Episode 6: Democratising the Coaching Experience for Young Professionals

Executive coaching has historically been linked with senior business leaders and high-potential employees who are being fast-tracked through the management ranks of organisations. However, recent events have created a new dialogue between employees and employers. 

Young professionals are entering the workplace with a different set of expectations as to what their working identity means to them. As Deloitte points out ‘they are more likely to hold true to their ideals and demand accountability’ and will lean into their values when it comes to making their career decisions. 

With priorities changing for employees and employers alike, this podcast episode explores some of the reasons why it is good business practice to democratise coaching and give young professionals access to coaching far earlier in their careers. We also look at the value created by equipping young talent with coaching skills and why a coaching approach is central to building key, transferable skills which are crucially needed in the workplace. 

Enjoy!

You can link with the podcast participants here:

Gina Lodge, CEO, The Academy of Executive Coaching (AoEC)

Chloe Garland, Founder, Quarter-Life

Charlie Stainforth, Founder and CEO, Circl 

Transcript

Gina 0:04

Welcome and thank you for joining us for the latest coaching conversations with the AoEC podcast. My name is Gina Lodge, and I'm the CEO at the AoEC. In this episode, we'll be exploring the critical need to democratise coaching for young people. And today we're joined by Chloe Garland, founder of Quarter Life, and Charlie Stainforth, co-founder of Circl. Chloe graduated with a degree in philosophy, but not knowing what was next for her, she employed the services of a coach who helped her discover what truly motivates her in life. From that experience, Chloe said that the penny dropped for her, and she wondered why other young professionals were not given this opportunity in education. That led her trying to become a coach and to set up Quarter Life that helps those in their 20s to lead more fulfilling lives and careers. Charlie started his career working with young adults from underrepresented groups and quickly learned that there were many aspects blocking their access to professional careers, including communication, leadership, and people skills. Recognising that teachers have little time to teach young people about the importance of people skills, Charlie has gone on to establish Circl. At Circl, he and fellow co-founder Adrian Blair are on a mission to build a world where anyone can learn to lead. And they believe the way to get there is through real-world coaching experience. So Charlie and Chloe, to start off with the COVID-19 pandemic, the jobs market has been very difficult and uncertain for young people since the start of the pandemic. So much so that those in the under-25 demographic had acquired the tag Generation COVID because they are the age group most likely to have faced cuts to their earnings, education, and employment prospects. What has been your personal experience of the difficulties young people have faced during the last couple of years? Charlie, should we start with you?

Charlie 2:04

Yeah, really good question, Gina. So I think it would probably be helpful for me to explain a little bit about myself and how Circl engages with young people, and then I can kind of tell you about the impacts that that's had, COVID has had on them, or that at least that we've seen from the demographic that we work with. So to kind of give you context, essentially Circl is a leadership development programme that focuses on training managers in companies and underrepresented young people aged between 18 and 24 from outside those companies, how to be more inclusive leaders using coaching skills. And the course that they go through is all about learning how to coach each other and get coached. So they get both sides of that. And that's kind of really you know to the topic democratising coaching and building equality between people who may be in work and people who are before work, so underrepresented young people. And we focus on underrepresented, primarily looking at young people from low socioeconomic backgrounds across the whole of the UK, Europe, North America, even South Africa, and other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. And normally the way we determine that is whether they have access to bursary or whether they would qualify for a bursary to get into further or higher education. So it kind of gives you a sense of the demographic that we support in terms of 18 to 24 year olds. And the thing that COVID really did in terms of just our day-to-day conversations with our cohorts of future leaders, we call them, was that most of them are providing or or working to provide for their family, part-time jobs, or just to put themselves through education. And the majority of the work that they did, as you can imagine, is in retail or hospitality. So in shops, COVID shut down all the shops, or in restaurants and bars, COVID shut down all the restaurants and bars. So that was it. That actually we saw, you know, we have hundreds and hundreds of applications from young people to do the Circl programme, but we saw a spike during COVID, even more so because they weren't even able to work in the normal jobs they were doing. So they're looking for any other opportunity to improve themselves and upskill themselves. And so that's how it came across for for us, really.

Gina 3:58

Thank you. It's had quite an impact on as you say different sectors, highlighting the different sectors that have been worst affected. Chloe, how has COVID impacted the work you do?

Chloe 4:08

Yeah, so again, it would be helpful to talk a little bit about what young professionals means in terms of how I work with them. So I work with generally young people between the ages of 20 and 35 who are in the workplace already. And my company's called Quarter Life, which is all about the idea of a quarterlife crisis when you get to a point in your career and you're really struggling with engagement and not knowing which way you want to turn. And when you're in your 20s, we have this, I call it almost like the holy trifector of stress. One is that we've got the stress of wanting to buy a home, we've got all this pressure that you want to buy a home by 30, to find the love of your life is the second one. And the third one is to find your career, what you want to do for the rest of your life and excel in it. And when it came to COVID, it made those pressures even more acute because suddenly you're not meeting anybody. Suddenly you are stuck in your job or you're on furlough, so you don't even have the opportunity to prove yourself. And it was incredibly challenging because all of those symptoms of feeding that crisis were just ameliorated, made, made incredibly intense. So stuff that we all know about is obviously people not being able to find jobs, there being a lack of the job market, but I think also the sort of psychological pressure of that on people and on what people thought that they should be doing at that age massively increased. However, having said that, I think for a lot of people, it forced their hand to make them start thinking about what they really want in their life, because often it's very difficult to make big changes in your career, in your lifestyle, if you're sort of quite comfortable. And what I've noticed in the one one-to-one coaching that I'm doing and training sessions that I've been doing in companies is that for some people, it forced their hands to make big changes that has impacted them positively as well. It was quite interesting because they've almost had to start thinking about what are their values, what's actually really, really important to them and aligning their lives to do that. Those are the fortunate, you know, those who have been fortunate to have experiencing some positive out of such a difficult two years.

Gina 6:12

Gosh, it does bring it home, doesn't it, when you start to look at what's actually happened. And I think the things I've heard also are about the changes in a workplace generally. So we went from all having to work from home. Now, some young people seem to really like that and like the flexibility it gives. But also I've been hearing that people are now starting to go back to offices in London or wherever. And mostly it's younger people that are going back first because they also want that human connection. And that's maybe the part of your life when you want to do that and rather than have a space. So just love both of your opinions on what have you heard about during the pandemic, people actually, young people, wanting to either do they feel happy working from home, or do you think they feel happier going and connecting and working in a building, not necessarily an office, you know, restaurant or wherever together?

Charlie 7:11

Yeah, it really depends on what kind of home they've got, right? If you are sharing with lots of other people and you don't have a space that you can, except for your bedroom where you can do Zoom calls and stuff, it's obviously really difficult. But then people who've got space, then maybe that's their preference is to be able to stay at home. But I don't know. I'd be curious to hear, Chloe, like you've obviously got a big range of clients. Where are most of them if they're between 20 and 35 when you're doing those sessions? Are they face-to-face or are they virtual? And where is everyone?

Chloe 7:40

Almost all of my sessions are now virtual. And I think, Charlie, that's exactly what I would have said as well, is that for the majority of young people, especially if they're living in a big city like London, their bedroom is their office and they're spending 24 hours a day in their rooms, which is so, so challenging. But I don't think I can have a universal answer to whether or not people have preferred working from home, to prefer going in into their workplace, because everybody's different and it kind of depends where you are in terms of introversion and extroversion. I think everybody can somewhat agree though that generally people are looking for flexibility. So I think that's the same with young people. So I couldn't say that there's a general, oh, I they prefer it working from home or going into the office. I think the flexibility, though, that it's given them also gives them autonomy. And that's something that I hear when I work, people talk a lot about values and a lot about what motivates them. And the flexibility is just so, so powerful because suddenly they have more ownership over their work. And there's that sort of Daniel Pink theory of motivation, which is what fundamentally motivates people. I think it's purpose, autonomy, and mastery. And I think the autonomy part has really improved over COVID because suddenly it's like, oh, actually, it's a Friday night, I want to work from home today. So I think that's been really powerful.

Charlie 8:59

When it comes to coaching as well, I was just going to say, in terms of people's access to coaches and being coached, getting used to a virtual environment has you know enabled that so much more, I think. Traditionally, most executive coaches, for example, you know, h Wisdom 8, Katherine Tulpa, who runs the association for coaching. When I first met her, she was like, I do all of my coaching face to face, or a lot of it, I go to their offices that's really valuable. And that's quite often because certain execs aren't necessarily used to or weren't used to doing everything through video calls, whereas COVID's kind of forced people to get onto video conferencing. It's really interesting. I think that's in terms of democratising as a first step. So obviously, again, we go back to the same challenge as actually not everyone has access to a smartphone, but still being able to connect with people and realise that coaching is just as valuable, sometimes even more valuable, and I'm sure Chloe you'll say this, with the options to be virtual and to not have to travel somewhere or to kind of have all the time spent either side of the coaching. And and also there's a certain safety zone, there's a certain distance with the virtual format that enables you to probably go into, once you're used to it, go into the coachee zone a bit more. And we do, you know, we do this in the Circl programme. We operate in about 20 different countries now because it's virtual, whereas before we had a few. We had a few programmes that were virtual, but we do quite a lot face-to-face. And a lot of the more traditional kind of corporate businesses were like, oh, we want to do face-to-face stuff. Whereas the kind of tech giants that we were working with, they're all like, oh yeah, virtual's fine, we've been doing this for ages. So it's kind of just got everyone on the same page, and that's got to be a plus for access.

Gina 10:33

Yes. It's interesting to hear you say that because so there is, as you're saying, a whole range of possibilities. It has given another option. You know, it doesn't sound as if there's any wrong or right, it's just there is another option and it can be put into the mix. I love the point also about the younger generation now wanting more flexibility and not wanting to follow, say, potentially an outdated business model of nine to five or nine to ten or whatever, how you know sort of crazy how sometimes people work. So that could be interesting to see if there's a change that comes out of this gradually. So kind of look now at a bit of a sort of a skills gap between education and work. So the CIM Chartered Management Institute founding its research that was published in late 2021. 80% of employers believe that current graduates do not arrive fully equipped with the skills that need to be work-ready to this basic thing of the education that isn't preparing people and young people for work. It also listed the most critical skills needed in the workplace as teamworking, critical thinking, and problem solving and communication. Similarly, the Careers and Enterprise Company has been releasing regular insights into student career readiness. And they reported in March 2022, this year this month, that there has been an improvement in young people getting the skills they needed to start work, which is data telling us that students rated their skills most strongly in the areas of teamwork, staying positive and listening. However, the areas they lack confidence in is in problem solving and leadership. So that's I mean, it's quite a lot to sort of digest straight off, but it's a very interesting point in there that we've been dissect. So for both of you, which soft or employability skills have you seen lacking? And how is coaching helping to just develop the skills gap that those young professionals may have?

Chloe 12:32

It's sort of interesting because I mean, as a coach, we're not involved with somebody's day-to-day if you're working as an executive coach. So there is a limit to, because we're seeing them through such a narrow aperture, there is a limit to what to what we can see. But there's one thing that I've noticed from the side of thinking about young professionals when they're already employed. I mean, just seems interesting to hear what Charlie says on the other side. And we often focus again on what is lacking with young people, and there is so much that they have that we don't even realise because they're just so innovative and so aware and so self-aware. But the thing that I've noticed that come up again and again is about being proactive and being resourceful. I'm talking a lot recently about the idea of being an entrepreneur, so being entrepreneurial, but within the confines and it within the sort of protective shell of being an employee. And one thing that I have noticed, unfortunately, it does kind of feed into a bit of a narrative and a stereotype around young people, is that as a young professional, there's somewhat of an expectation mindset of this is what I expect from my work and it needs to kind of happen to me rather than making it happen. And I suppose that's coming out of school and university where everything is somewhat spoon-fed to you. And so something that I often find is lacking is the idea of a kind of circle of influence and what you can control. And I think young people absolutely underestimate how much of their career is in their control and how much that they can do within their jobs. And so you kind of pick apart that and it's very easy to be like, oh, you know, they expect the world. But actually, I think it comes down to confidence. So the sort of soft skill and the confidence of, and especially if you're from a low-income or low socioeconomic background, you're not going to go into your first job and suddenly think that you should be in every room. And that is the difference between, you know, if somebody's been privately educated, they think that they deserve to be in every room that they're in because they've never been told anything different. So it's I think it's quite easy to say, oh, you know, these young people, they think that everything needs to be handed to them. But I tend to think it's like, well, actually, a lot of young people don't have the confidence because they've never been told what they can do. And this is sort of bringing back to coaching. And this is why coaching is so powerful because at a most fundamental level, that's what coaching does, is it increases your circle of influence. I like the idea of like that sort of iceberg where you've got the tip of the iceberg, and then you can see the big bit underneath. And the tip is what people think that they can do, and then the underneath is what they actually can do. And I think coaching is shining a light on what is possible. So that's what I think has been lacking is that sort of proactivity and resourcefulness and an entrepreneurial spirit of taking agency and taking control of their careers.

Charlie 15:08

I love that. I completely, completely agree with you as well. Like there's such a young people generally, young professionals or young people before they're professionals are just so underestimated. And they're also measured against the benchmark that the people who are in power or who are older most often had when they were young people. You know, and the world that they had when they were at that stage, rather than actually what the stage is now. So I think as well, it's so common to have kind of aspersions cast onto young people in terms of their lacking these skills. But completely, as Chloe said, so often with the most capable, it's actually the impostor syndrome, the lack of confidence that prevents them from going, you know what, I can do this. Actually, I have a huge amount to add. And actually, my perspective is now so valuable that these organisations and these professionals will get a huge amount from what I have to say or from my ideas. And coaching really brings that out. So if they are being coached, you know, the whole point is to enable them to do their best thinking and to explore what is underneath the surface of the water. They know the 50 iceberg, but like they don't realise how massive the whole iceberg is, like their whole capacity, their whole knowledge. And when you start to give someone space, and you start to give someone the time to be able to reflect and come up with solutions to their own challenges and to get towards their own goals without having to wait for to be told what to do by someone else who knows better than you. Suddenly they go, wow, actually I can achieve a huge amount. And we see it, there are so many young entrepreneurs now who are kind of becoming entrepreneurs through you know mechanisms and means that and really successful entrepreneurs that didn't even exist five, ten, fifteen years ago. Yeah, if you think about the influences of the world, for example. I completely agree, it's all around confidence. And I would just add the coaching that you can do to poor people, so you can be the coach to the coachee who is a young person, young professional, or someone who's not yet a professional. Is really helpful for confidence. But I think the thing that we've discovered at Circl that is even in many ways greater or a really powerful combination is teaching someone how to coach someone else. Because coaching so often is seen as just a formal one-to-one, exact coaching, kind of sit down, and I'm going to contract with you, and I'm going to say that we've got this much time and then we're going to go into coaching. Whereas actually, coaching in and of itself, and I've said this to you before, Gina, I think John Whitmore called it emotional intelligence in action. And it's just being emotionally intelligent and drawing things out of people with powerful questions and really good, attentive, active listening and paraphrasing to be able to help them think. And so at Circl, what we do is treat those young people, and obviously in Circl's instance, these young people are from underrepresented groups, so already they potentially lack confidence because they don't see role models in professional spaces. And we put them as equals with professionals in companies like McKinsey and Google, some of the most well-renowned companies in the world, and we say, you are equals. And in fact, young people, future leaders, you're going to coach this McKinsey manager first. And they go, Oh no way, I could never do that. And then we obviously train them, give them good training, you know, which is the basis of coaching. They go and do it, and they're like, Oh my word, I can't believe I helped this person who's managed to get into McKinsey just through this technique that I've learned, which is all about being super curious and authentic and enabling them to think and get to a solution, and then being thanked by that person who's a professional and sometimes even a CEO in a company, and go, wow, you really helped me then. That in itself is the biggest confidence booster and suddenly makes anyone really sort of go, you know what, I do think I could be a leader. I think I could genuinely help people to do their best thinking and get to the solutions themselves. I think that is the purpose of this conversation is about democratising coaching as in it's as if it's like a passive thing that happens to someone. But actually, I think it's democratising coaching in terms of understanding of how to coach people and use coaching skills and also receive coaching from other people and create cultures of coaching. And that hopefully should empower everyone at the same time. So these kind of skill gaps won't then exist, hopefully.

Chloe 19:00

What I love about Charlie's business and what Circl is that as he was describing it, it's like a great leveller. And interesting you talk about impostor syndrome, which I'm just getting kind of annoyed with that word because it's almost sounds like it's a disease. The reason why we experience low confidence and quote impostor syndrome is because we compare what's going on inside our brains with what we can see. So we can compare our inside with everybody else's outsides. So we think we go into this our work and we're stressed and we're struggling, and then we see everybody else who seems to have it all sorted. And so we have a positive distortion of what we think is going on in the world. And there's a really fancy term for it called pluralistic ignorance when we're ignorant of everybody's struggles. And so what Charlie does is so interesting because what you're doing is this young person is going in and coaching somebody from Google and having the experience of, oh my goodness, they're having the same doubt, self-doubt as I do. But I thought that they'd have it perfectly, and it's so acute because obviously they work at Google. That, you know, these people are on a massive pedestal. So when suddenly a young person sees that they struggle on a day-to-day basis, you're completely leveling out the playing field. And that's something that I encourage a lot of companies to do is talk about what's going on for them, talk about their difficulties so that you can share what's going on in your mind so that everybody's like, okay, my credible manager who I think is a superhero, oh, she's also struggles with her mental health. So I totally see how that works, Charlie, and how powerful that is because you're not just telling people, oh, everybody is the same, you're showing them like directly.

Gina 20:36

Yeah, that's fantastic insight because the perception, as you say, that leaders are always super human, but actually they don't make mistakes or they don't do anything wrong. So when you see a human-facing leader who actually shows vulnerability, doesn't try and cover up for the fact that they've made a mistake as well. It's actually quite refreshing to young people and actually to the whole organisation, I think, really, because the gap between leadership sometime in a company and a new starter. And I can actually remember when I started, I worked at Shell years ago. My first career was at Shell, and there was one particular very senior manager who used to walk into the office - I worked in IT at time - and he walked in and would just say, Gina, can I just ask you a question, what do you think? And I felt quite nervous. I thought, oh, is this a test or what should I say? How can I contribute here? Also I had a level of, okay, well I'll just answer the question, so I answered the question the best I could. And it became something that was good and he invited me sometimes to meetings with different people because I was just answering, I was just telling him what I thought. And I think he wasn't used to people just saying it how it was at the time, it was complete naivety. So I would appreciate that. That had a big impact on me for two years ago. So I think that there is a sort of almost artificial gap between people joining organisation. And if there was more understanding about the human side of work and that, you know, different people, it's a different different job, different choice. And it's not just about, I think when I really think about skills, you can learn skills, you can learn all of that. But what coaching, what I'm hearing you both saying is that coaching is more about listening to people and really helping them to understand how precious they all are as people and how they can all make a contribution. If you're lucky enough to get somebody who listens to you or, you know, listening. That's that's such a huge part of coaching, isn't it?

Charlie 22:59

I'm curious, Gina, because the thing that quite often comes out in conversations when we're talking about young people now or young professionals now is as if there's like a complete void between millennials and Gen X and baby boomers. And you know, we kind of pigeon box. But I remember talking before about there have always been coaching leaders. Yeah, and you're kind of giving an example of one right there. Someone who we would say leads with a coaching approach and asks people around him or her, what do they think. Not not because they're being nice, but because they genuinely want to know. Like they know that diversity of thought is helpful. But so often we're not teaching people that that's what leadership or that's what coaching is for, which kind of I think that's the other that goes back to the conversation Chloe and I were were having before you came back on, which was like there's so much needs to be done to be able to enable people to understand what we mean by the label of coaching. It's not just one-on-one exact coaching. It's an array of behaviours and communication styles that can go from really formal coaching all the way through to a coaching approach to conversations or even casual framing of a conversation, which isn't contracting, but you're basically contracting and helping people understand the difference between coaching and mentoring, you know, the difference being that coaching is question-led, mentoring is advice-led. So that kind of stuff I think is really important for the kind of democratising coaching.

Gina 24:25

It is, isn't it? It's a fascinating subject. And I think understanding what coaching is and mentoring is and difference is actually also a very good starting point for people. So leading on from that then. The democratising of coaching, how can we make it more accessible to a wider range of people, younger people, so that they can, you know, so there is still a little bit, you know, it can be expensive, it can be inaccessible. And I know you're both doing great work in this area, but how could it become the norm? How could it become the norm that people are listened to and supported and either mentored or coached as something that's very normal to help them and support them?

Chloe 25:06

So the approach that is most often used is to get your company to pay for coaching. That's because that removes the biggest barrier to to coaching, which is the money. But that then requires all of these, all of us like external people coming into different organisations. And I think what it will come down to is coach training, is coach training within organisations and training young managers how to coach. Because once you are coached, you suddenly realise the value in it. But removing the cost barrier is one thing. But I've said that I've sometimes gone into companies and the CEO's been like, right, everybody gets a coach, which obviously in in the coaching community, we're all like, what an amazing opportunity. But then none of young professionals will buy, not nobody will apply for it because they don't they don't yet recognise the value of the coaching yet. So even when you remove that cost barrier, you've still got the value barrier, which is well, they don't really know what it what it is. Because as soon as you coach somebody, then for the rest of their lives, they get it. And they will usually become spokespeople for coaching and talk about it to all of their friends and their families and get people in it. So the accessibility point is really important, but it's also how do we communicate the value of coaching without having to give everybody coaching? We're comparing to getting a PT, which is obviously widely accessible. I've never had a PT before, but I know that obviously it makes sense because we could all get fit if we really put our minds to it, if we did all the Googling and read all the personal fitness books, but we just never get around to it. And I think that's a similar thing with coaching. Is that we can read a million coaching books and things, but it's just so difficult to do by yourself. I mean, us as coaches, I often get asked, Do you can you coach yourself now? I haven't met a single coach who said yes to that question. So I think there's it's kind of a gone a bit tangent, but I think there is like the question before the accessibility thing is like how do we communicate the value to everybody without having to put them through coaching themselves?

Charlie 27:07

Yeah, I'm kind of just reflecting what Chloe said, it's exactly that, it's the value. But one point of difference is I always feel like you do have to get them into some kind of experience, as you said. So I don't know, if there will ever be an email or a TikTok video or like an Instagram post or anything that will just be like, this is coaching, this is why you should do it, and this is how we're going to make it available to you, and then everyone's going to flow. Like I reckon even with that CEO who was like, everyone can have a coach. There probably wasn't like everyone can have a coach, and that was like the one line. It was probably like, here are the benefits, you know, this is how it would be, this is what it looks like, this is the kind of format of it. And ultimately it comes down to the the kind of vernacular, right? Like coach, immediately for most people is tennis or football or like the concept of of a coach it originates from a French word, right? It's like trying to get someone from A to B. And if you are a driver, you're taking them there and you're getting them from point A to point B. Whereas actually coaching in the way that we're describing it is helping them get themselves there. Yeah, we're empowering them and raising their self-awareness so they become the driver of the coach. So I think it is a bit of a, you know, if you if you take it right back, it's about the terminology, and that's confusing. Like I think if you change the terminology, I don't even know what it would be yet. But kind of re-redefined coaching and called it something else, people would be like, Oh, okay, so it's not like you know, a football coach. Like Arsène Wenger isn't the same coach as Chloe, like they're completely different. Like, you know what I mean? But a lot of people don't see that. They see it as like I'm going to be told what to do, rather than actually having the space to come up with it themselves.

Chloe 28:45

It's like rebranding, but I've never been able to come up with because people do have a resistance to coaching because there's like unfortunate media around sort of life coaching and things like that, and people just sort of kind of roll their eyes a little bit at it. Still, maybe not so much with executive coaching, because people I think get that more, but it's like how and I've never been able to come up with a with a better name or or a way to describe it. I think you're right, Charlie, it's almost like a re coaching rebrand is needed, especially for the younger generations, for it to be cool, for there to be like a cool thing that you have. As I was saying, that there was an amazing experience I had with one of my clients who he went for dinner with his friends and they were all comparing what their coaches were talking about and what they were working on with their coaches. I was like, that's so cool. Hopefully that's the future.

Gina 29:28

I think that's a really good point. And I think there is a barrier to the word coach and the association. And often, if they don't know, they think they're going to be told something. So they think it's more like a mentoring side of things. So there's always a confusion between coaching. And because coaching is a completely confidential space, if you know, then you don't hear that much about it. You hear talk about getting a coach or effective coach, but you don't really hear at all about what goes on. And I think because of that, it's not a mistake, it's a central part of coaching to create psychological safety and make sure that you're confident talking to your coach and knowing that that's where it stops. So I think that's one of the things that's a bit of a mistake and a bit of a need for more understanding about what it is. But really, I think you understand that when you had a really good coaching session with someone, and then you certainly think, uh, okay, gosh, I can see at some point you can't see it at a coaching session. It's only afterwards that something, and it can be something very simple, and you think well how did that happen, the first one was just listening or they were just, you know, throwing in the odd question here and there. So how did that happen? But it can be so transformational, but very hard to find, isn't it? I think it's a hard thing at any age to get over to someone who has not been coached. It's something you need to experience. I like some of the co-coaching forums that are around. I think co-coaching is a great idea. I mean, you know, you're in the system then, if you like, by the time that you're generally exposed to co-coaching forums. But that's also a good way of perhaps using coaching, democratising coaching if you can get past the training stage. Then co-coaching is a cheaper way of doing it. But there are lots of things to think about. Just to end on, what do you think is the biggest influencer of creating more accessibility to people, young people or underrepresented people, apart from the good work that you're doing, and globally, you know, how can we reach people that really would benefit from coaching?

Charlie 31:45

I think there's lots of stuff that is shifting, I think, generally. You know, if we start in the awareness phase, which is what kind of what Chloe and I have been talking about, it's like understanding what it is. And actually, when we were saying, Oh, we haven't haven't been able to come up with a kind of rebrand, there is one kind of educational school of thought which is called inquiry-based learning. I don't know if either of you have come across inquiry-based learning, but it's essentially the concept that instead of at school being spoon-fed, these are the facts, when it comes to the exam, write these facts down when you get asked a question. It's like, okay, the learning is this is the question. Go and find the facts. And where back in the day you'd be like in the library looking for now, you just kind of type it into Google and you can go away and you can be like, well, okay, if I'm learning about history, a particular period, you know, I can go and just Google that and I can go and find out myself. It's that process that of getting people, humans from an early age, to not wait to be passive receivers of information, but to be seekers of information. And that's already getting people into a coaching mindset. So that kind of inquiry-based learning is taking some shape, especially in America, as you can imagine. And you know, with amazing results. Yeah, think of the creativity that like primary school children have quite often. You know, they come up with so much crazy stuff and great ideas, and and then quite often when they get into a curriculum where it's like, right, you need to learn this, this, this, this, this, and these will be things you'll be tested on, so like, don't worry about other stuff. Like, immediately that shuts down that creativity. And there's some brilliant TED talks on this. I can't remember the guy who spoke about it most prolifically. But he basically is talking about the education system as it is, is essentially like a design for the Victorian age where people would go into very much Adam Smith's division of labour jobs where they needed to know certain things and you know how to create X widget or Y widget. Whereas what we're in now is an information age where creativity and coming up with new ideas and innovation is so important. So if we can kind of re-plug from an early stage or re-program people from an early stage so that their creativity and their kind of unique thinking is the first thing they go to or the first thing that they're drawn to, then hopefully that will then raise the awareness of what the value of the coaching ethos actually is. And then people will be seeking it more as a starting point rather than again waiting for stuff to come to them.

Speaker 2 33:59

Yeah, that's so interesting. I wish I could have an answer to the question of like how do we make it more accessible? Because there must be something that we're not doing and ideas that we haven't thought of before. But there's so much, there's so much different things going on, but we're almost thinking about it from the our perspective rather than thinking about it from the people from the coachee or the future coachee. And also you've got to think that as a young person, if you're a 16, 18, 21-year-old from a low-income background, and there's something like, well, maybe I want to get some coaching, where do I go first? I think that's the perspective we need to kind of ask from. And developing that critical thinking. I have a really good friend called Chloe Francesca, and she started a coaching company called MindStation and all about bringing coaching to young people between the ages of six and eleven, and she joins something like clubs at schools and also your parents and things like that. And it's kind of interesting because then it's starting that inquiry mind from a really young age. Because what I'm also noticing or have noticed, I've got a few clients at the moment who've asked their employer for a coach, and they've been like, Yeah, of course, we'll get you a coach. So it's kind of going back to the point we were saying before about that proactivity and how so how do we develop that proactive nature so that it doesn't just rely on the whole coaching community to just like you know shove it in their faces and be like, you really need this, you really want this. But actually, like I wonder if there's a way in education to try and it's such a huge question that we're grappling with, but to try and get people to be more proactive and to think about well, what could I do? I work for a company called the Urban Scholars, and it's all about getting young people between the ages of 14 and 18, and you support them all the way through, and they come every one Saturday every month, all from low-income backgrounds, and you apply for that, and there's must be fat-in-the-circle programme, must be thousands of programmes out there. And some young people find them. So it's like, what do those young people have that maybe others don't? And what's happened in their lives that has enabled them to have this curiosity and inquiry, curiosity can kind of use the same time as like, so we almost like we do need to do our job in terms of trying to market and make these incredible companies available to people, but also there's something about how do we develop that curiosity mindset because those are the people that are most hireable, that come across the most opportunities. I don't know what the answer is to that. I wish I did, but it's kind of an interesting thought.

Charlie 36:13

Yeah, it's like bottom-up the awareness space because you're right, part of the young people that come to the Circl programme are those young people who they've met someone else who's done it, and they go, Oh, you know, that sounds incredible. It's completely not what I thought a coaching or leadership programme or inclusive leadership programme would be about. You know, I didn't understand it would be about building trust with someone I don't know and and sharing vulnerabilities with them. And so that's one way, like you're just raising the awareness, and then that hopefully should kind of create this surge of demand for more coaching, either learning how to coach or being coached, and therefore there'll be more solutions, even more solutions that kind of come to the market, right, for those demographics. And then the other way, and I don't know how much you'll like this, Gina, but the other way is kind of top-down, right? So thinking about the existing executive coaching model and market and framework. And the t thing that always strikes me is that so often coaches that charge eye-watering sums of money to senior banking execs. Like I just use that because everyone can kind of think about it. They are people who have a have a background quite often in that space. Because the kind of senior exec at that bank or at that big firm likes to know that their coach kind of has some knowledge or has some understanding of their world. And that kind of reinforces the idea that to be a really top senior exec coach, you have to have had a really stellar career before you in a specific industry that you are then going to go and coach in. Which is basically the opposite of what, you know, at least Chloe and I, we don't have as much experience, but just for being slightly younger, but you know, that's kind of the opposite of what we're saying about what coaching is. In fact, the best coaches are the ones who have no context because they are then not going to try and offer their advice. So I think there's something to be said about the shift that needs to happen top down in order to democratise coaching. Because you know, we've had CEOs of companies who are like, who get coached by an 18-year-old who's this is the first ever coaching session, and they're like, wow, like I pay my executive coach so much money, and that coaching session that you just gave me was way better than what I've done. You know what I mean? And you're like, wait, okay, this kind of crazy. And I think it's almost a bit of a mindset shift for the people who have influence within coaching to democratise it. So give a shout out, like Katherine Tulpa, for example, and the Association for Coaching, as an example. We're setting up a future leader advisory board with them at the moment for young people from under represented backgrounds, because they're really keen to understand, what the demand is and also like what the perception is. And I think that shift in perception will be so important.

Gina 38:50

I'm really glad you mentioned that because, and as you know, it's a something that I'm really passionate about as well. So building either an advisory board or as there's a word or a phrase now called shadow boards. So I think this is a great thing, and I think what the Association for Coaching are doing, you're doing in building that advisory board that you've got you know a management team, and then you bring in, a shadow board that's actually a board structure, and you bring a shadow board of young people who don't need to be trained, in that, but as being part of that, you get the fresh eyes with the board. And it's almost sort of almost coaching, but you know, not saying that those people have to be trained as coaches, but to learn from what's going on and the fresh eyes coming in from the shadow board of people who will just ask any questions. And what a lovely fresh aspect for a board, because boards can get stale because this is what is expected of us. We've gone into these roles with governance, etc. But by having a young board or a young advisory board or team working alongside an experienced team, we're still learning, we're always still learning. How powerful is that? So if so many more companies did that. So we're looking forward to seeing the results and the progress of this education coaching advisory team and see how that works. Because I think that's a really good leading example of where young people and people in a particular leader management role, leadership role, can work together. And I'm sure both will complement each other. It's not going to be a one-way street. It's not about the team educating the other. It could probably really reverse actually, and the team could learn so much from that. This has been an absolute delight. Is there anything you would like to say to close on, or any words of wisdom that you'd like to share?

Chloe 40:55

I think maybe just for coaches listening to this, to be curious and ask yourself the question of how you could make your services accessible to more people. It doesn't have to be, you know, all the time, it could be a session every month, or whatever, and just play with that idea a little bit and see how you could weave it into what you do to create even more impact than what you're doing already.

Charlie 41:16

Yeah, and I would just say, once we kind of deconstruct and demystify what we mean by coaching, the democratisation of that process is inevitable. Because what we're saying is it's emotional intelligence in action and young people who are going to discover about coaching, both coaching and getting coached, are going to then pass it on to more and more people. So it's going to happen. We've just got to be optimistic.

Gina 41:38

Absolutely. And I can't think of two better people to be involved in this. Thank you so much for this. You know, your heartfelt both curiosity and desire to bring about positive change. It just comes across in a huge sun rays, I must admit. And thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. Look forward to hearing more in the future. And let's make a big change. Charlie interjects - thank you Gina.

Charlie 42:01

Appreciate it.

Chloe 42:02

Thank you, Gina. Gina interjects - Thank you very much.