Lori Shook: Coach, Trainer, Consultant

In this episode guest host Charlotte Saulny, President & COO of Coaching.com, interviews Lori Shook, a pioneer with over 20 years in the coaching industry and celebrated for her experiential training approach. 

Shook, who achieved the status of Master Certified Coach by 2001, shares her journey from an engineer in anti-submarine warfare to a luminary in coaching, driven by a desire for meaningful personal development and making a positive impact on others.

The conversation delves into Shook's insights on the evolution of coaching from a transactional to a transformational practice. 

She emphasizes the importance of deep reflective thinking and exploring beliefs for sustainable personal change, contrasting this with the more immediate, action-oriented transactional coaching.

Saulny and Shook also discuss the vital roles of mentoring and supervision in the coaching profession, highlighting the necessity for continuous personal development and ethical diligence among coaches. 

This episode offers a comprehensive look at the intricacies of coaching and its significance in personal and professional growth, emphasizing the ongoing need for introspection, ethical consideration, and the adaptable application of coaching methodologies across different environments.

Transcript

(interview blurb)

Lori: Coaching is about helping other people develop, about being their best selves, and about learning to be resilient and finding new solutions and maybe be more creative.

(intro)

Charlotte: Hi, I’m Charlotte Saulny, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. I am taking over from Alex Pascal for the next few weeks and I am delighted to be your guest host. My guest today is a pioneer in the world of coaching and training, and has more than 20 years’ experience in creating experiential training. She earned the designation of Master Certified Coach by 2001 and has been a driving force for the expansion of coaching within organizations all over the world. Please welcome Lori Shook.

(Interview)

Charlotte: Welcome, Lori. So happy to have you here with us today. 

Lori: Thank you, Charlotte. I’m really excited to meet you and have a chat with you and in our little warm up there, I’ve gotten a great feeling about this conversation. 

Charlotte: You’re so sweet to say it. Well, likewise, likewise. For those listeners out there, before we jumped on the recording, I was sharing with Lori how excited I was to speak with her because she has been a part of the coaching industry for so long and so many years and just has a wealth of knowledge and experience around the business, the industry, has a lot of great insights and great opinions that I think are going to be just so useful and fabulous for everyone out there. But before we dive in, as we always do with our podcast, we need to start by discussing what we are drinking today. So, what do you have in your mug, Miss Lori? 

Lori: In my mug, I have some herbal tea, or as the Brits would say, some herbal tea.

Charlotte: Correct. Correct. 

Lori: Yeah, I was living there for 12 years, yeah. It is peppermint and licorice and I think that is a dynamo. I know, you kind of go, “What?” No, it’s a great combination. 

Charlotte: Wow.

Lori: Peppermint and licorice. It comes in a teabag. Teapigs, I think, originated — or Pukka Tea, I don’t know. Anyway, it’s a great combo, little perkiness as well as the smooth licorice. 

Charlotte: That sounds wonderful. 

Lori: And you? What have you got? 

Charlotte: Well, I knew you were having herbal tea and I decided to join you but I have a — this is going to sound crazy. It is a mimosa-flavored black tea. 

Lori: Oh my.

Charlotte: Yes, it’s a special blend made in honor of actually the series, The Crown, and it’s actually a very delightful tea, actually. I’m enjoying it quite, quite, quite well. I’m not sure it’s as good as peppermint and licorice but it’ll do.

Lori: It’s a different camp, I’m sure.

Charlotte: So, Lori, let’s dive in. And maybe to start, you could just share a little bit about how you got into the coaching profession in the first place, like how did you discover this profession? Because you started off a long, long time ago when coaching really wasn’t known in the way it is today.

Lori: It wasn’t, no. Well, I was an engineer and I was working for the US Navy. 

Charlotte: Wow. 

Lori: In the antisubmarine warfare department. 

Charlotte: Wow.

Lori: I know. It was fascinating. My brain kind of liked it and there were some things that were interesting about it but I wasn’t heartfully into it and I wanted brain in, heart not, and I was looking for something else and it took me a long time and I was dabbling in all kinds of things like meditation and yoga and Eastern philosophy on one hand and environmental issues on another hand, and I thought, okay, there’s got to be something I can do that is good for the world, that’s good for me personal development, and personal development for other people. And along the way, I ran into eventually a couple of people who called themselves coaches and I heard a little bit about what they were doing and it was similar on this, in the yoga meditation program that I was in, we had like partner conversations with one another that were really personal development-oriented based on the Eastern philosophy and all and I loved those conversations and coaching sounded a lot like that but without a lot of the stigma that was going on in Eastern philosophy stuff. So I was like, “That’s it. I’m doing that.” I called myself a coach.

Charlotte: You just sort of took it on, 

Lori: I adopted it immediately. I’d been looking, seven years or something I’d been looking for what’s the thing. I had the parameters and I could see that it met it completely, met the parameters. So I called myself a coach and then I found out about coach training, went in, dove in headfirst. It was great. 

Charlotte: That’s right. And so you did your sort of formal training at Coach Training Institute, Coaches Training Institute —

Lori: The Coaches Training Institute, yeah.

Charlotte: Yeah. 

Lori: In ’96, starting in ’96, yeah.

Charlotte: In ’96. and then you actually expanded their program and took it worldwide, right?

Lori: Well, I was part — I was one of the people who did that, yeah. So, in ’98, I started being a trainer for CTI, Coaches Training Institute, and then was involved in a number of projects of helping the quality assurance and this and that, and then 2003, so five years later, I’d been coming to London and Oslo, were CTI had already expanded, and doing some courses there, and there were people coming from all over the place going, “We want CTI in Turkey and in Dubai and in Israel,” and all these different places and I kind of took a stand and said, “Let’s make that happen.” And it took some doing but I moved to Europe and helped make that happen. And 14 new countries. I dragged my partner, Jim Patterson, along, my coaching partner, and we helped create expansion of CTI in 14 new countries. 

Charlotte: Wow. 

Lori: Which was very exciting, super exciting times. It was mind boggling and all kinds of things but, yeah. And several of those countries still going, not all of them, like South Africa couldn’t quite make the economics meet, work that out.

Charlotte: But it’s one of the largest training schools, coaches training schools in the world now. 

Lori: Yeah, yeah. 

Charlotte: It’s incredible. 

Lori: Yeah. And there was another guy who went to Japan. He was a Japanese guy, Hide Enomoto, he brought CTI to Japan and Oslo and UK were already in place. So, yeah, we went to Germany and the Netherlands and Spain and Turkey and Poland and UAE and Israel and South Africa. There’s a few others, I’m skipping some of the other Nordics.

Charlotte: That’s incredible. 

Lori: Yeah, it was very exciting. 

Charlotte: Well, it just goes to show that there is a need for coaching anywhere and everywhere, that there are human beings who have a desire to learn and grow or be better and it’s such an incredibly powerful medium. It’s always wonderful to hear stories of how people have really contributed to the expansion of the profession. 

Lori: And in all those countries, I was thinking as you said that, it’s the same in the sense that it’s about human expansion and working with people and helping people be their best selves and all those things but it’s also adapted to culture —

Charlotte: Absolutely. 

Lori: — which is really important to do and so I learned a whole lot about what does that mean in this culture or in that culture. And so we worked with the local people to really make sure it fit. 

Charlotte: Make sure it was unique.

Lori: It was interesting. 

Charlotte: Yeah, I bet. I bet. So, see, you’ve been involved with the profession for a long time. I’m curious, there’s a lot going on in the coaching profession these days. I mean, the profession is growing exponentially. There’s a lot of people out there interested in coaching or interested in being a coach, etc., etc., so, I’m curious, when you think about the state of the profession today and where we’re at, what comes up for you? Where does your mind go in terms of what’s next for the coaching profession? 

Lori: I hope we can have that conversation about what’s next. I don’t know what’s next. Some of the trends I see I don’t like, and, of course, it’s going to evolve and tradition holders, like I might be called a tradition holder because I like things the way they were when I joined, of course, they have to evolve. Some of the things that I really like seeing are how it seems like coaching is coming back around to being a personal development approach. For a while, it seemed like it was a very transactional thing. So, what I mean by transaction is like let’s just do and get going and make more money and help clients make more money and more, more, more. I wasn’t interested in it for those reasons to begin with so when I see such emphasis on more, more, more, do, do, do, I get a little sad. But I’m also seeing a real movement, and then we could talk about supervision because that kind of comes in alongside that as well, but I see a movement towards transformational kind of coaching as opposed to just the transaction. But I also see all kinds. I mean, there’s trauma coaching, there’s wellbeing coaching. You can go to a Home Depot and get a Home Depot coach.

Charlotte: Sure.

Lori: A DIY coach, which is a different thing. 

Charlotte: Sure, and I think people use the word “coach” as a label for so many different things that sometimes one can get sort of lost in in what coaching truly is and what it’s designed to do. So, I’m curious, you made a distinction, you said sort of transactional coaching versus transformational coaching. How would you describe the difference between those two things?

Lori: Well, I’m so glad you asked that question because it’s something I’m really passionate about. And it’s not the term I use all the time but it doesn’t matter. Transactional coaching, so let’s say you’re a client, you come and you say, “Well, I wanna build a business,” or, “I have this trouble over here with this person.” The questions I would ask you if I’m doing a transactional, let’s find a solution quickly so you can get moving and carry on. So the questions might be things like, “Well, what do you know is possible? Who else does this? Where can you get evidence of this? What else can you try?” And it’s very doing focused. “What can you do? What can you try?” Doing focused, which is fine. I mean, that’s part of coaching. No problem with that. It’s not going to go very deep in you and it’s not going to change you in any way, it’s just going to help you think of new things, which is probably already floating around in your mind anyway, or things you’ve seen. But if we really want to have sustainable kind of change for people and really have them break into new territories for themselves, they need to think more deeply and that’s what I think transformational coaching is. So we look at, “Okay, so you have this challenge. What’s your thinking that’s gotten you to this place? And if you want to get to a new place, you might need to have some new thinking, new ways to think about it, new ideas, new thought processes, new beliefs, even,” and so the transformational coaching goes into the belief space and the thinking pattern space. And that not only helps the person solve that particular challenge in that moment, it gives them a whole lot more for other challenges as well. It changes them, not just solves the problem. 

Charlotte: I love that, that’s great. And when you look out there in the world today, Lori, sort of the coaching profession, you mentioned a little earlier sort of supervision, I’m curious about the role that you feel supervision plays in terms of helping the coaching profession, because I think there’s a lot of discussion. I mean, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this, but when I first started in the coaching professional a long time ago, I found that coaching was often defined by what it was not, meaning coaching is not mentoring, coaching is not training, coaching is not facilitating.

Lori: Therapy. 

Charlotte: Coaching is not therapy, exactly. There’s a lot of what it is not as a way to differentiate it but less so what it really sort of is. And there’s been, I think, sort of pushback around having supervision or mentoring within the coaching profession and I’m just curious of your thoughts around that.

Lori: Yeah. Well, supervision is a term that’s being used a lot now, and in Europe, I think it might have a slightly different definition than in the States. So, years ago, I was trained as a supervisor at the Coaches Training Institute to supervise, which really would be called mentoring today. It was about listening to people’s coaching and giving them feedback and helping them use tools better and maybe think differently as a coach as well and grow as a human being, because you need some personal development if you’re going to be a coach. So, for me, that was all the package of supervision. Now, that would be called mentoring and I do a lot of mentoring as well and I love mentor coaching, because it does cover a lot of bases. And now supervision, I’m not a trained supervisor but I’ve talked to supervisors to find out what it is and there’s clearly a crossover but supervision is much more the personal development only, much less about goals, but it’s really about what are you thinking about when you are coaching this person, what goes on for you as you’re coaching this person or team, and it’s very much about the inner workings of the coach and as reflective practice, is the expression that I’ve heard, it’s really just sitting with kind of a mindfulness, in a way, like what are the thoughts that are occurring to you, what triggers you even, you can go in there, because we don’t want to be caught up in our triggers but, of course, we’re human beings, we get triggered by things all the time, we might be jealous of our client. I mean, there’s so many things that happen, and we need to pay attention to those. So I think it’s really useful to have a combination of a supervisor or supervision and mentoring to help one keep growing as a coach. There’s an expression, I haven’t used it in a while, but there’s an expression I use a lot with coaches, if you’re not interested in personal development, you don’t want to be a coach. 

Charlotte: Yeah.

Lori: Because if you’re not interested in confronting your own internal demons or your own internal thoughts, it’s not quite the profession for you, because we need to keep confronting them if we want to be the best coach we can be. Because, otherwise, we’re coaching people through all that. Does that make sense? 

Charlotte: Absolutely, yeah. And I just think there’s the whole notion of if you are in a profession where you are committed to helping people grow, you have to model that in some way, shape, or form.

Lori: Yeah.

Charlotte: There’s an incongruency that would come from being a coach that is not either being coached or working on improving their skills or whatever that is. I mean, I think learning is such a core part of that so —

Lori: Absolutely.

Charlotte: — people are never done, right? We are never done.

Lori: People we’re never done, yeah. And the coaches that I think are really doing some great work in the world, they keep looking at things. And there’s a lot to look at, being the trauma-informed coach or understanding neurodiversity or doing some meditation themselves or retreats where they go in and really sit with self and see what’s going on in there and can reorient it as needed. That’s what I see coaches doing is really investing in themselves as the instrument that they are as a coach. 

Charlotte: Absolutely. Actually, I love how you just put that because it is investing in yourself as an instrument of good and as an instrument or a channel of being able to bring out the best in others and so it’s such a key part of being effective. So, talk to me a little bit about mentoring, because I think there’s a lot of people in our community who are really committed being coaches and I think that, sometimes, sort of being aware of what would be involved in mentoring is just a helpful thing for our community to know.

Lori: My view of mentoring, which I don’t think is unusual, is about helping the coach be their best selves as the instrument of being a coach, but also knowing the tools that are available to them and using them well and knowing why. So let’s say you’re a coach and you’ve learned some tools at a school, whatever school, and you have a bucketful of the skills and tools, because I can just use these as randomly. They’re not random. So in mentoring, we look at why — so you had that coaching conversation over there, maybe I heard part of it or not or I have a transcript or something, so what were you after when you asked this question? What were you after when you used that tool? And if the coach doesn’t know, then I don’t know what they’re up to, but that’s what mentoring is, like let’s get really conscious and intentional about the skills and tools that you’re using. What are you after? Why are you going in that direction? Why do you ask somebody what do you want? I mean, we call that a classic coaching question but it’s not always the best question. I had some CEO tell me, “I had a new coach and the first question he asked me was what do I want and I fired him because this isn’t about what I want. This is about I have a stack of work to get done and I need a coach to help me sort things out and get back to my time,” and if that’s what his agenda was. I should go back, the what do you want was sort of like big picture. What’s your dream? What’s your dream? I’m sorry, that’s probably what the question was. What’s your dream? It’s not a fair question all the time. It’s not the right question all the time. 

Charlotte: Yeah, it’s not the appropriate question. Yeah, exactly.

Lori: It’s not the appropriate question. Thank you, that’s a better way to say it.

Charlotte: For sure. For sure. 

Lori: So mentoring, back to your question, mentoring is really getting conscious and intentional about why do you ask the questions you ask. In a given moment, you could reflect on a moment in a coaching session, what could have been other options you could have taken in that moment? So really reflecting and learning about one’s own coaching process because there might be other ways, better ways, and the more you do that, the better you get at finding great questions or great approaches or directions in the moment. 

Charlotte: And, just curious, do you have a preference in relation to mentoring, whether it’s done in sort of a group scenario or a one-on-one scenario? Is there room for both? What’s helpful in that respect?

Lori: I think there’s room for both. What I like about group mentoring is that people get ideas from one another and there’s magical things that happen when coaches come together and they have great conversations together and like, “Oh, I thought about it this way, I thought about it that way,” then it’s not just me and my brain and the coach’s brain but several brains looking and having different ideas and they spark off of one another. But I also like the one to one, the intimacy that’s created there and the safety, because not everyone is willing to say, “Here’s where I really messed it up in this coaching conversation and I don’t know what went wrong.” So there can be more intimacy in that and a lot of learning and deep learning so I do like a combination. 

Charlotte: That’s wonderful. And before we sort of hit record on our podcast today, we were talking a little bit about the profession of coaching and some belief systems that coaches may have around what it means to be a coach and what it doesn’t mean to be a coach. I’ve been sitting with that and what you shared around that, I think, is really important for people to hear and it has to do with sort of this notion that if you are a coach, you’re out there, you’re on your own, you’re building your business and that’s just sort of the way that it is and I’m curious if you could just share a little bit more about your thinking around what it really means to be a coach in today’s world. 

Lori: Yes. So this pressure, I hear it in coaches in training, “Oh, someday, I’ll have my own coaching business,” or, “After this year, after this training. I’ll have my own business, my own business.” Not everyone is cut out to have their own business. It’s a competitive space, for one thing. But there’s so many ways you can apply coaching skills and maybe that’s what you want to do or not but there are so many ways you can apply coaching skills within one’s own job or within the organization, maybe there’s a lateral move you could make for the organization you’re working for where you could use more of your coaching skills. Leaders certainly can use coaching skills. It’s not the same thing, I’m passionate about that, leaders using coaching skills is different than being a professional coach, but there’s a lot that you can bring. If coaching — or, for me, I should say this way, coaching is about helping other people develop and about being their best selves and about learning to be resilient and finding new solutions and maybe be more creative. There are many positions from which you can do that. You could be a team leader and do that. You could be a colleague in a team and do that. You could be a top leader in an organization and do that, depending on the organization and their goals and all of that. You can be in HR and do that. You can be in learning and development, but it doesn’t have to be HR and learning development. 

Charlotte: Absolutely. Well, what I hear you’re really saying is sort of expanding your structure of interpretation around the environment or the way in which you can be a coach or leverage coaching skills and not be limited to the notion that, to your point, gosh, I’d have to start my own business and there’s the entrepreneur piece and I certainly have run coaching practices for many years and I know people that are extraordinary coaches, exceptional coaches, who are not exceptional salespeople, and so building their own business was really a tricky proposition for them and so being able to work for organizations that delivered coaching services or leverage their coaching skills in different sort of environments was something that was better for them. I do think it’s great for people to think differently about how they might be able to coach. 

Lori: Yeah, and there’s no shame in that. It’s not like that’s second place, being the entrepreneur is first place. It just isn’t like that. There’s a need for coaching skills in so many places. 

Charlotte: Yeah. So I had a wonderful conversation with Marcia Reynolds, actually, and one of her big things right now is helping coaches and helping people in general really think about how they can take a coach approach in every facet of their life, how can I take a coach approach as a parent, as a spouse, as a friend, as a whatever, like how do I leverage these skills that I have in order to have a greater impact in my community or the people around me, and so it really resonates with me what you’re saying, and it also I think resonates with me when you think about how to scale coaching and organizations, we recognize it, and I know you’ve done a bunch of corporate coaching so I’m going to ask you about that in a second, but we often have taken coaching to be something which is delivered to the sort of upper echelons of the organization, executive coaching, but I think over the last few years, figured out ways to be able to scale that coaching to sort of middle management, etc., etc., but still, there’s no way that every single person in an organization is going to be able to be coached. I mean, realistically. However, if you start thinking about coaching skills as something that managers can learn to be more effective people leaders, you start thinking about scale differently.

Lori: Yeah, and I just want to say something at this point about that. One of the first things we learn as a coach is to stop solving and to hold the client’s agenda. So it’s about them, it’s about their solutions. And one of the things that is difficult for leaders is to try to do that while they’re also holding a leadership position or a management position and management responsibilities. You can’t always do both.

Charlotte: For sure. 

Lori: So it isn’t that part of coaching necessarily that you use when you’re coaching within an organization.

Charlotte: Absolutely.

Lori: There are so many other skills and approaches and tools that we can use that aren’t necessarily about holding that person 100 percent, because if I’m the manager, I have an agenda for you —

Charlotte: Of course you do.

Lori: — and that’s okay. 

Charlotte: Yeah. 

Lori: But I can see the light in you and I can see the possibilities in you and I can help grow you, I can challenge you and I can have great conversations with you about what’s going to be exciting for you and motivating and there’s so many conversations like that that we can have, even if I am holding my own agenda for you. 

Charlotte: Absolutely. 

Lori: So I think that’s the part that doesn’t always get communicated because that message of hold the client’s agenda is so strong. 

Charlotte: It is so strong and I appreciate you pointing it out because you’re right, ultimately, a manager, of course, has a responsibility to drive performance and so the agenda is always going to be around how do I get the most and best out of this person and so that that will always sort of be ever present in the manager direct report relationship. Now, Lori, you’ve done a bunch of corporate coaching. For coaches who are interested in coaching in the corporate world, what insights do you have for them in terms of how they might approach that? What’s important for people to bear in mind if they really want to be doing more coaching out there in enterprises? 

Lori: Well, I have several tips. First of all, I’ll just recall my first corporate client and similar to what I just said about that agenda, I wasn’t coming with solutions of any sorts and I was coaching this guy and I said, “Well, what do you know —” and he needed to find ways to manage his temper, he was just flying off the handle all the time and I said, “Well, what do you know?” because most of my clients before then knew something about how to manage themselves and I said, “Well, what do you know about how to stop yourself?” and he said, “Nothing, that’s why you’re here,” And it’s like that’s a really good point. So I had to come also with some tools, not that I turned myself into a teacher but there had to be something I brought that he could use. So there’s sort of like a side pocket that I, let’s just get clear about this, what happens for you in that moment and so we slowed down, slowing down is one of the big tips, slowing down. A corporate client, someone who’s been deeply embedded in an analytical world who hasn’t done any personal development work might need a slightly different approach with coaching than if you’re working with, say, someone who’s very self-aware already. So we need to slow down and help the person become more self-aware, aware of their thoughts, maybe aware of their feelings, go slow on that one because some people get really freaked out about that, build trust, one small step at a time. Meet the client where they are and then slowly bring them towards you and your coaching tools.

Charlotte: So one of the things I heard you say there, which is I’m curious for you to elaborate on, is the recognition that when you go into corporate and you’re working with leaders, that it may not just be a function, holding space and helping them process, but that you may need to offer up something tangible for them to do differently or tools, and I think sometimes, and I’m wondering what your perspective on this is, I think sometimes the belief system with coaching is that you are not to introduce anything into the space. Your job is to hold space for people to process and develop but you’re not putting your own opinion or your own perspectives or your own tools but you’re really allowing them the space to do it. How do you reconcile that with the notion of actually providing something more tangible to someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing?

Lori: So let’s say you have a tool that has a few steps to it, which is about becoming aware of your thoughts and the impact they have on you. So, first, maybe you do some breathing and then you close your eyes and then you notice your thoughts coming, right? That’s like a mindfulness tool. Let’s say you’re going to use a tool like that with a client to help them become more aware. We don’t just jump into that tool. We say, “You know, for what we’re doing,” it’s setting context, signposting, “for what you’re working on, dear client, I have an approach for that. Are you willing for me to use that with you?” And then you explain the steps. You’re not telling them what to do or solving their problem, you’re explaining what you’re doing, you’re introducing them, so that requires a little bit of what we might call education, but it’s not about telling your client what to do. I’m all for the client has the solutions but we have the tools, we have the space, we have the way to help them find new solutions and to get more resourceful and it might be a tool with a few steps. “So, first, I’m gonna ask you to close your eyes.” I also like using a little bit of neuroscience. “I’m gonna ask you to close your eyes. Now, I know that might be a little bit scary, you tell me if you’re comfortable with that, but the reason I asked you to do that is so you can have more access to different parts of your brain because then you’ll have a little more creativity and more ideas can come to you because your brain spend so much time processing visual information and when you close your eyes, you get more brain power.” So it’s little things like that, little neuroscience tidbits, signposting, “Here’s what I’m trying to do with you, I wanna do a visualization,” which I think is a big step for a lot of people. Some people are totally freaked out if you ask them to close their eyes so you don’t want to drag them over some scary edge where you’re into a territory they’re terrified of, you need to do one step at a time and do a small exercise like that. They get a result, they’ll trust you a little more, and maybe you do another little more creative thing, moving their bodies.

Charlotte: This is great. And when you think about sort of the work that you do in corporations, what are some of the topics or issues you see coming up that you find yourself addressing within a coaching engagement? What could people expect when they go into coaching in corporations in terms of issues?

Lori: There’s a lot of dealing with ambiguity and conflicting agendas, politics, in other words, like this person wants that and that person wants that, how do I behave? How do I get to the next level? How do I get a promotion? How do I become visible? I don’t want to be visible but that’s the way around here, you got to be visible. What does that mean? Dealing with toxic people. I’ve heard that one a fair number of times. Dealing with relationships. I mean, if you bring it down to one thing, we’re human beings, we’re designed to be in relationship and it’s so hard to be in relationship —

Charlotte: Of course.

Lori: — so dealing with relationships of all sorts. Managing up, managing doubt, managing others, getting along with colleagues, managing with a customer, dealing with difficult customers, managing relationships. 

Charlotte: And when you think across the sort of the board like that, you’ve already given us an example of a tool that you’ve used to sort of help bring more awareness, but if you were to think about a couple of tools that have been particularly helpful to you as you’ve coached people within organizations, is there anything that really jumps out to you as, “Here’s something that I find myself doing often because of A, B, C”?

Lori: Sometimes, values work, like what’s important to you, like what triggers you. I have a favorite about one’s inner board. So you have your own inner board of directors. Let’s name the different voices. There’s the one part of you, which just normalizes that we have different agendas in our own minds and different voices in our own mind, so there’s one voice sitting at your internal table that wants to just hurt everybody else and really competitive. Okay, that’s one voice. You have another voice that’s really compassionate and just wants the best for everyone. You have another voice that wants harmony. And so you name these different voices and it’s really helpful, maybe just because we normalize that we’re not schizophrenic because we have different voices in our heads.

Charlotte: Sure, sure.

Lori: It’s normal. So that’s one. But also, I don’t always use tools. I think the more we coach, the less we use tools, I think. I think it’s a great place to start to get the structuring, it’s kind of like recipes.

Charlotte: Yeah, no, yeah, for sure.

Lori: I like to learn a recipe or two and then I freeform after that and I pick and choose a little bit of spice from that and this from that. So I think I like to freeform a lot, the way I cook. 

Charlotte: That’s a great example. That’s just a great illustration of exactly what one would do. You sort of perfect the art of the recipe and then you add and change and shift and make it more delicious and nuanced and it’s a great example.

Lori: Yeah. Combine a couple of recipes and, yeah. And there’s a favorite part of one particular recipe maybe and you think, you know, browning that butter really is awesome, I’m going to do that over here and you just have a question or some essence of a tool that comes out in a conversation with somebody and that’s enough for that person because it opens up a whole new kind of thinking. 

Charlotte: So it’s so clear from hearing you share the power that you have experienced in coaching others and the impact that this profession has. When you think about what’s next for coaching or you think about maybe even sort of what you perceive to be the challenges facing the profession today, what comes up for you?

Lori: In this moment, it doesn’t feel so different than a long time ago when we both were starting in this profession of where’s it going to go and how are we going to regulate ourselves. So, here, I’m in Norway, and in Norway, you kind of have to be certified to do anything and so it would be natural for the government to come and say, “Okay, we wanna have a certification so you can call yourself a coach and we can agree on that,” and the coaching professions have, the coaching organizations have come in and tried to create that so that the governments don’t take over, but not everyone ascribes to those coaching professions either, the professional coaching organizations. When you ask the question what do I see in the profession of coaching is I see it going in so many different directions and, of course, in a lot of places, in the US, you can kind of do anything you want and it’s okay. And online, you can do anything you want. Influencers are doing all kinds of stuff and there’s no, from what I know, there’s no rules.

Charlotte: Regulation, yeah. 

Lori: And regulations, yeah. So I think it’s still a matter of that, what is it to be a coach and how do we have something that we can — and there’s not going to be one and only one body that does that, but how do we have some kind of consistency so when organizations are coming and buying a lot of coaches, coaching and you have coaching platform with a lot of coaches working on it, how do we have some common ground because I think we need to keep working on that. It’s not like it’s not there, we need to keep working on that so that there’s some kind of, common ground is the word I have for it right now, so we can define it in some way so people know what they’re buying. It wasn’t any different 20 years ago. I knew you were going to ask me that question and I was thinking by the time we got to that question, I’d have some really creative, interesting answer. But I think it comes back to that, it’s like, “What is coaching? How do we define it?”

Charlotte: What is coaching? How do we define it? And, to your point, there are so many different flavors of coaching and specialties for coaching and how do you put some sort of regulation around it, not to restrict it but to protect those people who are seeing it as a profession? How do we ensure that the people who are saying that they are a coach are coaching, in a way which is ethical and in a way that requires them to have obtained some certain level of competency and some particular element of competencies? And that’s tricky. It’s tricky to sort of do that.

Lori: It is. But you’re right, ethics and competencies, yeah. Finding some set that we can largely align with.

Charlotte: Largely align with. Yeah, I’m excited. I think that — and you’re right, I feel that the conversation 20 years ago is how do we define what we are and what we do and so on and so forth. And although I think the profession has made significant strides towards that in terms of trying to put more definition around there, I still think there’s a lot of opportunity to put more rigor around it. 

Lori: Yeah. 

Charlotte: And to sort of help people be at their best, which I think in many respects sort of brings us back to the mentoring slash supervision conversation, because in many other professions where there is some element of regulation, there is the need for there to be supervision or mentoring or something ongoingly to ensure that what’s being delivered into the world is up to date and is sort of in accordance with the guidelines associated. So, for me, it’s going to be really interesting to see how much more of a prominent role mentoring and supervision takes in the coaching profession in the next five years. 

Lori: So I think they’re doing a lot in the supervision world and I know I didn’t say this earlier, about ethics, like being the holders of ethics, taking a stand for ethics in the profession and helping coaches like really — and that’s where they have an expertise, not just holding space but having an expertise and saying, “Well, hang on a second here, here are the ethics of the profession, I encourage you to follow those.” It’s my understanding it’s part of the role of the supervisor. Again, I am not a trained supervisor.

Charlotte: I think it’s really important because I feel as if we can sit here and we can say, “Listen, ethics are good,” I don’t think anyone is going to say ethics are bad, so I feel like most people are going to say ethics are good and we can all agree top line that these are some of the ethical standards that we need to uphold. But the reality of upholding that in the day to day coaching relationship that you have with someone is a lot more nuanced and tricky and so being able to have those conversations in a safe space to really consider and think about how you’re going to handle a particular situation in relation to an ethical dilemma, that’s important work that needs to be done, and it’s not a one-off, it’s an ongoing, “Hey, I’ve been met with the situation, how should I manage it? How would you interpret how we apply the ethical standards to this scenario?” and it’s not always black and white and I think people think sometimes that it’s black and white, and it’s not. It’s not.

Lori: There are ethical dilemmas in all professions, I think. I think of medical ethics. There’s some great questions, you can read medical ethics columns, like, “Wow, that’s a really good question, what’s the best way to go?” That’s medicine, that’s been around for a really long time, there’s no clear cut answers. And every time we have a new invention or a new medical breakthrough, there’s more questions and same for coaching. We have, okay, so now we know about trauma-informed coaching, does that mean we’re now going to start coaching trauma all of us? No, because we’re not trained to do that all of us. Maybe some are. Great, well, what’s the ethics for the whole profession now that we have that new question, new sort of branch of coaching? So I totally agree with you, the profession has done a lot to come together and create ethical standards and competencies and standards, it’s really broadened, but then it’s even broader what people are doing. So we have to — it’s an ongoing — it will be ongoing for a long time.

Charlotte: For a long time —

Lori: — perhaps forever. 

Charlotte: And if you were to have one piece of advice for a coach who wants to expand their impact in the world, if you were to have one piece of advice for what you would tell them to go do or go think about, what would you say?

Lori: I’m not sure this is going to be a really simple thing, even though I have a clear thought in my head. It would — the answer, can I say the answer I wouldn’t say first?

Charlotte: Absolutely. 

Lori: The answer I wouldn’t say is go make a splash yourself and do something big and crazy, because I think a lot of people think that’s what coaching is, and I don’t. Sure, you can make a splash and all that, but it’s the other way. It’s about transformation. Do something that’s really transformational for yourself and understand you and your makeup and how that creates your actions in the world and do something to change that. See the world in a new way and understand what it means to see the world in a new way because then you can coach others to do that. And, for me, that’s way more interesting than go make a big splash. 

Charlotte: I thank you so much for saying that because as you and I were discussing earlier, there’s a lot of programming out there that is designed to help people become coaches and the focus of that is how do you coach from Burma and make however much money a day you want to make and that’s all the way that it is. But I so appreciate that notion of how do we really take accountability for our own growth and development as a vehicle and it’s a very necessary vehicle for enabling us to help others do the same. Almost like a prerequisite or a precursor, candidly.

Lori: I think, yeah.

Charlotte: So my final and last question for you. I mean, I have many, but for today, my final and last question for you is what question would you like to answer that I haven’t asked you today?

Lori: That’s a hard one. It has something to do with — something about me and impact, like what’s the impact I want to make or what’s the impact coaches can make.

Charlotte: Beautiful. So, let me ask you, what is the impact that you want to make?

Lori: Consistent with everything else I’ve said, it’s to have more and more people understand their humanity, the dark sides and the light sides, and how much we can do individually and collectively, because we are a collective species, we’re a social species, just to recognize the power of that, the power of the positivity of that and the power of the negativity of that and we can choose, but to recognize, that’s the impact that I want to help more people recognize that power that we have. Good news, bad news.

Charlotte: Lori, thank you. This has been delightful. I so appreciate your time today. 

Lori: Thanks, Charlotte. It was a great conversation. Really enjoyed it. 

Charlotte: Me too.