our performance in a way that is balanced and sustainable in the long run, if that makes sense.

[11:42] Virginia: That's absolutely wonderful what you're saying. I think I sometimes liken it to perfectionism. I call it like the wolf in sheep's clothing because it feels like something we should strive for. Perfection sounds really good. I mean, if doing something well is good, doing it perfect is even better, right? And what it does is it takes us down this path of frustration very often. Always trying to be better, always trying to be perfect, right? And what I've discovered in people who are like this very often is that they already have really strong values and principles around doing things well, doing things well, doing a good job. It's just kind of an innate value for these people. And the whole idea around perfection is just sort of an additional thing that they've kind of acquired. And if you get rid of the perfection and I actually ask my clients to experiment, I'll just say, listen, just take a couple of weeks to try it out and just don't be perfect. Just do things well enough. And you discover that it's impossible for you to do things badly because it's not who you are. And you discover people, it's like yourself. I'm absolutely sure that you have a value system that is about doing things well. I mean, just the way you set up the podcast, just the way you do this, it's very clear to me. Right? So what you do is you tease out or you help people realize there's that difference. And it's a little bit also like when you consider people who are swimmers, if you're a professional swimmer, to get that hundreds of a second off your time, you got to work so hard. So hard, so hard. Is that really efficient for most people in their lives when you can do a great job without striving to death? You know what I'm saying?

[13:40] Katie: I totally agree with you. And this is actually generally my philosophy. I do things well enough. I'm actually not a perfectionist, which I'm actually super proud of because it means I try a lot of things and I either improve as it goes along like I did with the podcast. I didn't have a webcam, I didn't have a microphone. The first episodes were still good, but just the equipment wasn't as good. And I like experimenting and improving as I go along because I like to do things well. But what I do feel is that the people I know who are perfectionists, it gets them blocked. And I'm extremely proactive, slightly impatient. I work on the impatience part, but I would hate to be blocked. And this is why I don't have this perfectionistic trait, because it blocks people and I see it and I see it my clients and friends, and that's not my character. I like to do things, so I've worked on doing it well and I've worked on my impatience because the impatience can lead to too rash results too quickly, because you want to get it done. So it's almost the opposite. But obviously I had to work on that over a lot of years.

[14:47] Virginia: That's terrific. Yeah, exactly. I like not having the judgment around it because there's usually a lot of self judgment around all of that. So that's another whole that would be.

[14:58] Katie: A whole other conversation. Yes, the judgment has been there in terms of it's not good enough. Because I think when you do aim to do things well, even if you're not perfectionist, it's finding that barrier. When do you self validate yourself that it is good and you accept the fact that you're not aiming for perfection and you accept to settle at something that's good? Because I have the hyperachiever thing. So it's like a hyperachiever in terms of recognition, self recognition and wanting all this, I don't know, reward status. I don't know what it is. But I feel the French educational system, if I can mention this here on my podcast, I don't think it helps because I don't know how many other educational systems are like this, but in France it is all about your grades from the age you're about six. My parents weren't that big on grades, which is probably why I managed to not be super perfectionist. But the school is and your friends are, and the teachers are. And I remember I wrote a diary when I was younger. Every single day I'd write, I had this or that exam, I had this or that grade, and that would define my mood. This is terrible.

[16:08] Virginia: Yeah, I absolutely get what you're saying. Congratulations. But I will add one thing that when I work with clients who are kind of perfectionists, what they discover very interestingly is that when they stop trying to be perfectionist and they just try to do things well, they actually come out better. Right. So I'm sure it sounds as though without being a super perfectionist yourself, it sounds as though you've been able to experience some of that and just allowing yourself to learn. And that's cool. Yes.

[16:41] Katie: And it's nice because this is actually a nice transition to the other topic I wanted to mention, because I just said the part how my grades influence the way I felt. And this is actually the second topic I wanted us to discuss, which is around the other paradigm, the force paradigm you write about in your book in terms of we can choose the way we feel. And I feel this is something I only understood when I started my coaching journey and personal development journey, and with authors such as Viktor Frankl, the greatest freedom we have is to choose the way we respond to external events. And until then, it had never crossed my mind that this was a thing or possibility. I'm wondering, why is it that people don't know this? Why is it that this is a universal wisdom that how we choose to respond to external events or circumstances is our own choice, and we can choose to change that? Why is it that everyone doesn't know this?

[17:40] Virginia: I would say that in our society as a whole, there's a lot of victimism. I think it's just and it's sort of easier to be a victim than to have to actually say, I'm responsible for the way I'm going to feel, or something like that. I'll get into how you can actually change that. I can talk about that in a moment. And if you look at in society, I like to use the example of songs in the top of the chart. Oh, you don't love me anymore, I can't survive, I can't live, I can't live without you and whatever, I won't sing. I'll spare you that. But it's kind of a societal thing, and in our relationships, in partnerships or couples, for example, too, very often we expect the other person to do certain things, and then we feel bad when they don't. And it's really about thinking, why is it the other person's fault? It's not their responsibility. It's not somebody else's responsibility to make us feel good. Although they can't I mean, if they're really awful people, they can have a role in that. But that's a little bit different. I think that one of the things that anyway, certainly with my own son, one of the things I taught him when he was young was that when he was upset about something, to learn to change that. And this is kind of for me, the secret is in changing the way we feel is seeing the learning component. Because when you feel bad and some emotions will always be spontaneous, some things will just make you feel bad or you do something stupid. Or at least when I do something stupid, maybe you don't, but I do. And I feel bad when I first do something that I made a big mistake, less so now. I'm sort of getting a little bit past that, but it happens to us all. And so what I discovered was that first I would and this is kind of a trick that I talk about it in the book too, but I would allow myself a little bit of time to feel bad, 1015 minutes, say, okay, I'm just going to feel really bad the way I do. And then try to then sort of slide a door across that and think about, okay, what can I learn from this for the next time? And in the beginning, it was really a clear two step process, how I'm feeling bad, then really kind of sliding that door across, not letting those other ideas in, and thinking, focusing on what I can do differently and how I can learn from that. And then eventually it becomes automatic. And then you don't even have to go to the I feel really bad place. So the thing about that is that the learning component enables us to feel as though we're somehow in control when things happen to us and we feel like a victim, or we feel bad about, you know, and there are other there are other feelings as well. There are feelings of jealousy. There are feelings of envy, which are, if you actually feel good enough about yourself, you don't need to envy someone else because you know that you're doing your own thing and they're doing their thing, and you're just different, right? But in the case of feeling bad about something, feeling bad is kind of, okay, something happened to us. We feel bad. And then getting the learning out of it means that in a way, you're kind of in control. It's no longer being a victim. And that's something that people are not taught to do. I think it would be really great if in schools they would teach this, and then instead of blaming so and so for what they did or how they made me feel, it's more mature and more healthy. I would say approach. I don't know if I've answered that. There's lots of things we could say about that.

[21:57] Katie: Yes, I love that. I would love it to be taught in schools. I often feel there's a whole part and whole aspect around personal development, emotional intelligence, understanding your emotions. I mean, how great would that be when you're eight or ten or twelve to actually understand why you feel sadness? I was doing this, I think it was in an NLP course or coaching course, I can't remember. And we went through the six basic emotions and the teacher mentioned the trainer, she mentioned that sadness is when you lose something. And I never knew that. I was in my late twenty s and I didn't know that sadness was loss. And it can be loss of hope, it can be loss of a person, it can be loss of a sin, but it's always loss and happiness is always gain. And I said, but how is a sunset making you feel happy? How is that gain? And she said no, but it's a gain of that moment, it's a gain of that vision. It's a gain. And just understanding that is something that really helps me. Because when I feel sad or when I feel happy, I think okay, what did I lose? Oh, I lost this. Okay, what will help me transit? Because sometimes it's loss of hope. You had a hope that this situation would work out or this person would be your client or whatever it is, and then it doesn't work out and then you feel sadness and then understanding it's a lot. So this would be one of the numerous topics that would be great to be taught in school but how we feel and the circumstances and not thinking as a victim, that would be really powerful. And I love the explanation you gave in terms of what did I learn from this? I generally do this with big stuff. So if I feel really upset about something or really irritated, then I look okay, what did I learn here? But it's true that it can work even for small daily things. Generally the way I PROCEED is I pause if I think to do this. I pause and I breathe and I wait for it to go. That's generally why, because I realize that if I continue my day with that emotion, it builds up. So I try and catch it earlier. So if I contrast it to the way you do it, where you wait, you let yourself sort of wallow in a 1015 minutes. I think in my case I'm too afraid it'll gain momentum and then it's harder for me to go out.

[24:16] Virginia: You would set an alarm.

[24:17] Katie: I said 15 minutes to feel annoyed about this. Sometimes I just bent.

[24:23] Virginia: But it's good what you're saying as well. And the thing is basically it's just not to sort of gloss it over as though it doesn't exist because it is a feeling and it's important to us. So that's why it's important to give it space and then later on you learn you don't really need to give it any space before you move to the next thing. But yeah, for sure. I really like what you're saying. Well, they're different approaches. Certainly that one's, one that worked for me, I taught it to my son and he actually became better than I was very quickly because you know how kids, they learn things very quickly anyway? Yeah, just taking things in their stride and give them a much greater stability instead of things that happen to us, knocking us off course. Anyway, that's enough for my view on that.

[25:15] Katie: No, I think this is great. And I'm also happy that listeners now have like two options. You can follow Virginia's option and follow a bit in it for 1015 minutes and then take the learning and move on and change how you feel. Or my approach of stopping it as soon as you notice and breathing. Accepting is a huge part. Letting go and then moving forward. Something else I do, I just realized sometimes I try and look at the trigger so I see what happened. In which way? How did that make me feel? Why did that make me feel this way? Just so I get to understand myself a bit better. And then I try not to judge because I think this is very common. If something happened and we feel sad or annoyed, we might think afterwards, like, why did I get annoyed about this? Or this was not worth getting annoyed. And then we sort of are even more frustrated with ourselves for having had an emotion. And I think that just goes against the whole acceptance of emotion and it's not a healthy approach.

[26:15] Virginia: Yeah, it's really what you're saying, it's about learning something from it. I mean, however you do it, in the end, you say you also explore maybe the trigger, but the idea is to learn and then to be able to move on. And we're not our emotions. Our emotions are something that comes up, but it's not who we are. Emotions change even around the similar or the same scenario. At different times in our life, we could see a single same scenario and have different emotions around it. So emotions come and go and it's really important to acknowledge that. So anyway, yes, definitely.

[26:54] Katie: That was another powerful learning, understanding that we're not our thoughts and we're not our emotions. That takes quite some practice to fully, fully accept this, acknowledge it and to see the benefits of not functioning like that. I feel I feel we've touched on a lot of different topics, but the two main ones, which I did want to cover in terms of failure and success and how we manage our emotions or how we're not in a victim attitude. So this is what happens when we have two coaches together. For the listeners, these are the sort of things we talk about. If ever you were curious what happens behind the room before we finish, would you like to share with us what inspired you to write your book? Because I think it's fantastic book and it can definitely be applied to parenting and leadership. So if you could just tell us what inspired you to write this book.

[27:44] Virginia: It's funny because it started out as seeing how kind of self confident, never arrogant, but how self confident my son was. He always did his own thing. He never felt he had to do what other kids were doing. Other kids were wearing those grunge. What was it? I don't know what it was at the time. They were all with the chain sometimes and this and that. And he would just go in with his tracksuit. And he was fine. And actually, because he was really fine with the way he was, he was respected by the other kids in his class. And I always thought, Where does this come from? And I started exploring because I have to confess that when I raised him, it was really kind of an experiment. And I say an experiment without a map, because I was just trusting that he had within him what he needed to know, what his dreams were, where he wanted to go with his life eventually. And of course, I set the framework for it, which was respect, some discipline. You always have to respect other people and nature and things like this. And so that was kind of where it started. And I started thinking, well, maybe some of the things that I do with my son would be helpful for other people to know about. And then I realized through the coaching, because my son was 19 before I became a coach, so it wasn't as though I was a coach and applying all these things to my son. I was kind of just finding my way. And then I realized that my coaching clients were coming with these obstacles. And I'm talking about people and really sometimes C suite people who are high level professionals. They're human beings. They were kids once. And some of the beliefs that they walk around with are actually from them. And you see you're coaching them to overcome certain obstacles that aren't inherent to the actual challenges they're facing at work. It's more about how they feel about it or their belief in their ability to take that on or what they think should happen, or how they feel they should manage their team. There's a million things that it could be. And so I started connecting the dots and realizing that a lot of the issues that we have as adults really come from I mean, this is not a news flash. I mean, we all know that what we the issues we have as adults come from the way we're raised as children. But I decided to really explore that much further. And I thought, well, okay, so even if we are as professionals or as parents, we have our own issues or our own limiting beliefs we've grown up with, it doesn't mean that we have to necessarily hand that down to our kids. What if we could just raise our children to be themselves without our limiting beliefs? So we give them our love, we give them our support. We give them an interest in certain things that maybe otherwise they wouldn't know about. And then we teach them about caring for their health and eating well and these things, but that who they're going to be is really kind of their thing. And that's what the book talks about. Okay, let me just say one last thing. As parents, we often think that we have to share our experience with our kids because that's our role. Our role as parents is to give them the benefit of our experience. And I say no. I say most of our experience is just the result of the way we see reality. And what we've experienced has also been colored by our own limiting beliefs. And so we can just end up passing that on because we tell our kids, okay, don't do that, it's not going to work for you. Or do that. That'll be better. And it's based on our experiences. We don't know how they're going to do it. So when we give our kids the opportunity to strike out or swing out and give it their best shot and try to do it their own way, apart from gaining experience themselves, maybe they'll do it something that we were unable to do. We don't know. And so that's why I kind of turn the parenting paradigms a little bit on their head in some ways. And children who are allowed to want their own dreams or believe in themselves without their parents saying, no, don't do that, that's no good, I mean, it's not worth it, and do that instead. Which is something that actually creates a lot of insecurities in children because we all have our own GPS, which is kind of telling us, go this way, and when you've got somebody telling you, no, don't do that, that's the way to go. Children get confused and this persists until adulthood. So adults, and maybe I'm coaching somebody's in their forty s and they're saying, well, life has no meaning for me, so what is it that I'm supposed to be? What can I do now for the rest of my life that will give it meaning? And they've just followed basically other people's precepts and their experiences. So I know our time is up. I could talk forever about this. This is really important. But that's kind of how the idea came around for the book.

[32:58] Katie: Wonderful. Thank you for sharing this and everything you just said in terms of us sharing our own experience, I literally feel that it is valid also in friendship, in relationships, in work. Because a lot of the times you might have a friend who wants to suddenly change career or wants to do this or has this great idea or project and it's the same. We put our own limiting beliefs. And one of the things I said to one of my clients at one point was they were going through a big transition. I said, Be very mindful who you share this with because there are people who won't support the change because they don't see that they could make that change. So I feel that everything you said in terms of sharing our own experience and beliefs, is something to be careful with. You can always share to inspire people, but it's important not to place that belief. And I love the fact that you finished on the importance of dreaming and allowing children to follow their dreams or listen to their dreams, at least, but also ourselves, because that was another really interesting point in your book and your sentence, our dreams nurture or dreaming nurtures our soul, which I thought was really beautiful. So I think it's a wonderful place to finish the podcast. Thank you very much.

[34:14] Virginia: I appreciate that.

[34:15] Katie: I'll put in the show notes the link to your book. And where else can people find you?

[34:22] Virginia: Well, I mean, they can find me on obviously Find me or the book. I'm on LinkedIn. That's easiest. And I have my author page, which is not up yet because everything has gotten delayed. Maybe it'll be up by the time you get this out. And basically the book is on Amazon and it'll also be available in bookstores if you order it using the IFBN number, which is also on the Amazon page. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to people reading it and also sharing the thoughts. In fact, somebody I know in the UK is planning to with some parents in her daughter's class, are planning to have a book club kind of discussion around it for parents. And I thought that was a brilliant idea because regardless of what you think, if you can have a conversation around it, you can always learn more. Everybody learns more out of the experience. So I thought that was a great idea, and I hope there'll be more of those.

[35:27] Katie: Definitely. I think that's a wonderful idea. Thank you so much for joining the podcast. And thank you so much for all your insights into all these different topics. Thank you.

[35:35] Virginia: Thank you for having me.

[35:37] Katie: Thank you for listening to the Focus B show. We would love to hear your feedback. Let us know in a review how this episode inspired you. Keep buzzing.