Blog – Coaching and Self-Reflection

We’ve moved into hipster territory. Even as I typed the title I can hear you judging me from your bus seat, or your lunch queue, or from over your increasingly soggy bowl of cornflakes. This week we’re going to talk about the importance of self-reflection and some lessons I’ve learned from coaching. This will be minimal on facts and figures and maximal on experience and waffle so if you’re here for the strong opinions and the references you may want to step away now.

I’ll start with a little background. I recently went to our careers service to seek some help with what I viewed as my failing career. I chatted to an amazing woman called Susan who left me feeling like a million dollars. I was told not to say I was ‘old’ but that I was ‘experienced’ and all sorts of other things that just generally made me feel like I had contributed well to things, rather than wasted epic amounts of my life pursuing a fundamentally unreachable goal.

At some point, Susan got in touch to say a colleague was training to be a coach and needed people to work with, and she thought I would benefit from it. I, at that point, knew nothing more about coaching that I had gleaned by osmosis from LinkedIn but I did have ex-academic friends who worked with coaches on a regular basis and who found it very useful. They mostly used it to work on personnel type issues – I have a new member of staff who is disruptive, how do I tell them not to be, my boss is aggressive and annoying, how do I manage up, that kind of thing. I didn’t actually see the benefit for me as an academic but (because I’m an academic) was sold on the word ‘free’.

At this point it would probably be useful to take some time out to explain the main goal of coaching and how it works, given that I had no idea until recently. We’ll do our usual and step back in time a bit to the 70s and 80s, a time of shoulder pads and power ballads, when business and ‘the businessman’ (or businesswoman) became the thing to be. A lot of large companies started hiring outside experts, usually psychologists (this was the birth of the organizational psychologist) to improve executive performance. A lot of this was spurred on by the 1974 Timothy Gallway book ‘The Inner Game of Tennis’, purportedly one of Bill Gates favourite books if that helps sell it to you, which mainstreamed the idea that a lot of the stuff that gets in the way of progress and success is internal, not external. The idea of coaching began as a way to help executives ‘get out of their own way’ in order to achieve what they wanted to achieve.

This moved on in the 90s to life coaching and then in the 2000s to health coaching but more importantly for us, the idea of coaching went beyond the ‘traditional’ business and moved into all areas of career development. And coaching itself developed over this time as well. The idea of coaching in the 80s was top-down, the coach came in to tell you what you were doing wrong and how to fix it, it was a very directive process. Many people think this is still how coaching works.

I told someone I was going to have some and they said ‘be prepared for criticism, they’re going to tell you everything you’re doing wrong’.

In fact, modern coaching is designed to do exactly what the Timothy Gallway book originally laid out, to help you get out of your own way. But the way the coaches do it is not by giving directions or telling you to ‘snap out of it’ but rather by taking a variety of approaches and discussing things with you to basically help you get out of your own way. The modern coach is tooled up with any number of different frameworks designed to tackle various different issues that you might encounter at work. I’ll give you some examples before we waffle ourselves into a nap.

A friend of mine is working with a coach who uses the DISC personality model in their sessions. This splits people into different personality types in a more productive way than Myer’s-Briggs, and helps you figure out how to work with them to get the most out of them. It’s great for people managing large and diverse teams who might have a mix of dominant and conscientious personalities (the D and the C from DISC) and who want to get the best out of the team whilst allowing all voices to be heard.

A lot of people work with the GROW model. This is ‘Goal, Reality, Options, Will’ which asks the coachee ‘What is your goal? What is the situation right now? What are your options to reach your goal based on the current situation? And what will you do to achieve your goal?’ My coach works on the OSCAR model – Outcome, Situation, Choices, Action, Response. What is the outcome you desire, or what is your goal basically, what is the situation at the moment and what are your choices to change that situation, what kind of actions can you put into place to undertake those changes and finally, did you do that and did it help. You can see how a lot of these models are very similar, they’re working with you on your own goals in order to help you think more about what you’re doing.

In fact, a lot of coaching styles involve an aspect of CBT, or cognitive behavioural therapy. I’ve even taken to referring to my coaching sessions informally to friends as ‘work therapy’. I basically go in with an issue I’m having and we talk about what I might do about it. Some examples have been how to give and receive feedback, how to maintain boundaries with junior colleagues, how to manage large meetings, and so on. A lot of what we work on ends up being self-reflection and as a process I’ve found that incredibly helpful. I’ll give you an early example, and a recurring theme, which is relevant to academia and perhaps you will find it useful enough to do a bit of your own self-reflection.

I did a mentorship course with ARUK and learned that to be a good mentee (not mentor) it’s important to turn up to these kinds of meetings prepared, with things in mind you want to talk about. I went in to an early session saying that I wanted to work on my confidence a little, especially in work situations where I tended to undersell myself and preface all my questions with ‘this might be a stupid question but…’ and so forth. All of those bad habits many of us have. I was asked ‘why’ a lot. A friend who has coaching joked that was all her coach ever asked her…’why do you think that is’. For me it was ‘Why do you worry that you’ll look stupid?’. I dig down…I want to look like I’m an expert to my peers, I’m not sure if what I’m asking is too basic, I’m generally just nervous about coming across as an idiot. ‘But you’re clearly not an idiot, you have a PhD, you’ve got grants and papers and years of experience, you’re clearly a competent professional’. I’m digging down further now, we’re verging on imposter syndrome territory and it’s getting uncomfortably personal.

We went round in circles with me basically saying ‘yes, I just need to get over this’ and at some point she asked ‘if you were in a pub with some strangers, what do you tell them about yourself?’ I tell them I’m a scientist, obviously, what a dumb question, ‘ok so what do you tell them if you can’t tell them what you do for a job?’. Ah. A wall. Interesting.

Do I have no personality? Am I nothing without my job? I have a dog, does he count as an aspect of my personality?

And it turns out that this is a very common theme in academia. In a post on LinkedIn, Mariette Van der Walt tells the story of Sarah, an academic who reaches mid-career and has a crisis, she has poured so much of herself into her career that she is uncertain what she would do without it but also uncertain why she’s doing it in the first place. A couple of sentences leapt out at me: ‘The cutthroat competition and all-consuming culture of academia often limit the exploration of alternative paths, leaving researchers lost in the emotional and personal costs of their unwavering commitment’. This is your life, you are a scientist from the moment you get up to the moment you go to bed, unwavering commitment. But after going through this wall with my coach I established I’m a problem solver and it’s now how I proudly describe myself. I solve problems in the realm of stroke and dementia right now, but I can also fix my bicycle in a fairly competent way. I have solved plumbing issues in our house, I can organize conferences. Problem solving and the enjoyment thereof is, it turns out after much introspection and coaching, who I am.

But this unwavering commitment can leave people to have made life choices, like not having children, or living in a particular place, or moving away from their family, that can make them fundamentally unhappy. But beyond that, Van der Walt says that ‘The constant pursuit of scientific excellence has fused their self-worth and personal value with their academic success’.

I am an excellent example of this, or at least a horrible warning. I had a grant rejection after a very long week of failed experiments and a paper rejection and was to be found crying in my kitchen in the evening. ‘Don’t take it personally’ my partner told me but how could I not? I had poured myself into this and it had been rejected. But this is what we’re working on in our coaching sessions. I had not poured ‘myself’ into it, I had worked hard on it. It had not been rejected because of me, it had been rejected because of the whims of reviewers. I know I write well, it’s one of the few things I am happy to brag about, and I know I have good ideas because usually at least two or three per review round say that the ideas are good. But there isn’t enough money to go around and that’s not my fault so he’s right, I shouldn’t take it personally.

And this is fundamentally what coaching is about. Taking some common-sense advice and trying to put it into practice.

It sounds ridiculous but as Tim Galloway highlighted in the 70s, sometimes we’re just not good at getting out of our own way and we need someone who has no vested interest in us personally to help us do that.

Talking to friends and peers is great, but if they’re in the same situation as you they may be good at providing a shoulder, but not providing a rational, distant perspective. Talking to qualified people who have the tools to sit back and make you really think about why you believe the things you believe is really valuable and I can highly recommend it to academics of all stages.

Dr Yvonne Couch

Author

Dr Yvonne Couch is an Associate Professor of Neuroimmunology at the University of Oxford. Yvonne studies the role of extracellular vesicles and their role in changing the function of the vasculature after stroke, aiming to discover why the prevalence of dementia after stroke is three times higher than the average. It is her passion for problem solving and love of science that drives her, in advancing our knowledge of disease. Yvonne shares her opinions, talks about science and explores different careers topics in her monthly blogs – she does a great job of narrating too.

@dryvonnecouch.bsky.social