Episode 2 - The metaphor one !

"The Coaching Lens" is where experienced coaches Alan Rapley and Nick Pullan dive deeper into the art and science of coaching. Each episode unpacks key models, frameworks, and philosophies that have shaped their thinking, all through the lens of real-world coaching practice. Expect open, honest conversations about the vital importance of rapport-building, why trust is the cornerstone of all effective coaching, and how deeper connections drive performance. Thought-provoking, practical, and always light hearted, this is a must-listen for anyone serious about becoming a better coach or leader.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Good afternoon

SPEAKER_01: 0:08

and welcome to episode two. How are you, Alan? I'm good, Nick. And before we start, congratulations. The last time we did this, you were a single man. Now you're a married man.

SPEAKER_00: 0:17

Yeah, I think the thing that's come out of that that's most salient is that my wife said that she listened to the podcast and said, did you drink two pints of beer during it? And that's the only thing she got from it. So maybe I keep some of my little pearls of wisdom to myself so I don't distract people. Thank you for that. No worries. Right, so here we are. We are at episode two and we're going to go a little bit deeper into who we are and what we do and set up really our agenda for going forward. forward as we meet people and share their lives with you so I've been asked to do a bit of a teacher's recap on what happened last week we talked about you know the things we covered and we are we say we started off with metaphors and of course the lens itself is a metaphor isn't it so we're going to help you see coaching and coaches through a lens and you're going to see through us as well we are your lens so we are metaphor and then I thought about metaphor sometimes can be a bit of a sticky wicket can't they but then of course that's a metaphor to describe a metaphor so it gets complicated very quickly quickly.

SPEAKER_01: 1:18

Especially with the cricket season starting this weekend.

SPEAKER_00: 1:21

Tomorrow. And I'm keeping wicked for the first, so I'm in trouble. Now, Alan and I used a lot of metaphors last week, and metaphors can be something that splits an audience. Sometimes they can land beautifully, sometimes they can't. Mine were fox poo and dog poo. Now, Alan, Alan was a chameleon, an organic chameleon, in a t-shirt with a Switzerland flag on it. He was sprinkling fairy dust and waving a magic wand, and he says he keeps his friends in pots. Now, I'm assuming, Alan, you don't go around collecting eyeballs and storing them in jam jars, right?

SPEAKER_01: 1:51

When you read it back like that, very eclectic conversation we had.

SPEAKER_00: 1:55

And he talked about being a travelling Wilbury. Now, I had to Google that. And they are a really bad 70s pop group. We were into Hugh and Cry at college, right? So he wasn't a travelling Wilbury. But we did talk about metaphors. And I think that I would like to ask you about, Alan, is a couple of other metaphors you used in terms of models. But before we do that, can you please dive in and give me a bit more? Give us a bit more. about what you're bringing to the table. Not that you're not, but last week we talked about my experience as a teacher and as a coach from being a teacher and a senior leader. What about you? Because you were an Olympian. You are the most important person I know in my life. So what do you bring to the table? What lens are you looking through?

SPEAKER_01: 2:35

Yeah, I've had a wide and varied career, I think, over the last 30 years, probably even 35. As you said, Nick, we were at college together for two years doing a HND, which back in the day stood for have no degree but we excelled in that we found our groove let's say to use another metaphor in those two years and and as a 20 year old when when we graduated with our HND I got an offer to go over to America and swim and swim full-time but also do a degree so something that I'd gone from do I do a degree to I'm going to get a degree but and also I'm I'm swimming and I went from being top 200 in in the country to top six in the world in in six years and i had to learn an awful lot of things i learned in 1992 that that i didn't make the olympic team by five one hundredths of a second and i sat down with my coach and worked out what i could do to make sure i didn't feel like that in 1996 and i guess we came up with a list of things about controlling controllable before that even existed in everybody knows it now 30 years later everybody has heard of controlling the controllables but back then that wasn't and it was a very start of sports science you know there were no sports sites back then really there was no biomechanics relatively speaking there was very little physiology and nutritionists etc etc so it was very much the wild west and you did what you did basically led by yourself and i think that led me to a lot of things in terms of how i operated every every meter i swam i recorded every meter i coached as a swimming coach for the next eight years after i finished swimming i record and I reviewed it. And it's kind of the basis of all sports coaching, but I think also executive coaching of plan, do, review. And we can sit down and argue whether that's the right model or whether that's an outdated model. Personally, I think it needs to change. I think it needs to start with a review, then go to a plan and then do the doing. I have a little saying of the first thing that normally goes with people when they get busy is the reviewing. So then you have plan, do, plan, do, plan, do. And when you get busy and again, you start planning. So you end up going do, do, do.

SPEAKER_00: 4:51

And it's nice to hear that you were so forensic with that collecting of evidence, that recording, because if you are really good at forming habits around collecting and watching and thinking and reviewing, as you say, that's going to stop you from getting into those bad habits of just doing.

SPEAKER_01: 5:08

And I still use that and utilize that, that every session to me. So I used to break the year down. I used to break, well, I used to break the four years down. So I trained 10 times a week, let's say, to make the maths easy. And I trained 50 weeks a year. So there were 500 interventions during that year that I could get better. So each session was worth one 500. And I wanted to add up how many 500s every day went towards my overall performance. So over a four-year period, that would be a lot of 0.02s. But I also said if I didn't have a good day, if I ate badly, if I slept badly, if I didn't do weights very well, if I didn't stretch very well or do my control balls very well, I used to take off a 500th as well. And if it was an average day, you'd just stay at zero. So I used to calculate roughly how much better I would be next time I swam in a competition based on those sessions.

SPEAKER_00: 6:04

That's a bit scary to me as a non-elite athlete and a very, very non-elite athlete, as I'll be seeing tomorrow, dropping loads of balls behind the stumps in the first 11. As a non-athlete, I would say that that level of forever target setting and expectations of drive drive drive get your potential be the best that's pretty scary and if it's translated in the wrong way into the executive coaching world and into business generally it's toxic can you cast some light into how you help leaders not get so results focused as you have to be in athletics of course because you know your swim times were your swim time

SPEAKER_01: 6:42

well so i didn't see it as i saw it more of a process nick rather than forensically dissecting what I did so my process was turn up on poolside early my process was a thousand sit-ups a day my process was give a hundred percent what my coaches asked in a training session now that may look like plus 0.02 of a percent or negative 0.2 but it was all about the process because it's all about for me the outcome and the output after 12 months two years four years eight years, whatever it is. And that's where I think it translates very well into executive coaching. I think you need to be aware of what you do in a day-to-day basis that is going to affect your process or influence your process, which is therefore going to influence your outcomes and outputs. My experience of this is that people don't look far enough ahead. They look from quarter to quarter or month to month or even April to March just because it's a financial year and want to be a little bit better than they were. My thought is they don't reflect well enough to put stuff in place that they can control and they can influence to make their outcomes better. But not many people think more than 12 months down the line. Not many people think 4, 8, 12, 16. There will be athletes now thinking about the 2036 Olympics. If you're a 14-year-old now in 2025 come 2036 you're going to be bang on the age that you need to be but what we need to do is train you for that performance not train you in the constraints of today's performance it's putting stuff in place for that in 12 years time and i'm not sure many people in business think like

SPEAKER_00: 8:37

that alan thank you that's been really useful there's a couple of things that resonate with me really well one is that idea of process today i've just been playing golf with a couple of chaps from the golf club. One guy who's just recovering from an illness and isn't playing to the standard he used to. And if he just enjoyed the round a little bit more and the good shots he hit, ignoring the bad ones, at the end of it, I think he'd have got more out of it. Instead, he was disappointed, frustrated, beating himself up, being very self-critical, a lot of negative bias there. And he's in his 70s, so you don't really want to patronise people, but he just wasn't smelling the flowers as he was going along. Other people's good shots are enough or jokes are enough to enjoy the round, let alone how well you play. So I'd love to hear about process.

SPEAKER_01: 9:22

And I think that's a brilliant, brilliant point. I spent a vast majority of my early 20s looking at the bottom of a swimming pool. It's not the most enjoyable thing if you look at it in that point of view. So why do we do it? Why do millions of kids in the UK and tens of millions of kids around the world do it? Well, you do it because you want to test yourself. You've got

SPEAKER_00: 9:45

no friends.

SPEAKER_01: 9:46

You were the last of a bad group to be quite honest. Yes. So you have to make sure. So I used to make sure that I could put certain things and I like to chunk things. And I used to like picking two or three things that I would work on over a four to eight week period and make sure they were going definitively better by the end of eight weeks than they were at the start. And that could be something as simple as breath holding or streamlining or breaking out of a turn or something like that. as an example, stroke counts and all that stuff without getting too technical. That's what I did. That's the way I got through it. That's the way I wanted to work. I wanted to be as perfect each time I swam as I could be. I think what happens, especially nowadays, everybody tries to do everything all the time. And what they don't do is kind of break stuff down into little chunks and go, right, I'm going to work on that. And I think we can do this in business. I'm going to be better at doing A, B and C for the next eight weeks. And I want people to see that I'm getting better at that. Rather than trying to do the whole alphabet, I'll just concentrate on three things within that project or within those meetings or within whatever it is. And I think that's what I bring into my coaching is that sort of challenge.

SPEAKER_00: 11:06

Yeah, thanks. That's a really great way of explaining what we know as periodization, don't we, from our qualifications. And yeah, I think there's a lot to be learned by that. The second thing I was going to talk about, Alan, that you really helped me to see resonate in what you said was about these longer term goals and not seeing such short termism. And most people that I come across in leadership management and in business who want more actually want to get to a place where they can thrive because they're struggling. And they struggle because they may lose the ability to sleep really well. They're under a lot of stress. They've got a lot of accountability and they don't sleep so well. So if you're not able to sleep well, then you won't be able to do your conflict resolution in a difficult meeting because you just pooped. So what you're saying about having this smarter, longer term view, perhaps a bit more pragmatic, a bit more realistic. We know there's a massive planning bias in humans. We all underestimate how long it's going to take to do something. Yeah, we're going to be able to do it before we can. There's a huge, huge human bias. It's a really bad shortcut of our cognition. And I

SPEAKER_01: 12:14

think that's a key word there, Nick, is shortcut. There isn't a shortcut I can't shortcut on finite skills in order to get to the Olympic final I have to do x y and z well and I find people like to take the minimum competency framework let's call it as an Olympic athlete 71% wasn't good enough 99% wasn't good enough so you talk about sleep can you get into routines can you get into knowing your sleep routines do you then have your nutrition enough time away? Do you stay hydrated during the day? Do you have too many cups of coffee? Do you do this? Do you do that? Do you do the other? Do you fit in exercise? Whatever it is that helps you sleep, do you read for 45 minutes before you go to bed or whatever? Do you not have your phone in your bedroom? And I think that's all part, and that's what I mean by process. If you're 100% fixed and focused on achieving that outcome, whether that's being a an f1 whether that's providing enough money for your children to go to university or or whatever it is what is it you're prepared to do but i also think on that nick another thing is what are you prepared not to do which may be diametrically opposed but the amount of friday nights i wanted to go out and have a have a drink or go do this or go do that knowing that i got a six o'clock session in the morning on a saturday am i prepared not to go to the cinema and sit in and rest and drink an extra half a litre of water so I can get that positive 1 500th of a percent towards my overall goals for this year on Saturday morning by staying in on Friday night.

SPEAKER_00: 14:00

The process isn't just about doing stuff it's about not doing actually some quite nice stuff I think we're talking about the marshmallow effect aren't we there there's some fantastic research that's been done over 30 60 years there's some contention about its validity but I I've seen it work in schools. And it suggests that if you put a marshmallow in front of a child, four-year-old, and you say, if you leave that there for the next 10 minutes, when I come back, you can have two. And the child will sit there, and they will wait, and they will wait, and they will look out the window. And then when it's time, they will get their second one, and they will have two. Other children will just put it straight in their mouths. Other children will nibble, sniff it, lick it, do all kinds of stuff. And they say that the children that can withstand this and delay gratification, push the good stuff to the future sometime, because it's good for you now, they'll do better in life. And I know there's been some contention over the long-term findings of that, but I think you're describing that really well there, that if we can resist the bias to almost self-sabotage ourselves by enjoying those short-term pleasures, we'll get a long-term.

SPEAKER_01: 15:05

And let's not beat around the bush, and I'm sure if any of my swimming friends listen to this, you've still got to live your life, you've still got to go out and enjoy yourself, and you've still got to do some interesting and fun stuff. My process when I was a swimmer is there's a time and a place for that. And again, it comes down to the planning and the reflection. Can you plan to have organised fun as such? It's an important part of the process. And yeah, that's kind of where that takes me, that sort of plan, do, review. The little impacts that a day can have or a couple of hours can have on an overall performance plan. Knowing that you're going to be ill, you're going to get in, Thanks, Al. I think it's really interesting, the

SPEAKER_00: 16:10

perspective that you bring from that background that is so foreign to me in so many ways. The things that you're pulling out there, which are process and about being smart around what our planning looks like long term, are really applicable to anyone receiving coaching or even therapy. I think it's really good advice. You talked about something last week that I want to dive into now. You talked about your kind of team model. You mentioned models, and I'm not a massive fan of models. I'm sure Mr. Grow and Mr. Stepper and Mr. Oscar have all made a lot of money out of their models. But you mentioned kind of the PDR model, which I think a lot of teaching is predicated around. You plan something, you do it, you review it, you assess it, you mark it, you check it. And you, like I, both feel that the R at the start is even more important than the GROW model that is perhaps internationally accepted as kind of the gold standard. I prefer to have a little G, a massive R, a little O, a little W, because that reviewing, that reality, that where are we Who am I? I find that really, really critical. But let's go back to your model from last week, this kind of moving across on a T and then being curious to drop down. Can you tell me, can you tell us how that works in a session? Because who decides what that oscillation looks like? Where does it, how far does it go? And then who decides when the deep dive down into that kind of deeper stuff goes?

SPEAKER_01: 17:39

It's a really good question, Nick. And I don't think it's a model. I just think it's my way of doing it, whether it is a model or not. Alan's model, we're going to call it Alan's model. We'll copyright it afterwards. All it really is, is for me, when I'm in the contracting phase of a relationship with a client, I always feel the more information I have, and I always find the first two or three meetings I have with the client is as much about me writing pertinent things down as anything else. And whilst you only talked about listening last week, it's about listening, it's about being curious. And that's what the T horizontal of the tea looks like to me it's curious it's it it's the listening it's the looking at the observation of when someone's eyes come alive or ears go bright red or or they start smiling a little bit and you know that's that means a lot to them that is when you start drilling down a little bit and you can tell when when you become quite good at this i'm not saying i'm i'm an expert or anything like that you can gauge how far down you can go you know i think i'd don't know who it is but you know if you ask three why questions the fourth why question is really really really difficult to answer so can you answer different ask different questions to elicit different spaces as as we do quite a lot it's then that goes off to another tea sometimes into another tangential tea so you've kind of got these links and breaths and depths all over the shop i think why i do it and why i feel comfortable doing it is i don't like getting to session seven or eight and going, oh, I didn't know that or I wasn't aware of that. And it goes back to what I always say is I coach the person, not the job title. So I like to know about the person. What are their likes outside? Do they have a dog? How many kids have they got? What stage of life are their kids at? Where do they go on holiday? And all that sort of stuff, plus business stuff, plus work stuff, plus personal life stuff, because that's the person in front of us that's who is there yes they might be a CEO yeah they might be a COO yeah they might be a head of or manager of but they're still a person they've still had a past they've still got a present and they've still got a future and I think we use the past stretch the future in terms of how people do stuff how people can get smarter to use a word that you've done more efficient and more effective whilst their life is busy around them so that's that Alan,

SPEAKER_00: 20:17

I love it. Being flexible enough to listen to people properly and get to know them beyond the job and to realise that there's going to be little nuggets in there that you're going to find that could be valuable. And I think what you're hinting at there is something that I feel very passionate about, that most of the time, it's a bit like five a day, right? We're told five a day, that we hold our five fingers up. Now, we've got used to things working in fives all through our lives. There's fives being used over and over again. And I bet you, you, there's been a case where I've counted my five a day when I was seven years old. So why is someone telling me to count my five a day? I can already do it. And if you spend enough time with somebody, I think this is a really humble approach to coaching. I think you're going to easily come across times where they've already fixed their problems in the past. And we get in the way sometimes if we're not careful of trying to be clever and come up with an answer with them when actually they've already had their answer. That's why I'm particularly willing to spend so much time in that reality phase of grow. I don't have any goals. I don't want any options. I just want to learn about you and you to learn about you. And you're probably going to go, hey, I did it before. And hey, do you know what? I don't need next session because I know where I'm going. I find that really powerful. What I really liked about your description there about how the dynamic might work in a session, and I can see this in counselling work as well, is that you use your instincts and body language reading skills to know when the right time is to ask that dive question Can you explain a bit more about that?

SPEAKER_01: 21:47

I think it's different now because of the online nature of things. So there's different cues, I find, than there is when you're doing face-to-face. I know I do some face-to-face work at the moment, and I know you do a lot of walk and talks and walk and talk virtually and walk and talk face-to-face as such. The human person is an interesting beast. They adapt, they adopt, they can mask, they can hide, they can over-exaggerate. But when you get to know someone i feel you can see it's like playing poker isn't it you can you can start seeing people's tells unless they become super aware of their tells and stop doing that or lead you up the garden path with that as well i was thinking of something when you were talking there of i think i like to spend more time in that rapport building phase to get quicker movement later on in the sessions rather than go hey how are you doing you're x i'm y you're married What's your job title? How many kids you got? Two. Right. Let's crack on. What do you need to solve at work? For me, that's not what this is about. That's very, very transactional for me. They may want to get there, but I think, and the way I've always worked and the way I operate, if I understand them more, we will get there quicker and it will be more sustainable.

SPEAKER_00: 23:10

And to use a couple of areas of psychology that kind of feed into this in education if you deal with children that have suffered really bad adverse experiences you know they call them aces which is a kind of weird way of saying it but adverse childhood experiences kids have had a really bad time it could be abuse neglect it could be all kinds of stuff what they need is one secure attachment later in life one secure attachment relationships are critical they can recover hugely all the lost time all that bad stuff from early on with one secure secure attachment with one good relationship, a teaching assistant, a teacher, a youth worker, someone from the local church, a granddad. It doesn't really matter who. That's really, really powerful. And the stuff that I read around therapeutic relationships, not just in therapy, but beyond that, is that often it's not what you do in the sessions is who you two are. Because if you two have got a strong relationship and there's trust and there's guilt-free conversations and there's openness, you can do all kinds stuff without that relationship building you're really wasting your time using this tool and that tool and this method and that approach because it's founded on a rocky soil it's not sown on good soil

SPEAKER_01: 24:27

and I think you're exactly right I think and it's been my experience the more you can get into that the better the relationships but also the better the process and the outcomes are so on top of the Switzerland t-shirt I also say I like to have a mirror on one shoulder to help self-reflection talk about these metaphors and I have this little trampoline on the other shoulder to bounce ideas off and bounce ideas around and we're all busy people everyone's busy all the time but I also think this allows them allows people to have an hour out or two hours out thinking about themselves we're giving them permission to do self-reflection we're giving them permission to bounce ideas around we're giving them permission to sometimes offload the stuff they've been thinking around or thinking through or can't raise at work or can't raise with certain people at work. Can't think about how do I do this at a senior leadership level? Talking with me, talking with you, talking with other coaches out there, discussing it allows them that safety to concentrate on themselves and process themselves.

SPEAKER_00: 25:36

Alan, it's really, it's a lovely, lovely way that I think draw near to the end of this, our second episode. I feel touched by your words. Oh. a little bit confused by even more metaphors of trampolines and mirrors. I'm sure we're going to get through that. You're a complicated chap, aren't you? I am. I am.

SPEAKER_01: 25:54

I even confuse myself most of the time, Nick.

SPEAKER_00: 25:56

But, Alan, I did like your Alan's model, and I'm going to get on QuickSmart and get that copyrighted. That idea of a simple T, where you're bouncing across, you're bouncing across, and that's a freedom. It's a curiosity. It's not a set path. It's just a kind of bounciness. I like that. when every now and then you're going to drop down deep and that could be based on what you've learnt about them in that time where you really got to know them but it could just as well be something they've come across because they've been more open with you and willing to share that so I really like that model and I'm going to use that in my work this week I haven't got a lot of work with it being the holidays but I am going to use that I'm going to think about that so thank you for that and I'm going to I think I'm going to hang on today Joe Root the England batsman when he was captain didn't ever talk about targets goals he just talked about his process he's going to get up he's going to train in a certain way he's going to turn up at the ground before a big match and he's going to prepare in the same way and everything is going to be a routine and a set of processes that he's just going to stick to knowing with confidence that if you do that you should end up with success and if you don't then you deal with it but it's a process it isn't an end point so I think in this conversation you've helped me kind of go around in a circle a bit in a good way because I started off listening to you talk about all these five hundredths of a second thinking, blimey, that's scary. How do you translate that into the real world? But I'm confident that that idea of process actually is the way to do that. It's not about the goal or the time. It's about the process towards the goal.

SPEAKER_01: 27:31

I'm going to add one little story just to finish from my side. I relatively did the same warm-up. I worked on my warm-up before every competition for 18 months. So I got to a point where I went, that is my warm-up. That That is the one that gets me to perform at my best. I did that warmup every swimming competition for the next six years, apart from one, the Olympic final. I went into the warmup pool, did a length and a half, and I was in the mid, I was warmed up in lane four, did a length and a half in a long course four, so it's 75 meters. And my brain went, you're done. My body went, I agree. I stopped swimming, went under the lane ropes, got out of the pool. My coach was going, what are you doing, Al? What are you doing? I said, I'm done I don't need to do another stroke I am there I am on it so it's the only time in six years I didn't do that process because I innately felt I was in the right place at the right time to do the right thing and I swam my fastest ever race by 0.6 per second

SPEAKER_00: 28:33

and I intuitively and innately feel this is the right time to draw to a conclusion thank you for that anecdote Al very inspiring you are the most important and famous person I've ever met in my life and every curry how I go to with you I can share with all the clients in there that very fact can't I and I do so thanks Al I really enjoyed that really the feedback we've had not just from coaches but from non-coaches has been really really encouraging fantastic that the listening public is not just coaches I think that's really exciting

SPEAKER_01: 29:02

until next time then because there will be more and more and more of these

SPEAKER_00: 29:06

looking forward to

SPEAKER_01: 29:06

it Al alright cheers Nick

SPEAKER_00: 29:08

bye now