Speaker 1: 0:00

You are listening to Making Sense of Work with Jean Balfour. Hi everyone, and welcome to Making Sense of Work. I'm really delighted to welcome Sass Petherick to the podcast today. Welcome, sass. Hey everyone. Hey Jean, so good to be here. Oh yeah, I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Sass, me too.

Speaker 1: 0:26

Sass believes that healing our self-doubt is one of the most important contributions we can make to ourselves, our families, our work and the world. For over a decade, she has coached hundreds of women experiencing self-doubt in their professional and personal lives. She holds a master's degree from Oxford and her research on self-doubt was published in the International Journal of Coaching and Mentoring, and she's also developed an evidence-based, trauma-informed, icf accredited coaching methodology for cultivating self-belief coaching methodology for cultivating self-belief. Sass hosts the top 1% rated self-doubt podcast, courage and Spice, which has enjoyed over half a million downloads, and we can only aspire to that, sass. She's also an accomplished speaker and has developed coaching workshops and programs for clients like the BBC Worldwide and Pinterest, and her writing has appeared in numerous magazines. After 25 years in the UK, sass currently lives by the beach in Tamaki Makurao, auckland, with her partner Ash and pooch Bodhi, imagining a post-capitalist world, exploring consciousness and listening to obscure UFO podcasts.

Speaker 1: 1:48

So welcome Sass. I'm not sure we'll get time to talk about UFOs today, but there's plenty else for us to talk about. Yeah, there sure is. It's so lovely to be with you, thank you. We always start with this question How's work at the moment? We always start with this question how's work at the moment? So I love this question and I think I would describe work right now as blessedly steady, like I've reached this point in my business and for those of you who are maybe self-employed coaches, you'll know that it's a bit of a roller coaster, right, but I've reached this place where I just feel really steady like I've. I've got a kind of um, a process and a system and you know the things that I do just to make sure that I kind of know what the next few months is looking like, and that feels like real safety for me and it means I can kind of have some fun and create new things. So, yeah, I would say steady is the is the word. Yeah, I can feel that, and I had a sense when you're talking about it, that that steadiness then opens up space for creativity, because you're not yeah well, I know as a business owner, you're not then worried about the other aspects of the business. You can just be with the work and yeah, oh, fantastic. And what does a really good day look like for you?

Speaker 1: 3:14

Well, um, as, as you kindly uh shared my intro, I'm living quite near the beach right now, so we take the dog for a walk early morning. I'm writing a book at the moment about my work, so I try to spend at least sort of half an hour doing something book related. I'm in the process of creating the structure for it at the moment, so there's not a lot of writing, but there's lots of bullet points and post-it notes going on right now, so I try to spend about half an hour on that before breakfast and then I'm sort of into the, into the work and I found that I actually find it easier to have days where I've just got one thing to do. So I have client days a couple of days a week and I have an admin day and I have like an interview podcasty day and yeah, and that really supports me. I try to work until about two or three in the day and then in the afternoon I'll go and read or write or take the dog for another walk or potter around. I'm a good potter, so I like that, that space.

Speaker 1: 4:22

I found I need a bit of space to let my mind rest and, you know, contemplate things, and a lot of my clients are based in the UK still, so I sometimes have like an evening call. Sometimes it's quite late because of the time of year and the time difference. It's a bit of a monkey puzzle managing the time zones, but there's this kind of slowness to life here, which is is quite lovely. In lots of ways, it's a blessing and a curse being on a tiny island at the bottom of the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so rare, I think, for people to be giving themselves permission to live in that way, where you stop work after a period and then allow yourself space to think and read and just be potter. It's good being activity, and I I've been really surprised by how many guests I've had on the podcast who have almost apologized for having white space in their diary, and it's part of our societal norm, I think. So we have to fill our days, be busy, so I love hearing you describe that you. It hasn't always been that way, jean, but it is now. Yeah, yeah good. I aspire to it. I'm on the plan for it myself.

Speaker 1: 5:36

So, so you've had an amazing career that's brought you here, that's enabled you to kind of create the wisdom that you share. Could you share with us a little bit about your journey to this moment? Yeah, yeah, well, I actually grew up in New Zealand in a tiny town called Wakoiti, which is at the bottom of the South Island, and there was less than 800 people who lived there, and my parents were English immigrants. They'd come to work at the local hospital, and so I've always had this dual nationality or identity of where I'm from. It's always been two places, and I was lucky enough to go back to the UK with my grandmother when I was 14. And that really just gave me this huge desire to travel.

Speaker 1: 6:26

So most of my career has been about doing work that I could do anywhere, although this was before the days of digital nomadship. So I actually began my career as a program and project manager. I worked in IT, and I only really fell into that because my degree, which was a Bachelor of Arts in Women's Studies and Educational Psychology which turned out to be the most unmarketable qualification in the known universe landed me at the Department of Corrections as a new graduate and I found that I was quite technically competent and I worked on a project and then just said yes to everything and actually that ethos kind of stood me in really good stead for most of my career Say yes to everything, be super ambitious, keep growing. And so I just kept getting bigger and more complex programs and projects, ended up in London and working for financial services company just before the run on one of the banks in the UK in 2008, which was quite frightening at the time. It was like wow, there is a lot of insecurity in what I thought was quite a stable career path and I'd also lost my mum quite suddenly. She was only 53 when she died.

Speaker 1: 7:55

And so there was this thing about being in the UK and in this really exciting, energetic London, amazing coping or not coping very well with the grief and loss of my mum. And I think you know honestly, I sort of drank my feelings and I was pretty armoured up, fell into work as a way of not really having to deal with a lot of stuff that was going on for me, and it was no accident that I ended up in a kind of work hard, play hard type. It's no accident that I ended up in a kind of work hard, play hard type industry, and I found that I think it was about my third burnout in 2010, 2011. I just thought I really need I need to make some different choices here, or this will just be the cycle that I'm in and I think as well like just losing my mum. She was a, she had been a psychiatric nurse and her work had had huge meaning for her. She worked with mums with postnatal depression and we attended her tangi, her funeral, and it was like being introduced to a stranger, like I had no idea that she'd had this huge impact, and so I'd been thinking a lot about my work after she died.

Speaker 1: 9:08

And then all of this kind of insecurity started coming into the work I was doing. I wasn't really feeling that satisfied by it. I'm not sure if I ever honestly felt really fulfilled by it, but it was super fun to feel like I'm, you know, catching the tube and I'm going to the city and I'm doing my thing, and, having grown up in such a tiny town, it really did feel like suddenly I was at the center of the universe. So work had always felt like a huge part of my identity and yet I wasn't really convinced that the work I was doing was what I was sort of destined to do. And so, yeah, at the stage of my sort of third burnout, I just thought I've really got to do something different.

Speaker 1: 9:53

And a series of things happened in the organization I was working with and I decided to take voluntary redundancy, and in the UK at the time your redundancy payment wasn't taxed and I was on a six month notice period, so I suddenly had the equivalent of about nine months worth of you know pay and no real urgency to go find a new job. And I sort of woke up on that Monday morning and almost had a panic attack, like for the first time in my adult life I didn't have a job description. And I slowly sort of used that time to really think about what do I love, what do I want to do? And I wasn't really 100% sure that every time I wrote a list for myself there was nothing really there about feeling ambitious or wanting the next big project, or that had sort of lost its meaning for me. And so I ended up getting called out of the blue as sometimes these serendipitous things happen by the Coaches Training Institute.

Speaker 1: 11:05

I had done their foundation course a few years earlier as part of a leadership thing at work. You know one of those work environments where they're like we're going to make all our managers coaches, and then you come back from the course and no one ever mentions it again. But I had loved the course and they said look, we're offering you know, we've got a special offer on our full curriculum and I'm just wondering if you might be interested and I really honestly felt like this full body, yes, like yes, I have to do that. And I honestly can't logically explain that feeling. It was just follow this trail, like everything in me was saying yes to this. And within the first couple of hours of that training program I was like I'm home, I'm home, this is what I'm supposed to do.

Speaker 1: 11:52

And honestly, at the time I didn't really know what coaching actually was and I certainly didn't know if you could do it as a job, like it didn't seem to be a real thing, because I think it came quite easy, like it felt very sort of common sense, very natural, very organic for me, and I'm I've grown up with that. You know that belief that lots of us have. You know, work should be hard and you should earn it and so I almost didn't trust it. But 13 years later I can say you can do this job and it is a real thing and yeah. So I'm really, you know, so grateful that I just almost like followed that intuition in the face of all logic to the contrary and have ended up in work that I now just feel like almost like a childlike glee that I get to do this, I get to have these expansive, enriching conversations with beloved clients who I'm very invested in and I adore and I just love that I get to do this work. It feels, feels like it's almost like I'm getting away with something, that I get to do this as a job. If that makes sense, oh, it totally makes sense. To me, that's a sense of being with people in a, in a beautiful, growing space. Yeah, how can that be work?

Speaker 1: 13:15

There was something you were about your story that strikes me as this cultural idea of what work should be. So it links to that work should be hard and also I think that work should be certainly if you've grown up in a sort of organizational or corporate style context that we should always be moving forward, we should always be kind of looking for the next big thing that it's not okay to step away, and so many of the people I have conversations with are exhausted in that system and really don't know how to make sense of what's okay, because the society is telling us that that's where value sits and yet for so many people, I think that value is not actually sitting there. It's not, you said, I think for so many people I think that value is not actually sitting there. It's not, you said, I think you used the word, I think, satisfaction, or there's something about satisfaction and fulfillment. Are we really getting satisfaction and fulfillment from some of the work we're doing? Yeah, yeah, you know, to me that's kind of like the tyranny of growth and productivity, right, like that.

Speaker 1: 14:22

Actually, our cultural stories are. That's what success looks like. If you keep on, you know your business keeps growing or you keep growing, you keep going for ever more money and fame and notoriety and reputation in your work. That's a good thing, that's something we value in our world and you know more and more. I sort of look at.

Speaker 1: 14:47

I think that is very much a contrived idea If we look at another system that we are surrounded by nature, right, there is not that idea. Those stories are actually almost contrary nature, right. There is not that idea. Those stories are actually almost contrary in nature, right? So we've got the kind of and I hesitate to hold this as a duality or a binary. But if you think about the corporate ideals of growth and success and profit and productivity, and then you look at nature, as you know seasons, and you know that there are times for things to die off and to pause, that we don't really take more than we need, right, that there is an endless bounty if we share, that we don't. Actually, you know, a nature environment that is, or an ecosystem that is constantly producing will die so much faster than one that goes through seasons, and I just think maybe we need to shift some of our values back to nature. I think that would just serve us all so much better. So I think you know, for anyone who's listening, who is finding it really hard to make sense of that, like I'm, so with you, I don't think that that's where we've got the answers from, and I suspect that, as the climate emergency becomes more and more urgent, that we will be forced to make those shifts and changes and because we've waited till the last bloody minute, as we often do right, it's probably going to be more disruptive than it, than it needed to be.

Speaker 1: 16:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. And for some people there is massive fulfillment in those jobs. So I guess I don't want to detract that. You know it's a both and, but for some of us, certainly for me. You know, I got into a very senior leadership role and I just looked around, like you, and I thought, well, this isn't for me. You know, I feel like I'm compromising on too much of who I am to be here. Yeah, so, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 16:56

You know, I can remember a meeting I had and I was basically told you're being groomed for a COO role and that would mean me taking over from my manager. At the time I was the head of projects, he was the COO and he was like you know, you're in my succession plan, I would like to start handing some stuff over. And I left that meeting and I was like, oh, I feel really odd and I had come out in hives and I thought, isn't that interesting? Because I think, even a few years before that conversation, if, if someone had said this is what's going to happen, I would have been so freaking delighted and proud of that's where I'm going, like I'm gonna make it and, um, I had a lot of fun in my corporate career as well, and is is there anything better than sitting in a room with some smart people and figuring something out? I don't think so. Like I think that's such a fizzy lovely experience that we should not take for granted. And it can be really amazing when you find your friends in your colleague group. That's fantastic. And underneath it all, right, there are these systems that are driving us to almost not experience those things.

Speaker 1: 18:15

Sometimes, I think it can feel like an organization or a company exists despite itself, right, it's almost like it's trying to make life more difficult. So, yeah, I really feel for folks who are like, this is what I want to do, this is my calling, and yet it's so freaking hard, you know, yeah, and getting harder, I mean, it just doesn't seem to have any let up in that. Yeah. So I'd love to make the shift from there to the connection to self-belief, actually, because I know this is your work and I mean for me.

Speaker 1: 18:52

My own coming to have a sense of self-belief has been, I think, probably similar to you, but it's been a massive journey, and actually I've called it Project Jean, because I was determined to kind of stop living with the kind of crippling sense of self-doubt and everything that went with it that stopped me from being at my best. So I love that you're doing this work, because I really believe that we even don't make these choices connected to what we were just talking about, actually because we have doubt in ourselves and so we stay in a place that seems to fit and is comfortable. It may not be serving us, but because of self-doubt we stay there. So I wonder if you wouldn't mind starting it seems a bit technical by describing how you define self-belief. So to me, self-belief is feeling resourced. So I have this kind of expanded sort of definition of self-belief and that it encompasses self-trust, self-worth, self-acceptance and self-belief. And what I have found is that when we feel like we've got those resources on board and they're alive and active in us, self-doubt has less work to do. So I like to describe self-doubt as being our sense of protection.

Speaker 1: 20:19

So often what you kind of know that you've got some self-doubt going on because you're holding back in some way. You're either not sharing your ideas in a meeting, not putting your hand up for a promotion, or you're just kind of holding back and seeing what might happen. You might find yourself a bit locked in procrastination or perfectionism or even, you know, overworking, proving yourself all the time that sometimes it can be referred to as imposter, complex or imposter syndrome, that sense of if I don't maintain the, I'm going to be found out. Or if people only knew me, they'd know that I'm not really qualified to be here. And what I know from the research and this is longitudinal research over 40, 50 years is that around 70 to 80% of us humans experience self-doubt to some degree, and of course that's at different levels of intensity and in different contexts often.

Speaker 1: 21:18

But it is just that sense of I need to hold back because something isn't safe, I'm at risk in some way here and so when. So my work kind of falls into two streams really. One is to make sense of the self-doubt and why it's there, because it's always there for a really good reason and the second part of that is to then, you know, bring those other resources on board of self-belief, self-trust, self-worth and self-acceptance, so that our self-doubt can kind of go oh, it's all right, you've got it right, I don't have to hold you back because I can feel safe, knowing that you're pretty resource and you'll be able to handle this. So I think a lot of us find in our sort of mainstream world we'll hear a lot about self-sabotage. You know, I'm just sabotaging my career because I'm, you know, I keep getting the same job or working for the same company and I'm refusing to put my hand up for promotion even though everyone tells me I should and it's like, oh, it must be me. I'm at fault.

Speaker 1: 22:22

And I would just say, for anyone who feels like they may be in that place where they're sabotaging themselves, if you change the question to what might I be protecting myself from, it will be really interesting to see what comes up. Right, because usually there's a risk of, you know, rejection or conflict or failure, overwhelm, right, a lot of people won't go for a promotion if they feel like I won't be able to cope with what comes with that. So success and overwhelm can often be quite close buddies and I think there is a lot to be said for just looking at why might I be protecting myself? What feels at risk here? And so a lot of my work is, you know, figuring that out. You know why you even have that risk in the first place, because it will be there for a good reason. And then how can you support yourself to be with that risk? Because it's kind of fortune telling right Like I won't be able to cope. We don't really know that. We're using that as a theory based on past experience usually.

Speaker 1: 23:27

So a lot of the work I do is based on experimenting gently, like having a ton of compassion for yourself while you're going through that process, because it can feel a little edgy. But I think for most of us there there really is just a huge amount of gold in our self-doubt, like it really does open us up to really knowing ourselves and understanding why we might hold ourselves back in particular ways. And that for me is almost like the unexpected benefit that people are like. But it's not just work that I feel better in. It's like my relationships, my marriage, my relationship with my kids. Everything is easier because I'm recognizing. Oh, I don't say that thing because I'm afraid that you might judge me or we end up in some conflict or there's rejection there. It's like all the ways that we try to take care of ourselves. Even if we're looking at it in a work context, of course, you're a whole human that goes in different places. So that's, that pattern is likely to come up in different places in your life. So it can be a really amazing door to open.

Speaker 1: 24:34

And you know, the courage to walk through that self-doubt door and see what's on the other side, I think is amazing, amazing work. I'm always just in such awe of my clients being willing to kind of do that courageous work with me. It's yeah, it's so fun and it's that sense of inquiry, isn't it? That willingness to go into the inquiry of how did I form the story or this idea? Or because, also, I think, when we face into those stories which can feel a bit scary, because it's, it's often looking at stuff we are pretending didn't happen or don't want to look at. But in, in my experience, when we look at it, when we look into it, it's like some puzzle comes together, the pieces come together and we think, oh, okay, so because that happened then, this happens now and that's impacting, as you say, me at work, me at home, you know, me with my friends. It's impacting the whole of my life, friends. It's, it's impacting the whole of my life.

Speaker 1: 25:38

And, yeah, we often use the, the quote in our programs which I think is miles down awareness is curative, and so what you're describing is that often, once we've seen it, we don't actually have to do masses of work with it. We can say, ah, I get that connection. I see that connection between here and there. Yeah, and it makes sense completely and I think you're exactly right, like there's really good reasons why we maybe don't want to look at this stuff as well. Right, because it can bring up emotion.

Speaker 1: 26:03

It can bring up memories, difficult periods like our self-doubt's, always born in a moment of usually heightened emotion where we did the best we could to cope with that and take care of ourselves. In a moment of usually heightened emotion where we did the best we could to cope with that and take care of ourselves in the moment. And sometimes that meant, you know, we didn't ask for what we need, we didn't really say what we were feeling, we held back in some way and over time that just becomes the way to kind of cope with it. So it becomes a bit of a pattern and you know, folks will often say to me after we've been working together for a time it's like maybe I'm, maybe you were right when you said I'm not a procrastinator. I just have a pattern of procrastination. When I feel vulnerable, it's like, yeah, we don't, we don't really know who you are underneath that pattern yet. Right, it takes some time to experiment with. Well, if you weren't procrastinating or stuck in perfectionism, who might you be Like? What might be possible for you? And so I think there's so much to be said for the willingness to do the work of acknowledging what's happening and where it came from and that awareness yeah, it really is medicine, it is. It is. Could.

Speaker 1: 27:19

Could you expand a bit more on the link between procrastination and self-doubt, because I I can see that connection and I'd love to hear more about it. So, um, the way that I kind of make sense of this is that we'll experience self-doubt as a sense of risk. Sort of an alarm goes off in our minds and it's like don't do that, you might hurt yourself, right? So, whatever that looks like for you so it might be don't launch your coaching business. Go to a marketing course, right? Like don't, don't tell anyone that you've got this amazing skill set, because what if they say no? So go faff around with your website for a couple of months, you know. It's basically a way of saying, if you hold back, you'll be safe and over time.

Speaker 1: 28:08

I think that that's just one of the ways that we resist that discomfort and self-doubt that, oh, I'm at risk. So there's discomfort there and then we resist it, and in my kind of model we have six p's of resistance, and so procrastination is a biggie, but there's also perfectionism, improving yourself, paralysis, people pleasing and passive behaviors where you're kind of consuming rather than creating. So most of us have one or two, maybe all of them, that our resistance patterns, that, and all that tells me is you've found really effective ways of holding yourself back. Procrastination and perfectionism are the biggies, and I will often see those two and probably proving yourself in people-pleasing with that kind of overworking and overgiving. They're the ones that tend to show up in the workplace where it's never quite good enough. We never feel like we're good enough. We overprove. So we keep working, you know, to prove that we're worthy of the role that we've already got, or we overgive. You know we don't delegate very well or we find it difficult to ask for help. We just we give so much of ourselves that we end up kind of burning out of it. So procrastination and perfectionism are big ones as well, right where we just keep putting it off. And I think it's a lot easier if you're self-employed, like if you're a self-employed coach, for example, because no one's really you're kind of your own boss, your tech support and the marketing department, at least when you get started, right, you're wearing so many hats, but there's often no one saying I'm expecting this of you, so you can kind of work at your own pace and I think that can be both a blessing and a curse, right, and in the curse side of things, it's well, no one's expecting anything, so it doesn't really matter if you don't do it today and that can run into a few dozen, maybe even a few hundred days in a row and you find that actually you, you aren't creating the thing that you really want the most. And I think for a lot of folks that can feel really confusing, like why is it that I'm holding back on the thing that I really want to do? And that's why I think it does feel like self-sabotage. You know, I can totally understand that, but again, if you just sat with, what might I be protecting myself from? I think that's going to give you so much more interesting information around what your resistance pattern looks like and what that's connected to in terms of your self-doubt. Yeah, great, that question what am I protecting myself from myself from?

Speaker 1: 30:56

I'm reminded of a coaching client I had, who who was one of the things we're working on was her procrastination, and she was talking about this pile of things. It was this was a long time ago so she had piles of things in her inbox physical inbox sitting on her desk and she talked about how she would go through them and sort of lift them up and look at them and go I can't do that. And it was always about I can't do that, and it was never. It was just it was that fear of whatever. It was what she was obviously protecting herself from some things. In that moment, we did a really funny thing that we decided that she would go in and take something from the bottom randomly every day and pull it to the top very courageously. Genius, yeah.

Speaker 1: 31:37

But of course, now we have inboxes that are not physical, so it doesn't have quite that kind of physical sense. Well, and I think as well like I've worked a lot with clients who have a similar kind of experience and often I think they're quite high-achieving people, and so when there is this thing of I can't reply to that email, there's often not just that issue but then the kind of shame around why the hell can't I do this relatively simple task. And you know, I always sort of invite clients to consider that this, the complexity of the task, it's about the level of risk you feel. So if you're responding to an email that's going to generate the risk of maybe conflict or someone might misinterpret what you're saying, then it makes complete sense to me that you would spend, you know, 17 hours rewriting a three-line email Like that just makes sense. You're just trying to protect yourself from that risk happening. But then, of course, we add in our stories, right, don't we? About why can't I just do this? Why am I like this? Oh, my god, I hate that I'm doing this, all of that stuff. You know, if only people knew this is how I'd been spending my time. What am I going to code this to? On my time sheet all of that stuff comes up right and it it makes complete sense that if there is a risk that's there for you, then that risk is the thing that needs your attention, like why is it that that feels so scary and dangerous, and what might you be able to bring online in terms of your resourcing, to be able to support yourself.

Speaker 1: 33:20

And sometimes we have to go back to when that risk originally occurred and look at, you know, what are the echoes of that original experience? How's that showing up in the here and now? And sometimes it can be related to, you know, quite early in our lives. So you know, I've often worked with quite senior leaders who are baffled by their situations you know why can't I just deal with this? And there's impatience and frustration and all sorts of stuff going on. And when we look at, oh actually, you know, when you're a little boy, you didn't have anyone saying it was okay, you didn't have to be the man of the house, you, but because you didn't have anyone else doing that job, you took that on, and now you're at the risk of burnout because you find it impossible to delegate, because that little boy is echoing into your role now, and you find, oh, actually, that's a pattern.

Speaker 1: 34:16

I've lived my whole life right, and so sometimes I think these things come up and when we can really understand what caused them in the first place, there's a lot of healing that can happen there. Often it's quite emotional. It's like, oh my, I can just put this down, you know. And then, of course, you have the moments of oh, this isn't supposed to be therapy and it's like, no, but it can feel quite therapeutic, right, it can really support you, yeah, and I think that for me is like when the work gets really quite powerful, it's those impacts have a ripple effect into the future of that client that we just can't even know about. It's wonderful to see. Yeah, it's liberating. It's liberating when we have those moments. I think, yeah, I'm really aware of time.

Speaker 1: 35:03

I'm really loving this conversation, but I want just to ask another question, or have a conversation about how are our modern workplaces impacting our self-doubt, and do you think so? Because I think I can see this. I think it's getting harder for people to hold on to who they are at work, and I'm curious to hear your reflections on that. Yeah, I agree, you know, I think, something I've thought a lot about, especially because I work with a lot of leaders and CEOs and folks who are in positions where they have an enormous amount of responsibility, and they certainly feel that that actually all of the things that we do to sort of armour ourselves up and protect ourselves against self-doubt, which I don't think are particularly coachable, right, like a lot of the behaviours that we put in place. They're all rewarded in our modern workplaces.

Speaker 1: 36:01

So you know overworking, overgiving, you know making sure that you're the one that's saying yes to everything A lot of that is absolutely rewarded by you know, don't feel too much, don't question things too much. We don't really want to know that you're not coping Like. A lot of that stuff, I think, is given lip service and certainly I think some workplaces are much better at this than others, where there is more than just lunchtime yoga to deal with. You know corporate overwork and expectations that are, I think, inhumane. A lot of. I think a lot of organizations are actually starting to be a bit more innovative and that's wonderful to see.

Speaker 1: 36:43

You know four-day weeks and job sharing and you know just seeing how might we do this differently if we weren't so bound up in these stories that it's got to be this way because it always has workplaces the things that actually perpetuate our self-doubt are absolutely rewarded in in the workplace, and so I think if anyone is feeling like man self-doubt's a thing I live with constantly. You know, just kind of zoom out a bit of your life and have a little. Look at the dynamics that you're surrounded in, particularly in a work context, you know, does it feel like you've got anywhere? You can be kind of psychologically safe, right where you're actually allowed to show up and be your whole self and share your ideas and have a sense of you know you can take some risks and you're supported by at least one person in the workplace. Those are the things that actually generate really high-performing teams, like it makes economic sense of nothing else for us to do that.

Speaker 1: 37:55

But I think that you know you're absolutely right to say that our workplace practices largely will perpetuate and reinforce self-doubt. Yeah, I mean this is my sense of it that it's true for many, many people that always finding themselves second guessing their own judgment, because where they think that they are bringing some wisdom or some ideas, it's being questioned or it's not enough, or you know some ideas. It's being questioned or it's not enough, or you know. And we could go on for 100 places. And and I'm with you, I think it's really important that we, when we're in those places, that we find people also that mirror our self-belief, that help us to find our resources as you so beautifully talk about them, to help us connect in, and that, I think, is partly why we're seeing such a growth in coaching, because we need people who are going to go with us on that journey, to help us kind of find and believe in ourselves, to stand firm for what we believe in.

Speaker 1: 38:53

And as leaders, we have, I think, a huge responsibility to be creating organizations that encourage people to believe in themselves and to grow, creating organizations that encourage people to believe in themselves and to grow, and and that is hard, I think, because the current climate doesn't really support that so, yeah, it really, and I think as well, like leadership is adaptive, like it will adapt to the culture. So, um, that works both ways right. If you go, if you're a pretty healed and whole human being and you're going into a leadership role, you will be able to impact the culture. Yes, and so I feel, even though I think systemic issues are, you know, rife, I feel incredibly hopeful that, as more and more folks seek out, you know support, like coaching and other modalities, depending on what works for them to really do that work of you know figuring out well, who am I in this, you know, and rather than kind of fitting the box that you're in, actually showing up as yourself and starting to impact the box. I think that is where we will see more and more changes happening. Yeah, yeah, and you and I are both privileged to work with the people who are doing that, who are totally, you know, holding the courage of who they are at work. Yeah, oh, that's such a great conversation. I could talk about it for hours, but unfortunately it's time for us to come towards the end.

Speaker 1: 40:26

I wonder if you could share with us a book or a podcast or something that has inspired you or influenced you. I have to say, I think this is a very mean question, because I could have given you 10 books. It was quite hard to choose one, but I have got combining by Nora Bateson as my, as my recommendation. Um, nora Bateson is this incredible polymath and this is a mix of like change theory and poetry and art and like wisdom and what the heck are we going to do about our world? Kind of conversations. It's so rich.

Speaker 1: 41:07

I bought this earlier this year and I keep going back to it. It's one of those books that you can dip in or you can kind of sit with, but I've actually found, if you're a curious human, it's one of those books that you just go. Oh, I need to think about that. You know, I'll read a couple of pages and then think I need to go for a bit of a walk and just see what's landed there. For me, it's incredibly fertile as a read, um, and I think it helped. She's very much about helping us think differently and this book is absolutely does what it says on the tin. Yeah, it's about combining all of these different ideas and seeing what pops out the other side, but it's a beautiful read for any curious human. I'm off to buy it. Thank you, oh Sass. Thank you for bringing your wisdom and insights to us.

Speaker 1: 42:00

We will share the links to how people can work with you and find you, and I know there's many ways for individuals and coaches to come in and find your work. I'm excited to read your book, although I understand there's a massive piece of work between here and here, but I'm excited to read that and also give my note of notice. But I've also enjoyed, as we've been talking, hearing the New Zealand birds in the background in your place. Yes, they're quite squawky, aren't they? I love them, I love them, so that's been a really nice part for me. Yeah, thank you, sat. And yeah, we will all head off into finding our resources. Thank you, thank you so much, James. Finding our resources Thank you, thank you so much, jane. This was a joy. 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.