Making Sense of Work with Jean Balfour
How’s Work at the Moment?
We all work - and yet we often struggle with work. Even very ambitious people find parts of work difficult.
This podcast is for you if you'd like to build a new and better relationships with your working life. We explore everything to do with our working lives, starting with how do we find our purpose, how do make sense of our organisations and what can we do to work in our zone of genius?
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Making Sense of Work with Jean Balfour
Ep. #92 The Impact of Our Early Lives on Our Leadership: Dr. Saba Hasanie
I'd love to hear any questions or comments you have about the show. Send me a message! Jean
In this insightful episode of Making Sense of Work, Jean Balfour is joined by Dr. Saba Hasanie, Managing Director and Senior Partner of OSC Leadership Development.
Dr. Saba introduces Biographical Dimensions of Leadership using BDMM© – Level One, a framework designed to explore unconscious behavioral patterns rooted in the past that may hinder growth and development in coaching.
With over 20 coaching and psychology certifications, a doctorate in coaching psychology, and her involvement with the prestigious Forbes Coaches Council, Saba brings a wealth of experience in executive coaching, leadership development, and coaching supervision. Originally from Canada and now based in Singapore, Saba shares her professional and personal journey spanning over 14 years in the APAC region.
Key topics covered in this episode include
- Saba’s career pillars: executive coaching, leadership development, coach training, and professional writing.
- The deep connection between our childhood experiences and how they influence our leadership styles and professional behavior.
- The importance of understanding “why I am” rather than just “what I do” as a leader.
- Saba’s unique Biographical Dimensions of Meaning Making (BDMM) model, which explores how past experiences, family dynamics, and personal history shape leadership tendencies.
- Ethical considerations in coaching, especially when exploring childhood influences and how to ensure clients are resourced to handle those conversations.
Coming Soon: Saba’s upcoming book on leadership development and the biographical dimensions of meaning-making. For more information about Dr. Saba Hasanie’s work, coaching, and upcoming book, visit OSC Leadership Development.
Books & Resources Mentioned:
- Bittersweet by Susan Cain
- Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability
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You are listening to Making Sense of Work with Jean Balfour. Hello and welcome to Making Sense of Work. I'm delighted today to be joined by Sabah Hassani. Welcome to the podcast Sabah.
Speaker 2:Thank you, jean, delighted to be here.
Speaker 1:Dr Sabah Hassani is the Managing Director and Senior Partner of OSC Leadership Developments. A market leader in the APAC region, OSC works with some of the most influential global clients across several industries. Sabah herself is a Senior Practitioner, Scholar, a coach supervisor and executive coach. She's a master practitioner with over 20 coaching and psychology certifications, a diploma in coaching supervision and a doctorate in coaching psychology. She's also a published author and part of the prestigious Forbes Coach Council. Sabah originally hails from Canada, but has been based in Singapore and worked extensively across the region for the past 14 years. So welcome again, Sabah. Thank you, Jean. I'm looking forward to hearing your journey through that piece. As always, we like to start with a question how's work at the moment?
Speaker 2:Simple question, loaded answer. I think Work at the moment is what I would say in transition. So I have four pillars that really drive me professionally. It's obviously the executive coaching, the one-on-one work I do with leaders. There's the organizational work that we do around L&D and creating programs and leadership development. I do a lot of work one-on-one with coaches and in cohorts of teaching and training coaches. And now I've got this fourth piece, which is writing and spending a lot more time in the publishing world and the professional writing world. That has become all-consuming, and so now I'm trying to figure out how to recalibrate the other facets of my life, not to mention being a mom and a partner and all those other things that I love outside of work. So yes, so it's in transition is the way I'm describing it right now.
Speaker 1:As you were describing that, I was wondering and thinking that there's probably a fifth pillar there as well, and that is that you lead a business, so you have a full life, because there's a lot happening there as well.
Speaker 2:Good, great point, jane, which can show you probably where my prioritization is as well. So, absolutely yes, being the MD of a coaching practice which, as you well know, can be quite demanding, with a lot of expectations, and, yeah, absolutely trying to keep all of those hats and plates spinning simultaneously is sometimes easier on some days and less on others.
Speaker 1:And with that in mind, with all of those things that you were doing in your life, what does a really good day at work look like for you? I love that question.
Speaker 2:I spend a little bit of time really thinking about what does a really good day at work look like for you? I love that question. I spend a little bit of time really thinking about what does that feel like for me? So I think, partially, a really good day for me means it's been a really good day for someone else. So if I hear some feedback from a client and they're, you know, made a shift or something has moved for them, then that's a really good day.
Speaker 2:When I hear from an organization who said the program that we've created or something that we've designed is really starting to create a cumulative positive net benefit in the organization, then that's really wonderful. But fundamentally, a really good day for me is a day where I get to do a few pieces of a lot of things that I love and I think, as you rightly pointed out, those five roles. If I have a day that gets to play with some of those roles, as hard as it is to flip in and out of them, it actually brings me a great deal of joy. So that's what a good day is for me.
Speaker 1:I can see that, so I shared a bit about where you are now and what you're doing, but there's a beautiful story. I've no doubt in how you came to be here, so could you share a bit about your journey to this point?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd love to. I say this often my professional journey and my personal journey are very inextricably linked, so I'm going to start with the personal and then walk you through how the professional journey has adapted. So Coles Notes version I am a second generation immigrant to Canada, so I was born and raised in Canada. I was born to two parents who had an arranged marriage 53 years ago, and I had two parents with very diverse backgrounds, so one which was very spiritual, fairly conservative and was thrust into living in North America, not by choice. And then I had an academic, very scientific, very rational father who was a feminist far beyond before his time. And you know, it's probably the only thing that I can say is my world of safety in a lot of ways. And so I was raised with this dichotomy of two parents who were culturally different, spiritually different, intellectually different, just different in every way. And then, of course, I grew up in a part of Canada that was not culturally diverse. So I was one of the very few people of color in my school. Most of the time me and my siblings were the only people of color in a lot of our environments and the activities that we did, and we had a very small community of people who looked like us, but again, we were really different to them for lots of different reasons, and so identity was always very convoluted for me when I was younger, and so what happened to me is that instead of focusing on who I am, which I found almost impossible to understand I focused on what I could do, and so my defense mechanism, my superpower, whatever you want to call it, became very early trying to figure out what I was good at and then doing that over and over again.
Speaker 2:So as soon as I was legally able to work in Canada, I was working multiple jobs. I think I've always held down a minimum of two jobs. I had three to four jobs throughout university, and while some of it was working from necessity, most of it was because that was where I shaped my identity, was the work that I did, and I was really blessed to be given opportunities that I think were sheer luck or just a beautiful intersection of having extraordinary mentors and people who saw and believed in me. But I had the great privilege and burden of having a lot of early career success, and very quickly. So my first job out of university, I studied business. My first job at a university was a professional recruiter and in a span of four years I went from being a professional recruiter I did a stint in branding, marketing communications to running the head of a division at the age of about 24 years old, which was when you look back from now. I'm thinking, oh my goodness, who, why was I ever trusted to do that? But equally, I worked with some of the most extraordinary women I've ever met. They're still friends of mine today and they never let my age be a factor against me and it's kind of that perfect intersection of opportunity meets ability and there we go.
Speaker 2:But, as you can imagine, that kind of success made me bored very quickly and so I thought, okay, I'm done this hurdle, or at least in my head that was a story that I had created. So I said what do I want to do next? So I decided to go back to business school, do my MBA, and then I did what I thought really smart people do. There's two big pathways. Common pathways out of business school is that you go management consulting or investment banking. I didn't want to go investment banking, I was very clear about that, so I went management consulting and then that was the next chapter of my professional life.
Speaker 2:It was the hardest kind of five, six years of my life but I learned the most in there and it was the perfect forum for someone who wanted to focus on what they could do and not worry about who they are. You could disappear beautifully in an industry like that and then eventually you know what it caught up to me. Beautifully in an industry like that and then eventually you know what it caught up to me and what I did became somewhat my Achilles heel at the time and that forced me to have to confront that inside story of who am I and why I'm driving for the things that I am, and that was very difficult at the time. I think you know 20 years later I'm still unraveling some of that. But that was my first foray as an adult into leadership development, into receiving coaching, doing very deep psychotherapy at the time, and you know I'm one of those people who's in therapy for life. I have been for over 30 years and I don't think that's going to change. But that was when I started broaching this notion of what is sitting underneath all of this and what is driving my behaviors and my meaning and all of those things.
Speaker 2:And then, simultaneous to that, I decided to move to Singapore with my husband and my three month old. So I'm a mom for the first time and now changing all of these other facets. So I'm a mom for the first time and now changing all of these other facets, and my first role in Singapore was to hire consultants or to hire coaches, actually for the MDs in the business, and I just realized there was, in my perception, kind of a missing opportunity. The models that I had been used to in the Western world were not necessarily here at the time. So I thought here's another example of opportunity meets chance and that's where OSC was born. And yeah, I haven't really looked back since.
Speaker 1:You're really curious about this connection between how we grew up and how that impacts who we are in our working lives and as leaders, and I'd love you to talk about that, because I 100% agree, and I'd love to hear you say a bit about how you see that connection. You've shared a bit of your own story and seeing that, that sense of the fact that we have drives, often untapped and not understood around why we're doing the work we're doing, how we're working, how we're showing up as a leader. So love to have a conversation about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So let me start with this idea that came out of conversation with you and I, which is we spend a lot of time in organizational life talking about who I am as a leader and defining the narratives around that. We spend almost no time uncovering why I am, and to me, this is the bedrock of everything Because, again, skewed by my own life experience, and never really fitting in to any boxes that people perceive me to fit into or think I should fit into, I go into every connection, relationship, contact, professional engagement, with the same level of. I just want to know, help me learn about you, and I actually find that really confronting for a lot of leaders, because a lot of leaders, much like myself, like to focus on what they do and the who they are and the why they are is just not something that we talk about a lot in leadership at all today, and certainly not a creative culture in most organizations, and it's ironic if you think about biographies or any you know outstanding stories. Every leader starts with their backstory. Every leader starts with this was my childhood. This is what happened to me. I'm like that doesn't exist in organizational life, and so I became curious about that very, very early in my professional career, obviously filtered a bit by my own story, but mostly filtered by the fact that I was an outsider coming into Asia and had a lot of very conscious awareness of how I am different and how my thoughts and beliefs and the context in my why will be very different from others. So I just had so much curiosity in exploring that as I realized how net new that was for most leaders to start thinking about, yet also deeply transformational, because when they could figure out their why I am, it creates space for them to change the things that they came into coaching to change. And so then I started getting curious about what is the methodologies do we have? How do we support it? And so you know, coaching psychology is this new thing that's come out in kind of the 2000s, but 99.9% of it is psychological theory adapted for the context of coaching. And, jean, as you well know, we can do that. But psychological training and theory is designed for healing and the work we do in coaching is very different. I believe it's much more related to integration, which is not too dissimilar to psychology. But our role is not to heal, our role is to integrate.
Speaker 2:And when I realized that there wasn't actually any primarily produced information around coaching and how we look at childhoods and history and narratives. That's when I came to my kind of other mission, which is okay. So then I guess it's my responsibility that if I feel like there's a hole in this market, to go get curious about it. And then what I did was talk to a bunch of other coaches who were my mentors far more senior and experienced in it, I think. My data set together, I did the aggregation and we had about 275 years of collective experience and all the coaches that I spoke to just in coaching, and every single one of them said childhood matters. And then I'm like so who taught you to go into childhood Lived experience or borrowing from my psychological training? And so then I said we've got to fix that. And so that is basically what has consumed my professional lifespan ever since.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I'd love you to bring this to life, this idea about the what and the why, and I guess maybe we can use an example that I have about that, but it would be great, kind of, so that we can land what this really looks like. So, yeah, so how would we approach that? How would you approach that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, to me everything starts in trying to create greater awareness around what really matters for the client and my curiosity. Of course, we do all the goal setting and everything has to be related to the goals and all of those pieces, but to me I'm always very curious at what sits underneath those goals, and so it always starts with why like so, why is that important for you now and where does that come from? And when they're like, oh, where does that come from? What do you mean? I'm like, take me all the way back to childhood and tell me what link you can make. And it's from there that you can imagine like layers upon layers of things emerge and inevitably we get into some really pivotal information around family of origin and often our primary caregivers and the templates that they exposed us to really early.
Speaker 2:And now I'm not suggesting that all of us had ideal templates, necessarily, but what it did was it gave us the first template of a boss employee relationship, because parents had power, they were authority for all intents and purposes, they're our first boss. You know, I always joke in my training programs. I always ask people the question how old were you when you had your first boss? And most people are somewhere in their teens, you know, 16, 15 or in early twenties. It's like it's your parents and your family was the first organization you belong to. So having a lot of curiosity around how clients make meaning from their existence is fascinating. And it's very different, by the way, and I use the word make meaning very intentionally, because it's not just the stories about childhood, it's not just let's recall memories and get into narrative data. It's about the meaning that they've extracted. So, because my father was this way, I am this way. Because my mother was this way or my primary caregiver was this way, I am this way, and that, to me, is the essence of why I am.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's great. I think that's amazing and I think it's good for all of us to do that inquiry, actually to understand that connection, because when we can make that line, then we can understand something about it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'd love to hear yours. You said you've got a?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I've been thinking about this because I've been thinking about our conversation today and I was thinking, um my parents, also incredibly different. My father is a very big character, big personality and still working in his 90s. My mother actually is still doing a bit of work. They're both in the clergy.
Speaker 1:But the thing that really came to me was the impact that my mother's journey has had on my journey, and I've been still thinking about it since we had our first conversation. So for me, very briefly, when my parents got married, my mother believed in the Christian ideal that women obeyed their husbands, that wives obeyed their husbands. And then, I guess, when I was, I was the eldest, I am the eldest child so when I was 10 or 11, she began to question this fundamentally for herself, and that led her on a journey that actually took her to being ordained as a clergy person and becoming quite a radical advocate for women's rights and for other underrepresented groups in society, which ended up at one point in her being interviewed on Australian television about this. And so that's her journey, and in that journey there's been bits where she said to me things like I raised you not to believe that it was okay for girls to be ambitious. And now I see that you know that was because of the story that I had.
Speaker 1:But what this meant for me is that I then came into my career. Once I worked out, I was ambitious. I enjoyed that drive and ambition, but then I really hit a roadblock around partly the work I was doing and partly I kept feeling this tension inside me about is it okay for me, as a woman, to be this ambitious, and so that very tension that she had. When I was growing up as a girl, I realized I was also living, and then it in fact became part of my dissertation for my master's to go on an inquiry about what is it about being a woman in business, in work, what does that mean? How do I feel about it? What's society saying about it? And I'm yeah, so it was. When I was thinking about it today I was thinking, wow, this is really.
Speaker 2:It still really sits with me her story, her journey and my journey in that wow, thank you for sharing that, Jean, and to me this is what fuels so much of our. Why, right, the things that fuel you and the things that we see on the outside of all of these amazing things that you do? But underneath it, where does that come from and what is driving that which is, oh, it's so deep and beautiful? And you know, in a very similar way I mean, my father represented my idealistic version. My mom jokes she's like all of you love your father unconditionally. He can do no wrong, and there's probably a lot of truth to that, that we have idealized my father to a certain extent, but my mom, who was the primary caregiver in the household and that she was very responsible for the things that interact with the kids, ie school in those aspects, she was always feeling like she never reached her professional potential and while she worked throughout our whole childhood, in fact, she worked nights. She worked at the post office, which is like where all the central mail is handled, and she did overnights and eventually broke her back through an experience there. It was just anyways. So she was always very committed to her family. She always worked, but she didn't have professional success.
Speaker 2:And that tension in her was so real because she came from a very privileged lifestyle and then was thrust into a working lifestyle in Canada which she couldn't make sense of. She was raised to believe that women are beautiful and precious and are to raise babies and to manage the spiritual life of their families more than anything, and that career is nice but not essential per se. And yet then she also lived with this dichotomy of being in the West and saying, but if I had that, I would have worth. If I had that career ambition, then I would be more worthy. And of course, as you can imagine, they experienced a lot of racism and a lot of discrimination, and so that worthiness I think unintentionally got filtered into me as well.
Speaker 2:That, like, it is my duty and my responsibility to work hard and it is a privilege to have the opportunity to work hard. And also I'm doing this because my parents experienced an exorbitant amount of racism and discrimination and were limited in their professional opportunities. I will not let that define me. I will not let that be who I am. And so of course all of this is carried with you. And then when someone tells you, hey, your professional way of being ain't so great anymore, it's saying you ain't so great anymore, and then how do you make sense of that? And so I think that, yeah, all of these things is you've so beautifully articulated or so wrapped into what we do, or sense of identity, and again, this, why I am rather than what.
Speaker 1:I am, yeah, I love this idea. I really love it, and I think often we can. So I think, if I think about both of our examples, actually there's a positive, generative energy out of that if we choose it. So we can see dark side and bright sides of these things, of these bits of our upbringing, and it's important, I guess, that we shine the light on all of that so that we understand how that is driving us. And I think I see that the more senior you become, as a leader, for example, the more critical it is that you understand those drivers, because they will be unconsciously impacting your decisions, your micro behaviors, how you're feeling, how you think about feeling, and all of that will be impacted by those family stories. How you approach hierarchy, what power looks like to you. Everything is impacted by those childhoods, by those early stories, and so knowing our why of how we are has such an important part in thinking about, then, our choice, about how we show up as leaders.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I really want to just underline that comment you made, because I think it's so true is that in both of our stories we have chosen to pull the threads of generative ideation from it. Yet our lived experience would not be a straight line on that. My guess is, at least for me it certainly wasn't, and I think that is the thing that I think in society. So I'm writing a book about this very topic. It's called Unsaid and it's looking. You know, the sub of it is the dark side of development.
Speaker 2:And we live in society and we live at a time where we are obsessed with positive psychology and we're obsessed at looking at what is the opportunity in the brightness in it and how do we create that as generative behavior.
Speaker 2:But the truth is you have to swim in the darkness for a very.
Speaker 2:You have to swim in it, right, we can't deflect it or avoid it or try to paint a beautiful picture from it, because it's only when we go into the depths of that that we have the capacity to see what the gift is in it as well.
Speaker 2:And I just think that this chronic, in some ways, obsession in society to not talk about the pain, to not talk about the vulnerabilities. I mean, there's great leaders like Brene Brown and Susan Cain who are now talking about it on a mass scale, which is amazing, but we don't, as a society, accept that, and certainly not in Asia. It is very frowned upon to express vulnerability and weakness, and some of these stories have deep vulnerability and weakness within them, and yet they have the power to be generative. And so this is for me again why we go into the, why I am Because there can be great empowering narratives that can stem from it, but if we don't look, we can't glean that and we can't see the opportunity in it in the same way, and so I'm so glad that you brought that up, because I think it, yes, we've gotten to that place where it's generative, but it probably didn't feel like that for a very long time.
Speaker 1:No, there's also something for me about some of the kind of things I was thinking about.
Speaker 1:Conflict is a great example, and it's linked to what you were saying, that whether or not we've had positive or challenging experiences in our childhood of what conflict looks like and how it's resolved, and whether it's okay to have open disagreement, to express anger, all of those things or whether we suppress it and we don't go there and this is just as an example are incredibly important for how we are as leaders, because when we have conflict at work, if we haven't looked into our experience of conflict, then we will just be playing it out just exactly as we will either be avoidant or we'll come at it, perhaps with aggression where that's not appropriate, or it will be happening in that way. And another example I would say is that I found myself with quite a few clients talking about money stories. So what were the money stories that you grew up with and how is that impacting how you think about money at work, how you think about compensation your own compensation, other people's compensation, how you approach client work, because all of that is focusing on money.
Speaker 2:So I guess there's so many places that we could go in places that are impacting this for us absolutely, jane, and and I think that and I know we're going to talk about that in a moment but the model, the biographical dimensions of meaning making model that I've created, it looks at those dimensions because the way that it was created was talking to very deeply experienced coaches and trying to link how childhood and leadership tendencies and behaviors that we often see in organizational environments, how are they linked? And while I didn't say it like that, what I said is what do you deal with and what are the roots to that in childhood? And, exactly as you're saying, these conflict templates that we create. That, by the way, start with our siblings, if we have any, our neighborhood kids, our kids in school, and then expand into relationships that we choose to be in or not, and how we choose to be competitive or self-protecting, whatever it may be.
Speaker 2:And I love that you brought up money because I think the social cultural context in which we were raised were you raised in a community where you are have or have not. What was the story of money in your family and your whole family of origin? Was it a constrained scarcity environment or was it plentiful with money formed very early by these kind of reference points of who was I relative to neighborhood kids and kids at school? Did I have or have not, and what has that created in terms of my own impressions and the things I feel like I need as an adult?
Speaker 1:Yeah, Absolutely so. Tell us about your model and how. Yes, tell us about your model.
Speaker 2:So tell us about your model and how? Yes, tell us about your model. Beautiful, okay. So short form, bdmm, long form, biographical dimensions of meaning making with is a mouthful is in a client's past that you would be able to have curiosity and a line of questioning around, and how that maps to leadership tendencies. So, for example, when we talk about a leadership styles, you know we're really good at doing psychometric assessments and getting patterns of leadership styles and then we blend personality into leadership styles and we say all of that is there. And yet I find so telling when I ask tell me about how punishment and reward was doled out in your family. Tell me about what consequence looked like. Tell me about how much agency you had over your own choices, about what you wanted to do as a young person. That to me, is far more telling in terms of leadership templates when I speak to leaders than some of the personality and segmentic assessments, because that is the why. So BDMM outlines all of the different dimensions that we would look at and how that relates to leadership behavior. So the first dimension is hierarchy, which I've just mentioned. So this is looking at the authority structures in your life and it's a model. Bdmm is a model that's not meant just to look at childhood, but it is a template that you hold all throughout life. So it starts with when you were a young child. Who were? Those templates often are parents and primary caregivers. Then it went to school, teachers, extracurricular and then eventually mentors, coaches and then bosses. So that is really driving what our leadership tendencies and mostly it informs how we look at power and how we looked at agency, which I think are key, defining characteristics of what leadership boils down to.
Speaker 2:Then you talked about conflict. So for me, relationship is spun from a few different ways. So for me, I look at the client's peer groups and so that means who are your perceived equals? Again, oftentimes it goes back to family of origin. Were there other children in the household, ie siblings, and how did you learn to negotiate? What your role was relative to their role, which sets the template, some for some around how to be or not to be in relationship, and then how that carried them through school, and then eventually romantic partnerships, the family. We choose all of these wonderful things.
Speaker 2:So, looking at the peer-based dynamics and the relational dynamics that people go through over a lifetime as a side note, I say people ask me when you do a 360 process, what tool do you like to use? I'm like, I like to use interviews and if I am given permission, I almost always ask to speak to that person's partner, if they will give permission, because to me there is so much rich insight that our partners have on our why, so they don't have the why right. They're not necessarily sitting with us in a day in and day out way, but they know so much of our why and to me that's gold, that's magic when we're talking about transformation. So just as a side. But then I also look at the identity dimension and so I have this thing that's called inherited versus constructed identity. And so inherited identity was who we were taught to be. So, jean, just as you're saying, like in the early years, how your mother taught you to be, like what does it mean to be a girl and was it mean to have certain patterns or behavior around that? And then that changed over your lifetime, for her and for yourself. And so that is the transformation from inherited identity, which is a template around who we were told to be, to what we're saying constructed identity, which is the person I'm choosing to be. I don't think constructed identity ever stops. I'm still trying to figure out those elements. And then, of course, there's a transitional period throughout it.
Speaker 2:Context is also very important. So my context mattered. Right, I sound very North American, my ideology is very North American. I don't look North American. So when people ask me, sabah, where are you from? And I say Canada, they're like, yeah, but no, where are you from? Because I don't look like someone who necessarily comes from Canada, although that's funny because Canada is now a majority, visible minorities right, it's a majority of people of color. But anyways, there is that innate like what is the real story? What is the relationship with money, geopolitically, culturally, religiosity, how does all of that inform who we are? And then other areas of really important data is like emotional data.
Speaker 2:So I think that understanding what a leader's template of emotional response is and what was considered safe and unsafe emotions to express in your family of origin.
Speaker 2:So again, I think some of us have built tolerances around certain behavioral patterns. For example, I think in organizational life, we tend to tolerate anger. We tend to tolerate fear. To a certain extent, what we don't know how to tolerate is sadness. We also don't really know how to tolerate shame. How many leaders will be like, oh, if someone starts crying, I just tell them go outside, collect yourself and come back. It's such a shame because, again and where does that come from? It's our own relationship to being in those emotions and how comfortable or uncomfortable we are, so really understanding what was the emotional language at home, what were the templates that you were exposed to and how did those emerge? So yeah, so there's six key dimensions and all of them are attributable back to leadership tendencies and behaviors, and the exploration is that when you see something with a client and you can see that there is a deeper meaning, there is a why, like they do things, and they can't necessarily deconstruct why they do them. This is a very interesting then course of exploration.
Speaker 1:Helps to make sense of that behavior, their behavior. It helps them to be curious, I guess, in the moment with them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so, to be curious, I guess, in the moment with them. Yeah, I think so, and when we get some source data around that, then we also then have the capacity to change its narrative and its power over us, which then I think is what sustainable change fundamentally is all about. We can train people to do things differently for a period of time, but if it doesn't really gel into their core identity around why I do what I do, it's very short-lived in my experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it really is. I've seen that. So your model, which is, of course, fabulous for all of us to be thinking about those questions and those lenses, if you like, about our why and how they're impacting us now. You're also now training coaches to use this, and I'm really curious about this, because we teach that the past is off limits, particularly for new coaches. Actually, because we want people to be safe, because many people have some form of trauma or something in their childhood that, if it emerges, we as coaches are often not trained to be safe with. So how do you hold this, how do you hold this kind of ethical dilemma about how to help people coaches, other people to talk about these childhood influences without going places that are going to be too difficult for the client?
Speaker 2:So I agree wholeheartedly that, especially with new coaches, this can be very dangerous territory and not advised. And as a starting point, my coaching is limited to people who've already got several hundred hours of coaching experience under their belt. So I agree wholeheartedly when you're learning the art of coaching, this is a lot to take in upfront not ideal at that level of understanding, but here's the dilemma I am in. So I've been doing a lot of keynote addresses and a lot of conferences and attending because this is obviously my passion. I've got a book coming out on it and then, like you said, I'm certifying coaches. So I'm going into these rooms. 10 years ago, when I went into these rooms and I asked people how many of you ask clients about their past, I'd say maybe 20 or 30% of people's hands would go up. Now, when I ask coaches how many of you ask about the client's past, almost a hundred percent of hands go up. And here's the terrifying part. When I ask people, have you had any formal training in it, you've got less than 20% of people raising hands. So, jean, the reality is whether we teach coaches to go there or not, they're going there. And why are they going there? I don't think they're trying to be ethically responsible, but to me, I call it the time dimensionality factor. The past is in the room, whether we like it or not, and so what I think is happening is coaches are going instinctually there because they feel like, yeah, it seems like something is clearly going on from your past. But the fear I have, and then the ethical responsibility I hold, is that is very dangerous both for the coach and for the client, when neither is trained in being able to understand what is safe and what is unsafe. And, to your point, jean, so much of this brings up our own stories. So when we're working with clients, we don't know even what's ours and what's theirs.
Speaker 2:So how do I address this? First of all, I address it by saying that there's a minimum requirement of hours of coaching before you do this kind of training, because I think that's essential. You have to really understand the craft of coaching before you start playing with this. The other thing that is mandatory in my program is coaching supervision. So I require coaching supervision as part of the mandate for the program and the completion of the program, but also that the coaches are involved in continuous professional development on that route. So I think that has to be mandated, and I think we're getting close to making that a mandatory part of our industry, which I think is fantastic. And then the third part, which is not mandatory, but I say get some therapy, just experience a therapeutic intervention. So you know your own data. Yes, that's it. Yes, you need to know your own data.
Speaker 2:And so when we train coaches, we put it on them first, right, the model, everything in the first modules, the first couple of modules, it's about let's do the work on you, let's look at hierarchy through your lens, look at peers through your lens, look at context through your lens, emotional data through your lens, and it's about trying it on and being really comfortable with our own narratives. And then we shift the work to say now how do you hold this for others? And I think that is just like a really essential part of it. I think even in coaching right, when we coach each other right To learn that muscle, when you experience it, then you can hold it in a very different way. So I think those are things. I think also how we contract on this work is so essential.
Speaker 2:And then I think the third piece around it is our ability to understand resourcing, and what that means is resourcing for ourselves. As coaches, do we have the capacity to go into this stuff or do we have too much of our own work to do, which inhibits our objectivity to be there for someone else? And then also, what is the resourcing of the client? Because people are like Saba if there's trauma, what do I do? You know what? I have worked with people who have lived through atrocities war, massacre, racial violence and they have formed a healthy relationship with what has happened to them and have a capacity to interact with that. So do they have trauma in their life? Absolutely, but are they resourced to deal with that trauma? Absolutely? And so then I'm not going to infringe because that seems terrifying to me that therefore it's not a safe place to go.
Speaker 2:Equally, I could have someone who grew up in a household with a family member who expressed deep emotional data, either grew up with a chronically depressed parent or chronically angry parent, and while on a surface it may not seem traumatic, it is deeply traumatic to them and it has formed maladaptive strategies.
Speaker 2:So for me, the ideas as a coach is that we need to understand how to source maladaptive strategies and those maladaptive strategies. That is the link into the past and does someone have the capacity to go there? So this is really essential to the work, and so what I do is kind of like how do we figure that out? How do we figure that out for ourselves, first and foremost Because we can control that. And then how can we help our clients be resource enough to explore that for themselves and, again, be very clear on the contracting why are we doing this work and what are we hoping to achieve through the exploration? Because coaching is not healing. We are not here to heal trauma, we are here to integrate it and you know that has a whole other conversation. But, yes, I hope that gives you a little bit of an idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it does. It's really clear. I can see that very clearly, and I guess I would add to that that, as a coach, it's good for us also to have a couple of therapists we can recommend to people when things emerge and we think actually this might be a place. Either the client says I might need some more help, or the coach might say I wonder if it would be helpful for you to have some additional help here, and and that's certainly my experience I quite commonly will have coaching. Clients are also in therapy and we are working, one on healing and as you describe it, and the other on and me, on integration. Yeah, yeah. So we could talk about this for a very long time and I think it's probably time for us to draw to a close. I wonder, just as we do come to a close, if there's a book or a podcast or something that you would recommend to people that you found really helpful or insightful, either in this field or in coaching or in leadership.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, first of all, the podcasts that I love are the stories where the people who are being invited share their background and share their stories. So, for me, part of the research that informed me going here was that I was a consummate consumer of biographies. I am obsessed with biographies. I'm obsessed with the stories of what make extraordinary people extraordinary, and so, for me, having a lot of curiosity around people's backstories is, at a very, very basic level, how to get started. So, like I said, biographies, I think, are always very fascinating to me.
Speaker 2:Podcasts that go into the history and the backstory about people, I think is a great starting point In terms of books. So I have a book coming out very soon, so we're just in the final editing phase, and so hopefully what that will give you is a much more detailed relationship between the different dimensions of the framework and how it shows up in leadership. So that book is going to be released later this year, and then we've got another one coming out which is a practitioner's tool guide, which I think will be really helpful. But I think the other part around this whole experience is really getting comfortable with looking at what I call the dark side of development. So I think a lot of coaches have been really good at learning about neuroscience and positive psychology. We don't look at the other side of the equation, and so I think there's a lot of authors we mentioned Brene Brown and Vulnerability.
Speaker 2:Susan Cain, who does Bittersweet Her last book was amazing which talks about this notion of the emotionality to development and what sits comfortably within us and therefore what we can be present to in others.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for sharing this. We will put links in the show notes to your courses, your training, and also for people to find you if they're curious about also having coaching with you, sabah. So thank you so much for your time, and I know I'm going to go away thinking more and more about this concept of my own journey. I hadn't really thought about peers and siblings so much, but I know they play a part, so maybe that's where my personal inquiry will go next. But thank you so much for this.
Speaker 2:Been an honor. Jean, Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining this episode of Making Sense of Work. If you enjoyed it, please go and subscribe, rate and review. If you have a topic you'd like me to explore in the podcast, please follow the show notes and send me a message.