The Coaching Lens

Episode 1: Behind the Lens – Meet Alan & Nick

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Welcome to the very first episode of The Coaching Lens! In this opening conversation, we invite you to step behind the mic and get to know your hosts—Alan Rapley and Nick Pullan. From Olympic pools and headteacher offices to executive boardrooms and coaching spaces, we share the journeys that brought us here and the shared passion that fuels this podcast.

This episode sets the stage for what’s to come: honest, insightful conversations with exceptional executive coaches. You'll hear about why we started The Coaching Lens, what coaching means to us, and what you can expect from future episodes as we explore the philosophies, methods, and human stories behind truly great coaching.

If you're a coach, a leader, or just someone who loves learning about what makes people tick; you're in the right place.

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UNKNOWN:

Bye.

SPEAKER_00:

Good afternoon, Alan. Hey, Nick. How are you? I'm very well. This is Nick Pullen here. And Alan Rapley. And welcome to the very first The Coaching Lens podcast. Why are we here, Nick?

SPEAKER_01:

Trying not to talk over each other like we were doing for the first three or four takes. And what's the real reason we're here? We are very keen to explore the world of podcasts and look at coaching through a lens.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. And I guess we've come together as two friends for over, well, nearly 40 years now, scarily. but we're now both executive coaches and one of the thoughts we've had as a pair is how do we kind of get that out to the wider populace and and how do we make best use of the skills and behaviors but also our experiences for other people

SPEAKER_01:

yeah i think we both feel that coaching is a a wonderful medium a wonderful thing and we may have an interesting story we may have some insights we may have some experiences that others don't have but what we both definitely have is a real passion for coaching and no matter who you are coaching is the thing isn't it we may bring something to it when we're doing coaching but coaching is the thing which is one of the lovely kind of democratic things about it isn't

SPEAKER_00:

it i think you're really right i think it's a lovely way of explaining it and i guess part of my passion for doing this is i've been coaching for 20 years in different industries and and different environments and i just want to start giving a bit of that information back but what i'm really curious about is how other people do it what are other people's thought processes what their what their go-to behaviors are their models why they got involved in the first place and where do they want to grow it to so on this podcast we're going to be interviewing not interviewing talking with probably is a better is a better word talking with other and and critically listening to and listening to thank you and yeah talking with and listening to other executive coaches they're out there in in the uk and wider around how they're do stuff and what their passion is and why they do it and how they do it. Because I think critically, executive coaching is a very closed job for one of your profession, because you can't talk about it with anybody else. You can't talk about how I've done this or why I thought of it this way or whatever, because it's a safe space for people to open up, to be vulnerable, to be in a trusted environment. So we don't often have these conversations other than in maybe a group supervision session or a one-to-one on supervision session. But again, that is very insular.

SPEAKER_01:

If I can interrupt, Alan, I think the insular comes from standalones like us, which is who this is really going to perhaps be really interesting to, people that don't get peer supervision on a plate at work, week in, week out. It's an opportunity for that collaborative learning set in a very small scale and a chance to learn a bit more from different people's perspectives.

SPEAKER_00:

Brilliant, 100%, Nick. It's It's kind of the ethos of what this is, is we can work in our own single silo for the next 10, 15, 20 years and not be aware of what everyone else does or what everybody else does will not be aware of what we've done. And I just feel this is this is a platform for us to go explore that. And I think a byproduct will be I get better because I know I've got a lot of growth to go in this and other people will get better. And I'm assuming and I know you're relatively omnipotent in all of this. Nick, but you could get better as well, even if it's just as marginal compared to me. So that's kind of our starting bit of this, I guess. That's our starting level. That's our base camp, if you will. So I'm going to ask the first question because it's easier for me to ask questions and answer questions, especially with you being here, Nick. Why did you start in coaching?

SPEAKER_01:

What was your... You can't answer that question because the script you gave me has got who am I as my first question, so I'm sorry. Who are you? Thank you. This is very unscripted. I asked this question to someone today, actually, when I was doing one of my coaching walks. And they immediately said, oh, I'm a head teacher. And we talked for some time about the kind of Freudian nature of saying that. Are we describing and defining ourselves by the job we do? And if that job's a tough job that doesn't ever get done, what is it saying about us? So just saying who are you is a very powerful tool. So it made me change my answer. And my answer is I'm a happy person. So who am I? I'm a happy person who wants to carry on being a happy person. I think who strives to be a happier person every day. And happy means a lot of things to different people.

SPEAKER_00:

I was just about to say, what does happy mean to you, Nick?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it can mean many things, can't it? Contentment or joy or love or fulfillment. It's a combination of all those things. And defining it doesn't really get you that far sometimes. because it will be different for everybody else but I suppose in a useful way to give a bit more pragmatic information is I'm an ex-teacher after 30 years who did a lot of coaching sometimes unconsciously subconsciously subconsciously is the right word and across all different kinds of schools including head teacher and I've been an amateur sportsman and love sports which is where we first met really all through my life and now I'm a self-employed I would call myself a personal development coach but I'm finding increasingly increasingly that work is at the therapeutic end of that spectrum and I'm studying to be a counsellor trying to be a counsellor so that's it that's really me there's a bit quite a bit of my job there which is an important context for this podcast but yeah I think I want to be a happy person which I think all coaches strive to help their coachees be

SPEAKER_00:

and I'm sure we'll unravel a lot of this as we go through this episode and various other episodes that are obviously going to come down come down the line

SPEAKER_01:

so Alan the same the same same answer to you but you can't say what he said okay I sat next to you at university remember so you can't keep saying that

SPEAKER_00:

so who am I um I think I'm someone who's in transition quite a lot I've had a lot of stages of my life and I definitely have transitioned from one stage to the next to the next to the next not with necessarily an end goal or an end outcome but more of a let's see where this this journey takes us if it takes me a here or there or the next place, then that's fine. Let's be open and agile enough to do that. So I guess I'm kind of someone who's a bit of a traveling Wilbury. And I was describing to someone the other days, I have a dozen pots of friends, if that makes sense. I have school friends, university friends. I have university friends in the States. I have swimming friends. I have friends from Edinburgh. I've had friends from Leicester. I have friends from all over the shop in different pots. And that's kind of difficult in one way because trying to stay in contact with everyone all the time is extremely difficult, especially when I first went over to the States pre-internet and pre-mobile phones. But now I think I look at rather than friendships and people that I come across, it's more about how they help me grow, help me become the person I'm becoming in my late 50s now of how I'm getting shaped a bit more. I think I got shaped very much so between that sort of 12 to 30 years of age. I think I'm now going through the next phase of that. So who am I? I don't really know. If you cut me open, I don't know what it would say, but I'm very much, just to say what he said, I'm about people development. I'm about individualised and team people development, whatever that means to that person. I'm definitely not a teller. I'm definitely not a autocratic style. I want people to evolve and develop the way they want to evolve and evolve to where they want to be. I think

SPEAKER_01:

you've got a nice resonance in how you describe yourself there because if you're in a state of change, maybe in a permanent state of some kind of flux, that's a really good way to come at your sessions because you must have a growth mindset. You must be very open-minded, which makes it easier for you to see other people's situations and in a similar vein so I think that's quite powerful

SPEAKER_00:

and I've just come out of a session as well and I was trying to describe to someone he asked me about my coaching style and I said well the first thing I try to do and I guess I probably do it 9 out of 10 times if the client or the coachee wants me to is I wear a Switzerland t-shirt for want of a better phrase and I'm going to get a Switzerland t-shirt or a set of t-shirts with a Switzerland flag on it so I can be neutral I try to come into things with as little bias as I possibly can, because the way I see the world is very different than anyone else sees the world. So I try and be as neutral as possible. And I think that's always the first step for me.

SPEAKER_01:

And I think there's a lot of power there. I know that when I was studying for my counselling qualification early on, some of the trainees, some of the students had a massive problem with a natural bias to try to fix and you see it in teachers as well and teaching assistants and parents we all do it there's a natural bias I'm not even sure whether it's an officially recognized bias but it probably is I'll have to google that or any other search engine will be available I think there's a natural bias that we have to fix and when you are a helping person it's almost counterintuitive to remain neutral and you have to be really really conscious of doing that So the fact that you feel the need to mark that down as one of your neutrality, one of your unbiased key things about your style, I think that's good. I recognise the opposite of that in my experience as a teacher, because if you don't go and collect the dog's mug from the front gate or the fox poo from the front gate, it will be walked through the school by 125 people, small people. And it will ruin the day for everybody. So to say to somebody else, let's have a coaching conversation about you picking up fox poo doesn't really work can you just fix you go and troubleshoot drain swamp fix problems

SPEAKER_00:

and I think and I think that's something that I've really really learned the last sort of 10 years 15 years maybe of not having that fixed mindset that what the one thing isn't the answer that I talk a lot in terms of pendulums of at the top of one side of the pendulum at the top of the other side of the pendulum pendulum but what we tend to forget is the journey the pendulum makes from one side and it goes left to right right to left and left to right and right to left and at any point of that we can pick to be at that point in that pendulum and i think it's very as you said you know it's we have fixers or we have people who support let's just call it what we forget is there's there's a massive amount in between those two areas where each person will need different stages of that or or meanings about even in within one session within 10 minutes of one session or across half a dozen sessions so yeah it's it's i guess it's very very early to get into our philosophies but i'm very very much aware that to answer your original question who am i i am someone who i think is is open-minded and and definitely doesn't have a fixed mindset of what life should look like for everybody else and that's maybe come from my transitions i don't know i'm sure a psychoanalyst would look at this differently, but I think that's who I am. I guess I'm a bit of a chameleon, if that's a good way of describing it. Well,

SPEAKER_01:

I think that's a healthy thing in many ways in coaching, because one of the questions that we posed ourselves before we did this was, what is our go-to model? And I think it's a leading question in many ways, because most of us don't like too strict a model. And that is how education is predicated unfortunately if you look at uh i'm a proud ex-educationalist i suppose i'm still an educationalist but having worked in schools for 30 years when you've got 30 children of disparate levels disparate needs scn gifted and talented in front of you for 55 minutes to learn something you have to have a very very very rigid model just to make it happen and the idea of personalizing that learning for 30 people at once could drive you mad and i do believe it causes a massive amount of under the floor stress for all teachers and teaching assistants because it's a job you can never do properly. You're constantly fudging personalisation because you've got so many bodies in the room.

SPEAKER_00:

It was interesting phrase you used there about teaching them something. And I'm often one to think of, and again, it's something I've kind of delved into a little bit more over the last five, 10 years of, does every session have to have a positive learning outcome or a learning. And it's something I grapple with. And I think it's more about, and I think in teaching, I've never been a teacher, but is it the expectations of the parent, the adult of that child will come home and go, what have you learned today? And I know when I asked my 12-year-old son that, he goes, nothing, nothing. And as an adult, you think, well, surely you must have learned something. And he's like, well, no. And now I'm doing a lot of coaching and one-to-one coaching. I don't feel the need for someone to have something learned by the end of it. I almost feel like it's a softer thing that we kind of... evolve over a number of sessions and it always fascinates me if you speak to a sponsor or a line manager or or the company or whatever saying well are they better now than when they started this and and it always cracks me up of well what was better so kind of almost takes me back to that that managing expectations of all parties involved and and of how this is going to be it's not a magic wand it's not a set of fairy dust that you sprinkle on over a few hours and hey presto someone's doing something completely different than they did before

SPEAKER_01:

i think that's right and if you go back to schools the problem with this this rigid model that you have to have to get you know you have to have a starter you have to have learning objectives you have to then deliver work in a certain way that you know is going to hit most people so you might explain some sums on the board some new maths and then you're going to test it out and then you're going to look for errors and then you're going to do a bit of fixing and and then you're going to do a plenary and then send them out with their homework. You have a very, very strict model in terms of time, resources, approaches, philosophies. It has to be very strict. But that's teaching. Yeah. Now, I discovered, I was a PE teacher in my early years, I discovered that you can actually, rather than teach PE, you can organise learning. Okay. I spent my career trying to organise learning for learners rather than teach, and it's really hard. And you can fail an observation with Ofsted because you are organising learning for learners rather than teaching because there is an expectation, as you say, from parents and from line managers, what have you rolled up and poked in their heads today that they can regurgitate that another day in a test? Sadly, sadly, that is what education can be boiled down to in its worst kind of...

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, is it a five, a six, a seven or an eight? So how do you put that learning... for yourself and considering that's taken 30 years to get to this point, how does that come out in your exec coaching?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I think that's a great question. Thank you for asking that. And that wasn't what we were going to plan. So well done for coming.

SPEAKER_00:

This is right off the cuff now. That little

SPEAKER_01:

doobie. What I discovered as I moved through education and I went to head of department and then deputy head and then head, what I discovered I was trying to do was to take what I did well in the classroom and just take it out wider. So what I believed in in my class when I taught children is no bullying. I wanted them to be safe, happy, relaxed, comfortable, confident, and then they learn on their own and you just get out of their way. That's how I saw things. It's a bit more complicated than that, but I think it's true. So I didn't try to take that out to the staff. If the staff are happy and confident, they've got the things they need and they're safe from criticism and complaint, then they can just flourish. And I think that taking something simple and blowing it outwards makes sense to me so what i try to do as a coach now and it's not easy it's not not and i don't always nail it but to take that idea of personalization that it is nothing to do with me yeah everything to do with them the less and the wonderful thing about coaching which is the opposite of teaching is the less you do the more you get and that isn't the same education in education if you want to get 25 kids out of 30 to pass the test you it will come down to your blood, sweat and tears. Coaching, it comes down to their blood, sweat and tears in the way they want to approach it. And my metaphor, which I've thought long and hard about, Alan, after you asked me to talk about my philosophy, the way I see myself, and I use various different ideas, but the metaphor I've stuck to over the last couple of years is I will walk alongside my coaches and I'll stand just behind them, just to one side, and we'll talk. And as we get to a jump we'll discuss which way to go and when we walk through a horrible scary forest we'll talk about how it felt afterwards but that's how I see myself which is nothing like teaching teaching is either the stage the sage on the stage or the guide on the side and both of those I don't think suit coaching they might suit mentoring but they don't suit coaching

SPEAKER_00:

I love that that's that's not often I thought I'd ever say that 30 odd years ago to 50 40 years ago to That was fabulous. That was lovely. And I guess that takes us on to kind of a next level of this. I'm very wary of time, but if we have another couple of minutes on this before we depart, how would you, if you could talk to yourself, and this is a contrived question, Nick, don't get me wrong on this, but if you could tell yourself now as a coach what you now know for when you started, what What were the kind of key guiding messages? Shut up. Shut up. Okay. I would tell myself

SPEAKER_01:

to be quiet. Not me,

SPEAKER_00:

not me,

SPEAKER_01:

but you. I think it's a lesson. It's a lesson I learned. When I taught abroad, I taught foreign languages. So I taught English to Spanish kids and Greek kids. You're paid as a foreign speaker, as an English speaker, to talk a lot in the class because the kids need to hear your voice so they hopefully don't pick up the American accents from telly and they sound a bit more like you. Interesting when children have had... people from belfast teach them or from edinburgh it's really interesting they pick up their accents it's lovely to hear but so i moved into this country to teach pe and was told to be quiet by my mentors you know you're talking too much stand back and watch what they're doing before you go in and say something so i'd be used to being i think the idea would be yours you were the center of all the spokes in the wheel and you're constantly going in and out with all these people which must be boring for the other spokes that aren't being spoken to if you don't want to mix Too many confusing words. But that model doesn't suit teaching PE. It doesn't suit most teaching, to be honest. So I learned then and then had to relearn that again when I became a coach just to be quiet. And the longer you can hold silence for in a comfortable way to give yourself and them time to think, it's powerful. Because here's an amazing stat. We know that it takes about five to 15 seconds for the human brain to process something useful. I don't mean what color is that, blue or black or whatever. I mean something useful. for something a bit deeper five to 15 seconds and yet the average time it takes for a child to put their hand up in the class in school is about 0.6 seconds wow so they're not thinking and then the average time it takes for a teacher to let them respond is about 1.2 seconds so the the wonderful thing that coaching can give us is the time and space just to shut up and let them have time to think and really really reflect so i think the younger the younger coach me probably like I do in life, generally, as a person, talk too much.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. Interesting. How about you? Me, probably on a very similar theme to that.

SPEAKER_01:

You

SPEAKER_00:

can't say what he said.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm

SPEAKER_00:

sorry. Is that going to be a theme all the way through this? Definitely. I guess it's rather than talk less, is listen more. And I know that's probably assumed within talking less that you are listening more, but learning how how to listen and learning how to listen well, I think is a massive, massive skill. I know there's books out there and there's lots of different theories on listening and active listening and inactive listening. But I think, and I was trying to explain it to someone the other day that I come off of an hour, hour and a half coaching and I am exhausted. Not because I've been talking or not because I've been interacting, it's because I've had to so much listening-wise. And I think the reason for me for listening is kind of twofold. One is to be curious, to find out the curiosity in words, as we've done today. So this is relatively completely unscripted. So we can only play off of each other because we've listened to each other. And I think that's one critical area. But it also affords us to ask the killer question. or a series of questions. And I call it my T-frame, where if you think the horizontal of the T, you can go back and forwards till you find an area, and then you can go deep the vertical of the T. And I think that's, for me, one of the critical things is listening to people, finding out and being curious about certain aspects, and then finding out when to go deep on the vertical part of the T. to explore, to be curious, but it lies into yours of giving that person the time to concentrate on themselves for once. I find in business, and I'm sure you find in teaching, and I know generally who you coach at the moment, and you know who I coach in terms of the industries they're from and the levels they are, people don't have a lot of time to think about themselves anymore or self-reflect or go deep on their thoughts about themselves and their performance or their behaviors or their skills or their mindsets or their energy or whatever it is and it goes back to what we said earlier we're not coaching a chief exec we're not coaching a head teacher we're coaching the person and i think the curiosity to find out that person is critical for me and then find out how they are as a person

SPEAKER_01:

let me show that i have been listening because you've made a really good point there and i want to take it back to previous points that you've made and that i've made let's see whether i can draw us together into some semblance of kind of common sense you talked about you being a person who cares about people and their development yeah so caring about people let's just let's just hold that in one hand i'm going to come to back back to that at the end to make my final my second point but my point before that is there's a technical thing when you're listening that if you're fixing and children fix boys particularly i learned in my time don't listen as well as girls so you know you take a 10 year old boy versus a 10 year old girl on average the boys don't seem they seem to fix more have more ideas more quick responses and what happens is if the moment you start to fix someone subconsciously or consciously you can't listen because you're planning your next language so you can see that in coaching you can see it in counselling therapy you can see it in just interactions you cannot be present for someone if you're doing any fixing If you're thinking about what you're going to say, you have to be quiet and then be quiet when they finished. Then you could start to think about your response. If you're planning your response while they're talking, you're not listening. That's the first thing. That's a very technical matter. I don't think anyone on this planet can do that. No one can multitask to that level. And if I go back to what you said, Alan, I think it's lovely about having a passion to help. Counseling is a bit different to coaching from the point of view that most people who come to therapy are sitting in discomfort, we say. They dealing with something unpleasant. Emotional distress.

SPEAKER_00:

They're there for a reason.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Most clients or helpies, whatever you want to call them that come to some therapy, are sitting in discomfort, emotional distress. And if you don't get heard, if you don't get heard by the person who's listening to you, then that's painful. That is adding pain on pain. If you're an assistant leader and you want to be a leader and you go to coaching and the person's not really listening to you you won't make progress you won't get this you won't develop the skills you want to but at the end of the day and that's a real shame and that's terrible for them because they pay good money for it and they deserve to be to be what listen to but if you think about people who come to therapy if you're not being heard and you're sharing your emotional distress then that's really painful because you deserve to be heard and then if you take that that assistant leader needs to be heard as well because just because you're not sat in emotional distress doesn't mean you don't deserve to be listened to so i really feel that you know a passionate desire to make somebody a happier version of themselves to develop themselves has to come with that curiosity and with it we shut up and we're patient

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think that's a fantastic sentence to finish on for our first one. I think we've gone slightly deeper than we thought we would, but I think that's the nature of this is that we will spark off of each other and kind of explore because we're curious people, because we ask questions, because we are passionate. So we will ask that of each other. So I guess from here on in, Nick and I will probably do one, if not two more one-to-ones, whether that's That's a single one that we break into two or do two separate ones. And then we're going to start inviting people in so we can have Nick and I having a conversation with someone else to explore with them, to explore them and explore with them how they are as a coach. Similar sorts of conversations, but as you can see, Nick and I are quite talkative and quite curious and have a lot of, I think, a want of a better phrase a wealth of experience and I'm just super super excited about going on this and I know when we first talked about this a couple of weeks ago it was almost a natural thing to do for us and this isn't about us it's not about other people well this is about other people it's about making or helping other people there we go with that phrase again maybe understand themselves a little bit more but also asking questions of how can you evolve how can you develop how can you get better in whatever better means for you. So I think we've almost got a 360 there of where we started to where we're finishing.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's a fantastic conversation to have whether you're having a couple of pints like I've just had in the background. You didn't notice but I've had two pints. Whether we have it over a coffee or whether we're doing it like this, it's a great conversation because we're learning from it as much as anything else. So that's really the main reason to do it. If anybody else can get any insight into it, fantastic And

SPEAKER_00:

if anybody wants to grab hold of us, where can they get you, Nick? What's your best email?

SPEAKER_01:

On nickpullen, with an A, coaching at gmail.com.

SPEAKER_00:

And for me, that'll be alanrapley497 at gmail.com.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, that's a rubbish email address.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, 497 is... We may be going to White's 497 next time.

SPEAKER_01:

Do you know, I once had... imtherealbatman.com. I wanted something like that, right? You couldn't have it, but you could have imtherealbatman002. So, do you know what? That's not going to work for anybody.

SPEAKER_00:

No, it ain't. It ain't. All right, Nick, until next time. Good to speak to you.

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