Psyched For Business Podcast Episode 5
Episode 5:
Unblurring the lines between coaching and therapy – a unique approach
In this podcast episode, Richard Anderson is joined by Jon Barnes.
Jon is a lecturer in organisational transformation, a regular TEDx speaker, and an author on the topics of human growth in the workplace.
Jon is also Co-Founder of The Listening Collective, who have a very unique approach to coaching.
In this episode, we discuss:
✅ Unblurring the lines between coaching and therapy in the workplace
✅ How to maximise professional performance by providing coaches who are qualified therapists
✅ A little about our own fears, and how we can look at managing them
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Episode 05 - Transcript
Voiceover 0:00
Welcome to Psyched for Business, helping business leaders understand and apply cutting-edge business psychology principles in the workplace.
Richard Anderson 0:11
Hi, and welcome to Psyched for Business. My name is Richard Anderson, thank you for joining me. In this episode, I'm joined by Jon Barnes, co-founder at the Listening Collective. Jon is a lecturer in organizational transformation, and a regular TEDx speaker and author around the topics of human growth in the workplace. And he's worked with 1000s of leaders to adopt progressive ways of working, that have transformed their organizations. In this episode, Jon helps us to try and blur the lines between coaching and therapy in the workplace, and how providing coaches who are qualified therapists can go far deeper beneath the surface in order to maximize professional performance. Thanks for listening. Jon Barnes, thank you very much for joining me. How are you doing?
Jon Barnes 0:56
Yeah, good. Thanks for having me, man. Great to be here.
Richard Anderson 0:59
You're very well, it's a pleasure to have you. And it's a pleasure to be speaking about this topic. It's one that I'm very interested in, The Listening collective, which I know that we'll get into and a huge amount of detail throughout the course of this podcast, you guys have got a very unique approach. But I guess just to set the scene, Jon, it will be really useful if you wouldn't mind giving the audience a bit of background on yourself and how you came to form The Listening Collective.
Jon Barnes 1:21
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. A bit about myself first, the thing that's had me tick in and got me working for my whole career really has been an interest in how we organize ourselves. We're all familiar with the model that most of us have grown up with, which is an autocratic model. From school, you sit down and you kind of passively receive information from the boss at the front, you're told where to sit, when you're allowed to speak, what you're allowed to wear, when you're allowed to go to the toilet. And as far as I can tell, work is roughly the same. You have a boss instead of grades, you have pay grade instead of subjects, you have departments, the uniforms are roughly similar. And it's kind of a continuation of that same autocratic system. And I see it not working for many reasons, partly just for human reasons, I think it stunts our growth, or let's say it stunts our development. And when I say development, I mean, in the research sense of our adult development, the fact that it's possible for us to grow into more complex ways of understanding the world. And it's also just not that nice, as well as not that efficient or effective. It can be quite wasteful, not that there's no role at all for autocracy or hierarchy. There definitely is some, but I've made my career out of trying to work with alternatives, typically, what is sometimes known in the field as self-organizing teams, or self-organization, that's kind of my thing. Along the process of doing this, you know, we're working with complexity. So it's complex, and it's nuanced. And it doesn't work. And you tried to do this, but that happens. And there's second and third-degree implications to everything. But the thing I keep coming up against, or keep having my curiosity piqued by, is that there's all these ways we can organize ourselves far better in the 21st century, that are far more inclusive of complexity and nuanced. And yeah, all of those ways we might self-organize better, still, to me bring about the constant idea that how well are we are actually self-managing, like at managing myself, I have a self or at least a sense that I have a self. Like, I'm not sure how real that is. But that's a full topic. And exactly, absolutely. But I certainly struggle to manage it. And I noticed that in the teams I work with, and particularly for leaders who are dealing with greater degrees of complexity, you know, a big organization, constant change, if you just look at the last few years, from pandemics to Ukraine, to energy crises to cost of living crises, leaders are having to deal with this. And it's hard. And so it seems to me that for all the tools and processes in ways we can organize ourselves really well, fundamentally, our capacity to manage ourself is something we could all do with help with. And we can do with that help, because everyone can do with a bit of help. Like I say that in a loving, compassionate sense, but also because we can all grow and increase our capacity for performing. I don't mean performing like playing a role, I mean, actually getting stuff done. And so The Listening Collective exists for that purpose - to help people and often leaders to navigate complexity to deal with change and to grow from there, really.
Richard Anderson 4:42
Jon, before we get into The Listening collective, right, how far would you go with this? You talk right at the beginning about when we're children in schools and get told where to sit, what to do. I mean, how much do you think we should be looking at the areas of school and changing how that all works? Or is this just a workplace thing, just in your view?
Jon Barnes 4:58
I'll answer it in two ways - my personal application of it is to the workplace. So I kind of go from the principle that or from the premise, let's say that we, you know, school is incredible in lots of ways, by the way, before I go and give the downside like, it's amazing. I'm even in a position in 2022, where I can criticize education. That says how far we've gone, and how far we've got and how great the world is, in many ways. However, I also think it, in many ways, stunts our development, for example, like the child's brain is typically not ready to understand abstract concepts like maths until roughly 12 years old, yet, we start teaching it at five, which is, to my mind, slightly absurd, and a number of things that we also have our autonomy kind of stolen from us. So I see that it's very important, but my professional application of this is that we as adults, grew up like that. And so there's some unlearning and relearning to do for us. So adult education in some sense. And when I say that I really want to make clear to listeners, I include myself, as a novice and a student with a long way to go in that, that's my professional interest. I am absolutely fascinated by education, it might be a whole other topic that I've done some research and have some experience in, but professionally, I put my work into adult education, let's say.
Richard Anderson 6:17
Yeah, and I can tell you are very passionate about it, was just out of interest to see how far that spanned, if you like, fantastic. So that's a brilliant background. I appreciate that, Jon. Talking about The Listening Collective itself - so I know that you guys are unique. And I'm sure you'll talk through how you are unique, I think it's very, very interesting, this whole debate that people have, and it's an interesting topic of conversation, coaching versus therapy, and where the lines blur, or whether where the line goes between the two, I know that you've written articles on it, you've added LinkedIn threads on it, I did something fairly similar recently. But I'd be really keen to get into that topic, if you'd maybe be happy to discuss that in a bit of detail. So in terms of coaching, or business coaching, let's say, traditionally, what does a business coach do?
Jon Barnes 7:06
Maybe first, just before I answer that, I don't know to what degree I'm creating or observing this dichotomy, but the way I came across it was that I, myself was doing really well, in my career. There's nothing broken. And actually, there was nothing, I wanted more, everything was great. But I thought, Well, I still want to grow. And I want to grow for the sake of it. Right? Not to undo a wrong, not to get this or get that, I just, for the sake of it. As I did that, I thought, well, you know, I should get a coach. Right? That's what we do. And so I started thinking, Well, what, what would a coach get me, and this is where maybe I can just, I'm aware to listeners, I'm going to pigeonhole coaching. And I know I'm wrong. There's as much diversity within the category of coaching as there is between the categories of coaching and therapy. And the same would be true for therapy. But fundamentally, I think, as a kind of cheap heuristic, we go to coaching to perform better, do more, do faster, and more, make better decisions. So these are all output-orientated things. And then there's a huge variety as to how a coach deals with that. Fundamentally, it's in order to achieve the output at the end, and it's about the future. Whilst I saw a huge benefit in this, I kind of had the instinct that were I to even want those outputs. The problem is, you know, I felt at a level where I wanted, I wanted to grow, but I didn't know for what output. I didn't have an output in mind. And so in a way, what I was looking for, was not to look forward, but to look deeply and to understand myself more. And I kind of see myself as the tool that I've got to do and be anything or everything. And therefore it felt what I decided to do was not to get a coach, but to get a therapist. And then I was like, well, that's interesting, because we go to therapy for our personal lives, not our professional lives. Yeah, I'm, I'm really sensing that since I'm my only tool. I'm the only tool to do my work with but I'm also my only tool to be a husband and a dad with - it's the same tool. So that distinction doesn't make sense to me right now. But then I was like, well with therapy, we go there to heal ourselves. And I mean that etymologically like a physiotherapist is to heal the body and a psychotherapist is to heal the psyche. And yeah, I was there with nothing on the surface, at least that needed healing. But I could tell that there was potential in me that I was yet to meet or understand, and that I needed to go deep to find that out. And so this was where this was born this coach versus therapy.
Richard Anderson 9:47
That was a self-observation that was just something that you realized was happening?
Jon Barnes 9:52
Absolutely. I'd add to that then observing what I see in workplaces, which is that I get demands from organizations is about people. So right, a head of HR or head of learning development or someone like that will come to me and have some people moan or desire for their team, which might be to perform better to make decisions better to handle conflict better, and what we go to our tools to do that with. And I find these tools incredibly valuable. But fundamentally, I also think they're just tools. And like I said, the meta tool, the mother of all tools that I've got is me. As far as I can see, therapy is the best inter-relational tool we have. Right now. There's now within that field, there's so many modalities, some, I'm not particularly attracted to some I am. So this is this dichotomy kind of continuing now, what we've ended up doing, call it coaching by therapists, the way I've kind of tried to articulate it before is that typically what someone is bringing to us in our coaching sessions is some sort of professional situation or life, right, they have either a problem they're trying to solve or an opportunity they're trying to grasp. And as far as I can tell, coaching, would then try and move us forward into the future where we're succeeding where we were on the flip side of this situation, and everything's rosy. But having therapists as coaches, what we're hoping to do is that you go from that professional life downwards, think of an iceberg with 10%, above the surface, and 90 percent beneath, we go deep instead of forward. So rather than going over the iceberg, we go underneath it into your personal processes, how you deal with conflict, what identities you hold, how you're processing a particular situation, how you feel, just in certain situations, or how you make sense of things cognitively, for that matter. When you deep dive. If you go like literally deep sea diving, you'll find, I don't know, shipwrecks, but you'll also find treasure chests. But certainly I would never go deep sea diving a shipwreck without a certified instructor, which is why at Listening Collective, our coaches are qualified, or in advanced training to be psychotherapists. And then you can emerge on the other side, having found some of those treasures, having explored the shipwreck that we all have, with the help of someone you feel safe with and you can emerge hopefully able to grasp those opportunities, but not only grasping those opportunities, you're doing it with this far greater understanding of yourself, which allows you to grasp many other opportunities, I don't even know what they might be at that point. But your tool, like yourself, hopefully is developed by them. So we feel this is like both meaningful, but also what it gets from coaching, which is really valuable is still a sense that, you know, if therapy can be kind of seen as looking backwards, and being a bit navel gazeley and a bit indulgent, what we're taking from coaching is the ability to maybe look down and deep, but then look forward to have an actual impact, whether it's in your workplace, or whatever it is, and coming back above the surface, right, not just staying down beneath.
Richard Anderson 13:05
I mean, it's really, really, interesting stuff, Jon. So if you're working with an organization and leadership team, and you're doing some coaching with them, they come to you with initially with the problem and you start to deep dive into that person, I guess how readily do they volunteer information about their past or challenges or whatever that might be? Because to me sitting on the other face of it, if I'm sitting with a business coach, and they start delving into that sort of area, it's probably going to take a lot for me to want to volunteer? Do you ever see that as being a bit of a challenge? And if so, how do you circumnavigate it?
Jon Barnes 13:35
There's a few elements to it. First of all, the way we work with clients is we typically contract for a number of hours, and typically a group of people that they'll give this service access to internally, and those people are given a calendar. And then they can find their coach and start on those a one to one confidential sessions. And like I said, everyone's qualified unit psychotherapy training is rigorous. And so you're faced with someone who's done the work themselves, they've seen their own shipwreck, and that can make you feel a bit safer. But nonetheless, what you pick up is true that can be resistant. The first thing to say is, that person only needs to book a session if they want to, no one's making them book a session, or at least I really hope not, it's certainly never asked that we put that pressure in my feeling is that we benefit from things quite often. And mostly when we ask for them and have some readiness to it. You know, I'm not going to say it's not good to ever be pushed into things that you're not sure of, but certainly, a willingness to be there is kind of key to any coaching, whether it's coaching or therapy relationship. So that's the first bit it's voluntary, right? And the second part is, your coach or therapist is never there to pry into you. Not at all. We don't know what to call them because we're coaches who are therapists, maybe listeners is the best version of this. We're here to do just that and listen, and it's by listening that that person takes us where they feel comfortable going maybe to the edge of the shadow, then it's their decision if bit by bit, they want to go there. And so that's definitely something that our listeners are really used to working with is it's just the real principle that we've, we follow you. And that feels really key. And actually just adding to that shadow point I had. I was getting some feedback from some clients recently. And there was this really great metaphor that came up that actually in order to, you know, think of any story big story, like I don't know, Gandalf is a good one, right? He's Gandalf the Grey, but it's only once he falls into the mines of Moria. and face the Borg that he comes out Gandalf the White, so he had to go deep, and it had to get dark. So that's kind of a key part of how we seem to develop that Hero's Journey is seen everywhere, Luke Skywalker becomes a knight via the cave, you know it, you see it all the time, what you need is your Yoda there maybe to go with you. Like that's quite key. But what came up in this conversation with the client was, the monsters are only scary in the dark, you don't have stories of monsters where the light The light was shone on them, and they weren't scary anymore. Monsters are only scary in the dark. And hopefully, getting to the edge of the areas that we feel vulnerable with is, is just about where you want to be. And then you go, you go there at your own pace or not at all, for that matter. That's totally up to the coachee.
Richard Anderson 16:22
Brilliant, and when it comes to the therapy that you guys will, will offer and of course, you're giving people the opportunity to speak you're listening very intently when it comes to the therapy side of things. What are there any specific therapy that works better than others? Or is it case by case basis? How does that work?
Jon Barnes16:41
There's two ways of answering that. One is the reason we're call the Listening Collective, the listening modes really key. And that's because of some age-old research. But that seems to still hold true from what I can gather, which I think Carl Rogers initiated, which was basically, that it seems that the success of a course of what he called the helping relationship, I want to be clear that we're coaches, or we're acting in their capacity of coaches, not therapists. But what he found was that modalities didn't seem to matter nearly as much, at least, as the relationship between those two people. So he found that we're, if empathy was present, congruence was present and unconditional positive regard were present, then the likelihood of this being beneficial to the person asking for help would increase, and the modality kind of didn't matter so much. So that's why listening is the absolute foundation, we come and meet you. And hopefully, this expression that it's when we heard, we hear ourselves, you start to notice things you're saying that make more or less sense. So that's the first part to mention. Then in terms of the because our collective of coaches is growing. It's like where to look, because actually, like I said earlier, there's so much diversity within that field, we are currently showing a preference. And it's actually a preference that the coaching world I think would relate to, it's modalities that tend to meet people in the present moment. They don't ask to go into your past, although those patterns can be useful.
Richard Anderson 18:14
Yeah. Because I think as a layman, and you know, I'm by no means an expert in these areas, but psychoanalysis would appear ostensibly to be very different than something like CBT cognitive behavioral therapy.
Jon Barnes 18:25
So yes, okay. Analysis is probably I'm not I'm not like saying there's no value to psychoanalysis. But it's certainly not something that we're bringing into our sessions with clients who've got coaches who are trained Gestalt therapists. psychosynthesis is another one, which is really interesting because it is kind of a generalist. modality. So it includes lots of modalities like CBT, so more cognitive ones, Gastel focuses more on your emotional world and reactions to things. All they have in common certainly is meeting someone in the present, not with some remembered or pseudo remembered version of our past, we're not there to do that at all. We meet people in the present, we go to whatever depths we go to, and we reemerge with hopefully a new future and new version of ourselves quite often, in mind, at least, that's the fee, the feedback we're getting is that that approach is more effective than what people have experienced in traditional coaching.
Richard Anderson 19:22
Okay, so Jon, one of the areas I'm keen to explore and how the listening collective would approach a particular situation, I'll use me as a, you know, as a good example. So one of the challenges that I've had in the past is, for example, I've been a little bit hesitant to spend money, things like marketing, staffing, those types of things. And I guess, ultimately, when we dive a little bit deeper, that probably boils down to the fact that I don't want to fail. I don't want to spend all of the money. There's a risk there. What happens if the business fails? And I guess for me, there's probably an innate fear of failure there if we went very, very deep, but If you were a coach of mine as an example, how would you go about dealing with that particular scenario or approaching that scenario?
Jon Barnes 20:08
My key interest there goes into your fear of failure itself. Of course, one approach there is to look at all the possible simulations of how this particular decision you're making could go right, like if you spent the money if you didn't, if it went wrong, if it didn't go wrong, and these are all really important, and useful tools, and many of our coaches would use them, no doubt themselves, like simulating and imagining versions of the future is definitely something that's interesting. But what piques my interest, and I imagine, would pique many of our coaches interest who I remind the audience are far more qualified than I am, I would imagine, it's, it's interesting to me, certainly, the fear of failure itself, which, like you say, is something we all experience I certainly experience. But to go there could be interesting, like, how does your fear of failure? You know, what does that look like? First of all, like, biologically, do you experience? How do you experience fear? And what's your relationship with failure? Is it something that exists in your personal life or in your past perhaps, and going into that could be interesting, not only because maybe it will help you make a good financial decision right now. But if your relationship to fear and to failure, and to both of those things, changes, many decisions you make in the different in the future, will change not only the decision, but how you feel about the decision and your process of making that decision can be really different. And maybe that kind of summarizes, it's great that you've brought up an example that summarizes what we believe and we're hearing from our clients is the difference between the way we coach and traditional business coaching, which is that we're using this particular professional instance, for you to look at your own personal process, and then to reemerge, you know, with a greater capacity in your case for making decisions in general, now that you've got a different relationship to that particular monster of yours is yours, which is your fear of failure. And I hear you on that man. Yeah, I
Richard Anderson 22:06
Bet it's quite a common thing to see you answer. Now. I was thinking maybe things like impostor syndrome and people speaking up in meetings, it's all there's always a reason isn't it's not doesn't just happen that you know, you don't want to speak up in meetings. It's probably because you will want this thing to vote. Yeah. impostor syndrome. What if I get found out? It's all that? What if catastrophizing in your head or whatever?
Jon Barnes 22:25
Yeah. And there's different ways of looking at that, like CBT asks you to reframe that thought and to question the thought almost like a scientist, I find that incredibly valuable, but other tools to look into your emotional life or into your relationships and how it comes up there. This isn't navel gazing, because it's like doing that will help you reemerge with a greater capacity, a greater wisdom and ability to do stuff in of material consequence in the world. And something that came up for me, by the way, when you mentioned that list of you know, fear of failure, imposter syndrome, etc. Is this odd paradox that on some level, I think one thing I'm hearing a lot from our clients is the feeling that they come out, really valuing themselves, right, which is beautiful. And I could I could categorize that as realizing you're special. Also, I'd hope. What many of us could learn is that you're not special. You're not the only one to have a fear of failure. You're not the only ones who have impostor syndrome. I say that tongue in cheek because we should leave slightly like relieved,
Richard Anderson 23:27
Right? Don't be anything other than a good thing. If you're not the only one.
Jon Barnes 23:31
I think so just like you I have a fear of failure. I will love this tool
Richard Anderson 23:35
It's good. It's good. Good to hear. That doesn't make me feel better. Jon, one of the comments I got on a LinkedIn post that I put out on this particular topic therapy versus coaching was when the challenge that somebody is having and use the example of fear of failure, maybe it's not the best one. But if that is affecting somebody's life every single day, and is that where it becomes a clinical issue isn't the way you'd make a recommendation for is that where it gets into mental health?
Jon Barnes 24:02
Yeah, it's interesting, all these lines are a slightly slippery, right. And we're trying our best to delineate them whilst acknowledging complexity and nuance, which knows no lines. So that's the odd balancing act, we're playing with what we do see, so first of all, we're a coaching service, right? businesses pay us to help people fundamentally in their view, perform better but the way in which we go about that is to look at our personal processes as humans, so we're there for professional reasons, or be it in their professional reasons that have an incredibly big heart in the case of all our coaches. However, sometimes, you know, you start with a fear of failure in a boardroom and you go to places where you will what comes up over the course of a relationship and as trust builds is genuine trauma, mental health issues, daily suffering that is of a different degree, than a pure being scared of your power. Point presentation, right. And when we get to those places, what we've seen is that it's useful for our coach to acknowledge that, that we've kind of, whilst we're trying, whilst we're using the fact that you and me are human beings, and that we're connecting on that deeper human level in order to eventually circle back to our ability to perform better. There's moments in life where what we need is just personal help. And we've actually made the decision that any of our coaches if in that situation, first of all, we just try and help that person. And we can, because we're qualified to go there. So we've had some instances where that has become a personal therapeutic relationship between the coach and the coachee. We take no profit as a company at all. And it's now considered a situation where that person needs personal help, then it's up to the company as to whether they want to fund that or not. These are case by case scenarios. The certainly the only thing that matters to us at that point, is the person that happens because there's more of us suffering, then we can tell. And like, you know, like everyone says mental health and trauma are not things that are visible, that are the reason we're employed in the first place is for that professional context. But certainly, you know, the line is not as clear as we wish it was, it would be so great if you had a professional life and personal life. But that is in large parts an illusion that we have.
Richard Anderson 26:25
Just a couple of questions left. Jon, just very conscious of time, I've really enjoyed speaking about this, this particular subject, who would be the best candidates for coaching? In your view?
Jon Barnes 26:37
Yeah, I mean, it's tricky. It's tricky to just not answer everyone. But if I had to prioritize, what I'm really seeing is amongst leadership teams, the value of it for quite a few reasons. One is the leaders, I do think deal with a higher order of complexity by virtue of managing and leading others, but also often working in more abstract sections of work being slightly less hands on or more strategic or having a longer like time horizon to their thinking. And they're often in charge of navigating huge amounts of change. The reason I think our particular coaching product is incredibly valuable for that is, first of all, that navigating Change is hard emotionally, mentally, it's taxing is a real reason we burn out, we're dealing with constant ambiguity. And yeah, kind of caveman system just wants constant certainty and linearity. And that's certainly not the case in 2022, I think we can all finally see that. So leadership teams value it massively and really see, you know, the, the word we keep hearing is how effective is professionally for them. But definitely, therapeutically, like we wondered whether we should call it therapeutic coaching, because a lot of people leave with some, you know, I'm changing my voice to that relieved. So I think leadership teams can really, really benefit from it, we are seeing a trend that people in C suite or some sort of senior management team are valuing it and then offering it to their teams, as well. And that's, again, in order to increase the complexity of your sense making and therefore work better. But also because, you know, we all need a bit of help, I think,
Richard Anderson 28:17
Of course we do. I absolutely. And just while we're on that, if any leadership teams or any organizations generally want to get in touch with you, or the listening collective, Jon, what's the best way for them to do that?
Jon Barnes 28:27
Yeah, so just websites, probably the best place the listening collective.org You can send us a message and get in touch there. And there's a bunch of fun things coming soon on there as well with some videos and other content. So meet us there and we'll be on the other side of an email. Be great to chat. Fantastic.
Richard Anderson 28:45
We'll put all the links within the article the blog article itself for this podcast, John Barnes. Thanks ever so much for your time. Really enjoy chatting.
Jon Barnes 28:53
Thanks, man. Take care. You too.
Voiceover 28:55
Thanks for listening to Psyched For Business - for shownotes resources and more visit evolve assess.com
