Ep107 How coaching works

Dex (00:00:09) - Hi everyone. My name is Dex Randall and this is the Burnout to Leadership podcast, where I teach professional men to recover from burnout and get back to passion and reward at work. Hello my friends. Dex here. Welcome to this week's episode. And this is part two in understanding burnout recovery coaching and what it can do for you. So last episode I talked about the fundamentals of burnout recovery, what tools you need to come good and the transformation you're going to go through during the coaching program that's going to revolutionize and reinvigorate everything about your work experience, so you can once again bring your full talents to bear without the drag of exhaustion, frustration, and overwork. It's basically flipping the needle from stormy back to sunny and learning how to keep it there. And in the process, learning how to recognize and enjoy your own skills and contribution at work, and developing a much stronger career platform so that you will excel now and you'll have much more robust career options into the future. You'll light up your passion and engagement and sense of fulfillment.

Dex (00:01:32) - That's probably been missing for you for quite a while now, huh? And you're going to pull all this off by following a step by step, proven, reliable process to emerge from the dark, as basically all my clients have used to succeed and thrive in both their professional and personal lives. It sounds like quite a big deal, huh? You won't believe it. It's actually an even bigger deal than it sounds. Because it's fundamentally about being free. Free from anxiety, frustration, drudgery. And free to love work, love your family, love your life again. Because burnout really is all about being emotionally exhausted, shut down, compromised, and usually totally pissed off all the time. Rings a bell with you? If it does, it's by no means your natural state to feel that way, and your future doesn't need to be that way. And I beg you, if you are in burnout, to get the help you need. Because if you've been burning out for a while, is whatever you've been doing to fix that working? Is a better future in sight yet? And I'm asking you that obvious question because for those of us with burnout tendencies, trying to row our boat, pushing ourselves harder and harder, we tend not to be able to solve burnout from the inside.

Dex (00:03:11) - Our own resources are going to lead us in the wrong direction, so we must ask for help. And that help is what I'm going to talk about today. What it would look like in practice for you to seek a professional solution to burnout from an established expert who knows how to help you. And before we get into that, I've got some really great news for you. Coaching is not unpleasant or difficult, really. It's not all about painful navel gazing. It's more about untangling you from difficult experiences so you can find your power and confidence again and feel good about who you are and what you do. The whole program is really designed to uplift your spirits, focus you on your gifts, your professional skills, your talents, and of course, your big heart. You will need, during this program, to be honest with yourself, though, about anything that's not going your way at work and really honest about where you see the opportunities for improvement or resolution of that. But to be honest, you've had enough pain already, right? So let's make coaching fun.

Dex (00:04:26) - I want to have fun coaching. I hope you do. And know this. I'm really quite firmly on your side already. I'm like a mentor. I believe in you. For those of you who haven't listened to episode 106 How Burnout Recovery Works, that was last week. It covers the principles and the recovery fundamentals. So you might want to go back and have a listen to that. It's about what the process does, why it's designed the way it is for your smoothest and fastest recovery. But today, let's really get into the nuts and bolts, how you will experience the Burnout Recovery Coaching program each week. As a client, what does it look like for you on the ground during the actual program? What I'm going to do is describe each of the components of the program for you. And first of all, number one is the consult. So you and I will have a free call together where we'll meet up for an hour and find out if we're a good fit to work together. We'll talk about what's happening for you, where your problems lie, what the obstacles are to your success, and where you'd ideally like to get to.

Dex (00:05:38) - It's really just a getting to know one another process. And then on the call, if we both agree, you can start your coaching program right away. So that's the consult. Once we get through that, you will do a self-evaluation. And I start with this for each new client before coaching begins, basically to draw a line in the sand. What happened that's led you into burnout? What are your problems now that need fixing? Ideally, what do you want your work situation to look like? That's a self-evaluation. Then we move on to how to be a successful client. What attributes do my best clients have, that makes success easy for them? How do they show up? How can you commit to being the best client, so you get the most out of the program? Because it really matters to me that you succeed. Once we get through that, we're on to goal settings. Typically, the first goal you'll set in the coaching program is how you want to feel after the first six weeks, which is an intensive learning process.

Dex (00:06:49) - And how do you rate how you feel right now? One example of that might be, let's say, you want your anxiety to go from currently it's eight out of ten, you want it to go down to two out of ten by week six. That's doable. And I do goal setting because people in burnout are goal oriented. They know how to process and work with a goal. So what you do is you set your goal and we'll agree to it together, and then you'll measure your progress against it every day of the program. You'll commit to the goal. I will commit to guiding you there. And at the end of six weeks we'll review your results. Then during the course, probably each week, there are going to be study resources available to you, and I tend to customize these to wherever your head's at the time. So whatever you most need. So this might be videos, podcasts, books, whatever. And it's really so that you can learn the basic techniques to transform your work experience. I will give you the resources that you personally need to master the course material, as applied to your experience.

Dex (00:07:57) - And when you do this learning on these resources, you're going to do it ahead of our one on one weekly call. Because I really want our one on one time to be spent resolving your actual problems. The other resource I'll give you is worksheets. So worksheets are for you to fill in so that you can find a deeper self-awareness about your own patterns. You basically get a deeper insight into how you're contributing to creating results you don't really like in your own life. For example, maybe you say yes to work requests that are outside your work remit and then you get overworked and resentful. The awareness you arrive at with worksheets, and understanding why you make the choices that you do, organically will lead you to make different decisions, higher quality decisions to shape your own life in ways that suit you better. And then we come to self coaching. So self coaching is a tool you're going to use to understand why things that happen bother you and to work out exactly how you can change that. It gives you immediate power back over upsetting events and people at work.

Dex (00:09:16) - And it works in the moment because as soon as you can see clearly what power you have. You can completely change your experience of what's happening. It works that fast because it basically helps you change your emotions and feel better. You're going to discover how to prevent yourself feeling bad about stuff that happens. When I teach you to self coach, you're going to reclaim emotional resilience. So feeling bad doesn't continue to take up all of your time and all of your headspace, and that allows you to make huge gains in your work performance and collaboration. And it brings back your energy levels. And the practice of self coaching takes about 10 to 15 minutes per day. Then the next component is our one on one weekly coaching calls. This is really the magic beating heart of coaching, where together we resolve actual problems you're having each week, live on the call. Because actually I'm a big fan of on the spot fixes. Because I'm impatient like you, huh? So what you'll learn is how to resolve a specific instance of an ongoing problem you're having, or an ongoing dynamic you have.

Dex (00:10:32) - And here's an example. Let's say there's a moment this week when your boss did something that upset you. Let's say they publicly undermined you, about something you said in a meeting and you felt humiliated. Together, you and I are going to look at the dynamics of what happened and use coaching principles to bring you back to your own power in that situation. In this example, perhaps your boss was uncomfortable with how they felt when you spoke, and they asserted themselves to cover for that, to cover for their embarrassment. Perhaps they felt that what you said made them look stupid or didn't serve their interest. But when they spoke against you, it probably felt like a personal attack to you. Perhaps it felt like disrespect. Well, in fact, they weren't even thinking about you at all at the time. Because almost 100% of the time, as humans, we say or do things because of the way we feel or the way we want to feel. Which means that most decision making is emotional, self-referential, validating our personal view.

Dex (00:11:39) - I need to be right. Rational logic actually has very little to do with decision making. We just don't want to feel bad. And certainly since we spend all our time thinking about ourselves and what we want or don't want, any words we might say targeting another person actually say little or nothing about the other person. They say a lot more about us. All that happened is we just said what we needed to uphold our own worldview, our own beliefs, to shore up our ego so we can feel safe and okay again. So if you think about that in coaching, it follows that we can actually find techniques to use to depersonalize criticism, judgment, disrespect, and so on so that we don't react or overreact to what other people say to us or about us. We don't make their words mean anything about us. We don't receive their words as an insult or an ego threat, and then go on and get into an ego war with them. Depersonalization of what other people say, quite simply makes us feel better.

Dex (00:13:00) - So that's one example of coaching and how it might be applied. And the really terrific part about all of this, the piece I love the best, is when you solve a specific instance of an issue, such as your boss overruling you in a meeting, what you're learning really is a transferable skill. You work on an instance of a problem, and then you generalize the solution to all the other times your boss has done something similar. Solve once, defuse the problem forever. So I've gone through this example, just to give you a little taste of how you might begin stopping all the wars you're having at work. There are many more techniques to learn, of course, skills that will probably be new to you, that go against the grain of what we could call normal communication skills. And that's just one. But perhaps you get an inkling of the power you're going to have once you learn those skills. So many skills to reduce your suffering and increase your confidence in yourself. Of course, some of the skills you'll learn will be for when YOU make a mistake.

Dex (00:14:11) - Maybe you neglected to call someone back, or you failed to complete a task, or you snapped at someone. What I'll do there, when it's a mistake you've made, is I will help you very gently restore your own faith in yourself and take care of yourself, because you're hurting in that moment. So I will help you continue to see yourself as competent, worthy, valuable. Basically OK. And change the way that you think, speak, and behave in the face of adversity and anxiety. So you don't do make mistakes like this again, and you actually create results for yourself that you like better. We'll really be mining what's already good in you. Hidden underneath all that self-criticism. Systematically on these one on one coaching calls, particularly backed up by your new self coaching practice. We're going to knock off all your problems one by one. And then to back that up between your weekly calls and all the other things that you're doing during the whole program, the whole coaching program, you will receive unlimited email support whenever you need it.

Dex (00:15:24) - So if you're in between sessions and you get an issue, you can come to me and say, okay, this is what's happening. Can you help me out? I will help you out via email. And when you've done all of those processes for a number of weeks. Particularly after the first six weeks. That's our first stopping point. We'll do a review process where we'll check how you're going with your goals, because you'll be self-reporting each day on your progress. We will celebrate all of your wins, and certainly by the end of the six weeks, you will have many and you will feel differently about your whole work experience. And also we'll plan on how you can make the most of the skills that you already have. So we'll talk about how to deploy those in other areas of your life to get the maximum benefit from your coaching and self coaching experience. And where all of that takes you is week by week. As you study and attend the cause, you'll find your energy coming back, your strength, your brilliance, your confidence, and of course, very importantly, your sense of humor.

Dex (00:16:30) - And you'll start to get an inkling of feeling that maybe this whole mess can be salvaged after all, which indeed it can. And on the one on one calls. Over the first six intensive weeks, you'll start seeing work differently. Things won't feel so dramatically awful. You're going to watch things change. You'll watch yourself change. You'll connect with more of your own potential and self-assurance, and you'll start getting along better with people. Because what we're really doing, particularly at the beginning, is we're on a salvage mission. But no matter how tough things have got for you at work, how messy, how depleted and exhausted you are in the period up until you begin coaching. All of those situations will start being fixed real time each week as you go through the coaching program. So let me recap a little bit on that. Here's what you're going to get in practical terms in this coaching program. And all of the work you'll do boils down to roughly 2 to 3 hours work for you per week. Depending on your mileage, that may reduce over time as well.

Dex (00:17:41) - And don't forget, once you start coaching, if you're feeling overworked and exhausted now, you're going to quickly reclaim time and energy and start to feel better. So don't worry, you'll get stuck in. You'll quickly bounce back. So the components I've talked about here are number one, the consultation, which is the free call where we check if we are a good fit to work together. And I answer all your questions and hear about what your problems are. Number two, a preparation worksheet which is drawing the line in the sand of where you're at now and where you're trying to get to. Number three. How to get the most out of coaching and show up in the most conducive way to getting the results you're looking for. Number four. Goal setting. Number five study resources. This is learning the techniques to beat burnout, basically. Number six worksheets to troubleshoot any unhelpful patterns that you may have. Number seven self coaching to help you feel better every day. Number eight one on one personal coaching calls to resolve your problems real time.

Dex (00:18:51) - Number nine. Unlimited email support. And number ten. A review to celebrate all of your wins and review goals, progress and maximize your success going on from here. Of course, having said all of it, that's just the nuts and bolts. But the gift of burnout recovery is, of course, priceless. Enjoying work again. Restoring harmony. Enhancing your career prospects. Improving the quality of relationships both inside work and out. Becoming a go to person at work again, but at a higher level than you were before. Trusted and relied on and being given new upgraded challenges at work or even promotion during the course of the program. Because this program is transformational, you won't recognize yourself once you've been through it. So that's what I have today. Thank you very much for listening. And if you are in burnout and you've had enough suffering, you're ready for change. You must come and talk to me about how to recover quickly and sustainably and get back to your best performance, leadership and success. And of course, most of all enjoyment inside work and out.

Dex (00:20:03) - You can book an appointment with me at Dexrandall.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please help me reach more people in burnout by rating and reviewing this podcast. I truly appreciate your support in this. And if you know someone else who's heading towards or in burnout, please send them the podcast link. The podcast is packed, as you may know, with practical tips for burnout recovery. I recommend new people listen to the first five episodes. Thanks for being here. I will see you again next week.