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Aoifinn Devitt 1:02
I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. This podcast series is kindly supported by Franklin Templeton and Alvin Capital. Franklin Templeton is a global investment management firm that provides a broad range of investment solutions, including mutual funds, ETFs, alternative investments, wealth management, and technology-enabled financial services. Founded in 1947 the firm manages approximately 1.8 trillion in assets under management and serves individual and institutional investors across more than 150 countries. Alban Capital was founded in 2005 It’s European-focused private capital advisory and placement agent that provides capital raising services to investment managers from its bases in London and Stockholm. It creates bespoke capital raising programs that blend appropriate investor targeting and sophisticated marketing to deliver a fundraise aligned with institutional expectations. I’m joined today by Kirsty Snade, who’s an organizational psychologist, executive coach, and the author of Returning Well, a practical evidence-based guide for working parents and their managers. We are both at INSEAD together, and I have followed her career ever since. I’m delighted now to bring some of her learnings to our audience. Welcome, Kirsty. Thanks for joining me today.
Kirstie Sneyd 2:18
Thanks, Aoifinn. Lovely to be with you.
Aoifinn Devitt 2:20
As I mentioned in the intro, we first met at INSEAD, and my sense then is that consulting had formed part of your life and part of your career journey up to then, but I’d love if you could take us right back to where you grew up, what you studied, and how this world of coaching and organizational behavior made itself known to you.
Kirstie Sneyd 2:37
Yeah, happy to. So, and you may not know this about me, I was born in Belfast, so luckily I’m an EU citizen, which is fab. So, yeah, born in Belfast, brought up in Norwich University in Bristol, and then moved to London, and so started. Actually, I started – I wasn’t in consultancy to start with. I started as a product researcher for Procter and Gamble, so I have a toothbrush patent in my name, which is a little known fact about me, and so started to get into understanding people when I was there. So, although I was a scientist and kind of analyzing how products were made and what consumers wanted, I started doing some internal training, and that was when I realized that people actually was the thing that interests me, so understanding people and how they operated and how they were motivated. And then when we met at INSEAD, I don’t, if you remember, but I was sometimes called the OB queen, so organizational behavior. So while everybody else was doing finance and strategy, all of my electives were organizational behavior, because that was a bit that really interested me, and really excited me,
Aoifinn Devitt 3:43
and I suppose that was early into that for you, because I think a lot of us laterally realize that that’s really the bit that matters, that’s really the bit that counts. And then post INSEAD, did you always work as a coach, or how did you then develop this? Were there any surprises in there?
Kirstie Sneyd 3:56
Yeah, I’d started coaching before INSEAD, so had when I was at Deloitte, which was my job move after Procter and Gamble, they put everybody through a coaching program, which was fab, so that was coming up for 30 years ago, and I remember at the time just thinking this is a really useful tool, and then when I left in Sea Ad I switched consultancies to Accenture, which had a much bigger practice around understanding human behavior, and joined that group, and so that was when I started to develop it more, and then went into a very small boutique consultancy, which is where I really have specialized a lot more in coaching and ran coaching programs, so training other people to be coaches as well, as well as doing the coaching myself, and I guess that’s where the passion really started and developed more, and then I ended up going out on my own, so I’ve been, I set up on my own 15 years ago, 1516, years ago, and then really specializing more in organizational behavior, and then I went back and studied again and did a. Masters in organizational psychology, just to really build up the evidence base around it, actually was my key driver for that. Quite a lot of the stuff I’ve learned up to that point had been potentially quite fluffy or consultant driven to be able to make money, and I really wanted to make sure I did things that had a very strong evidence base, which did quite a lot of unlearning, which was quite interesting,
Aoifinn Devitt 5:22
so evidence-based, clearly that’s a core tenet you have is to basically ground it in the evidence. What else would you say are some of your core beliefs or core values when it comes to coaching?
Kirstie Sneyd 5:32
So the very first coaching program I did, so there’s this guy called Sir John Whitmore, who’s recognized as one of the gurus in the field, and he talks about this idea of awareness and responsibility. So, when we are coaching somebody, one of the primary goals of it is to help the person increase their own awareness of the situation and understand what’s really going on. So, we can often start conversations, or the coachee can start conversations and not really know what the problem is, so it’s really trying to help them unravel that and understand what it is, then thinking about helping them take a sense of responsibility around doing something around that, so okay, I’ve now figured out this is actually what the issue is, now what do I want to be doing in terms of what actions do I want to take, or how do I change my thinking around this to help me move forward with it?
Aoifinn Devitt 6:26
And one of my findings with some executive coaching has been often the answer is inside every coachee, as, as we call that, that there’s – it’s not that the coach has the answers, is that they can prompt the coachee to find the answers inside themselves, which is a very empowering journey of discovery, but can be initially a bit frustrating for the person being coached, because sometimes they may just want to be told. How do you find that agency develops, and do you find many people are surprised that a lot of the action has to come from within?
Kirstie Sneyd 6:55
I would say part of it is culturally, so at the moment, for example, I do quite a lot of coaching in the Far East and the Middle East, and I get Miss Kirsty tell me what I should be doing, and it’s kind of like that’s not quite the point of coaching, so we do always start coaching sessions with that understanding, and I think it’s the nerve as a coach to hold the space, because quite often you may well have an answer that would be a perfectly adequate, helpful answer, and you may well have a lot of knowledge in that area. So, it can be incredibly tempting to give that answer, and so being able to sit with that level of uncertainty and help people through that can be quite tough. And I think, as you develop as a coach, you develop that as a skill, and learning to hold with it. I mean, as a junior coach, I remember just thinking, well, if I come out with a list of actions, that’s a good coaching session, and actually it’s not necessarily because they may not be the right actions, and your desire to have a tangible bullet point list actually detracts from the really getting that depth of understanding for them of what is the real problem and what’s the real thing to work on, rather than a surface level thing that might make us both feel good at the end of it, but doesn’t actually mean we have a change,
Aoifinn Devitt 8:12
so interesting. And then your book, Returning Well, so clearly focused on a particular cohort, the returners, for various reasons why they may have left the workplace, now returning, and importantly, their managers, I think, as well, embracing that it’s not just about the individual, it’s about the ecosystem that they’re joining. Can you tell us a little bit about the book and the motivation behind it, and some of the key messages?
Kirstie Sneyd 8:33
Yeah, so I guess the motivation behind it is a start point, so the research that I did as part of my organizational psychology masters was around specifically parental returners and that journey, and what made an effective return. I was meant to present my research at a big European psychology conference, which massively excited about, and then Covid hit, so I didn’t get to present it, which was a bit of a bummer, but I then thought about trying to get it done as a paper, so really thinking about, okay, how can I get this out there, and then when I thought a bit more, I just thought actually an academic paper is going to have a relatively limited audience, and although that might feel quite prestigious in terms of having a paper in my name, actually practically I want something that is going to be useful for people and helping the people that I’m not able to coach, because clearly there’s a limited number of people I can coach, and quite a lot of people may not be in organizations that have the finance or resources to pay for coaches, and therefore, How can I produce something that is genuinely going to help people using all the knowledge I’ve got in my brain that I’ve built up over the years of working in this field, so it really guides people through the journey. So, before I go off on leave, when I’m off on leave, when I’m preparing to come back, and then I also look at once we’re embedded back in the workplace, what’s it like being a working parent, and how do we manage that, and for each stage of the journey. Journey looking at it also for the manager, so what kinds of conversations should I be having as a manager at each of those stages, and also understanding as a returning parent how tough it can be for the manager as well, trying to tread that line between wanting to make sure you’ve met the needs of the returning parent, but also you’re balancing the needs of the business and not necessarily knowing what they want because they haven’t told you,
Aoifinn Devitt 10:26
and I suppose that’s a critical point, is balance, right? Because I think any business owner and your own entrepreneur, so you know what it’s like to be a small business owner, having an employee leave and return is massively disruptive and can be a cost factor, so there is obviously a tension inherent or conflict inherent in the whole leaving and returning, even though it’s something that is part of daily life and part of the life cycle. What do you find? I presume in a book you do have to give some pragmatic advice as well as answers. So, maybe what is maybe some of the key points that you find have resonated with the audience in terms of takeaways or maybe rules of thumb in terms of approaching this.
Kirstie Sneyd 11:04
Yeah, so I think there’s definitely something about a shared responsibility, so there’s something about understanding where the other person is coming from as well, whether that’s as the returner and what the business needs and what your manager needs. So, for example, things like when do you notify somebody that you’re pregnant, so when’s that, so not at a time that’s going to be bad for the manager in terms of their own pressure and workload, and you’ve hit them, and also how do you do it, how do you do it in a way that’s going to help the business, because you’ve thought through the implications of how’s your work going to be covered, what could wait until you come back, you know, so not just, oh, I’m pregnant, be happy for me, but actually, what are the implications for the business, and how can you make it easier for them at the same time, and then conversely, as a manager, helping think through what are the conversations that I need to be having, for example, about the person’s career, around the communications that they want when they’re off and their cover and how’s that going to be managed, so that’s one of the acronyms I use, is the 3c’s so career, cover, and communication before we go off on leave, and then when we come back, thinking about finance, flexibility, and fulfillment, which are the three areas we have to balance for ourselves around what do we want from our career and what’s important for us in our world.
Aoifinn Devitt 12:24
Each one of those, I think, probably has its own chapter there in terms of what each means. One of the things that strikes me, and I see this because I work with women across the workplace, returners or not, is visibility, and I think for women in particular, they have to find their space, find their voice, be visible, and increasingly, as a minority in a workplace, it is important to be visible. I think when you’re away, you’re not visible. When you’re returning, you’re making yourself visible again. What do you advise around that, around the making sure that you get the mind share, especially if a promotion is in your future, or you just want your work to be noticed?
Kirstie Sneyd 12:59
Yeah, so there is a really fab book for this. I’m always a fan of recommending books, and not just because I’m an author, but the book’s called Playing Big by Tara Moore, and it’s around our inner critic, so it’s around the voices in our own head that potentially stop us. So I mean, there’s things you can do in terms of what do you do in terms of making yourself visible, and what’s your brand, but the thing I really like about this book is thinking about what are the things that we say in our speech habits that undermine us, so it’s a very practical actually looking at my own language and what am I doing in my conversations that might be undermining my credibility, so a really small example is the word just. So, when we’re writing an email, do we ever put I just wanted to check with you? So, just is effectively saying I’m not quite sure I have the right to have your time, rather than just saying I would like to talk to you about x. So, there’s a whole list of different things, whether we raise our voice at the end, so I’d like to talk to you. Makes it sound as if we’re not as confident or certain about the things that we are proposing. Thinking about those habits of how we speak is just a very practical, relatively easy thing to look at, and think about how does that impact my communication and the power of my communication,
Aoifinn Devitt 14:22
and another key transition – it may not be an actual physical transition, but it is certainly a transition of stage – is when you move into maybe the 50 plus chapter of a career. Sometimes that means winding down of a traditional career, sometimes it means a shift to a portfolio career. Not sure whether retirement is something we talk about today, but how do you cope with that area, which is also coinciding with the midlife stage for many people as well. Any rules of thumb there?
Kirstie Sneyd 14:49
I think, and this is, I think, throughout career, is thinking about what’s important for me and really having that understanding of what does success look. Look like for me at this stage, and we also talk at this stage of thinking about who am I now, because we have a level of identity throughout our career. So we’ve been a professional in a certain field, we may or may not have been a parent as well, and have an identity around that as we’re moving into later stage career. What’s my identity now? Is that still tied up with the work that I’m doing? Do I want it to be an identity as part of that type of work, or something else? So, really thinking through who is it that I want to be now, and for this next stage of my life, and if we have a partner, thinking about how we’re doing that together, so the contracting between the two of us on what does this stage look like for both of us? Because if we’re in it as a partnership, what does that mean? Because you’re a dual career couple and therefore thinking about that stage of managing both of your careers, assuming your partner is still working as well and has a career as well.
Aoifinn Devitt 15:55
And do you see the level of anxiety is rising at this stage, and they say 50 plus bracket, I suppose, because there is a sense of younger talents perhaps being more relevantly trained than the need to skill. I used a brilliant expression, compare and despair, in a session that we went on, which really resonated, because I think there is a tendency throughout one’s career to compare, but particularly when there’s that divergence, then in terms of maybe wealth creation, if that’s important, or just status, which is also important. There’s also the empty nester phenomenon. Children are moving on. There might have been a lot of one’s identity around that, and then that’s no longer part of the identity in terms of the day-to-day caregiver. Any aspects of this that resonate more?
Kirstie Sneyd 16:35
I don’t know where the anxiety has increased more. I think it is different, and I think what is better now is we are more likely to have portfolio careers, so previously most people, not everybody, but you joined a job, you might have stayed in it for life, you might have potentially, and then it was this really hard cliff edge, so you basically you retired, whereas most of us now, and if we look at both of our own careers, we don’t just have a thing, we do, we have a variety of different things. So, when we move into later stages, we can think about, oh, I want to keep this thread on, because that satisfies these needs. But do you know what this thread of my career I’m less interested in pursuing now, because I don’t need that stress, I don’t need that hassle, or level of travel, or whatever it is, but actually this strand I’m going to continue. I think there’s a much greater awareness now, which might increase anxiety, and there’s a hell of a lot more decisions we can potentially choose, which definitely increases anxiety. There’s lots of research that shows the more decision options we have, the higher the level of stress and the level of wellbeing, but I would say unless you are in a very black and white career that you’ve just had a job and people do, where it is much harder to make that transition, a lot more of us are set up in a way that it’s going to make it easier for ourselves.
Aoifinn Devitt 17:57
My last question on the coaching, before we move to some reflections, if you were to say, employ a pattern recognition approach to the coaching clients that you see, what topics come up over and over again, and do you think are these fixable? Some of these issues that people come to you with,
Kirstie Sneyd 18:12
I guess, thinking about what are the things that I most commonly share with people as examples to help them through. So, definitely, the book I just talked about, playing big, I think the other thing is around our sense of control, so often where concerns are in the workplace are around, do I have control of this, so we can spend a hell of a lot of time in what we call our circle of concern, so there’s a whole chunk of stuff that I’m worried or concerned about. Within that, there’s a smaller circle or sphere of things I can influence, and within that, there’s a smaller circle still of things that I can control. And I know I’ve talked to you previously, even about cognitive coping, which is around how do we think about things, or view things, or reframe things, and that is within our control. It may be tricky to do sometimes, but really thinking about how am I choosing to view this situation, and is that making it easier or harder for myself, is something we have control over. But what somebody else is doing, we can influence potentially, but we really don’t have control over, we may not even be able to influence it, so actually, What can I focus on, which in itself energizes us and motivates us and makes us more likely to be able to do stuff rather than sitting in this pattern of, oh bloody hell, this has happened. I always pull people up if they go they, who are they, you know, who’s the person, so is there a person you can influence, or or is it this amorphous? They are doing this well. What can you do? What’s the thing that you can control and do? So, I would say that’s probably one of the most common themes that comes up.
Aoifinn Devitt 19:53
That’s wonderful. I mean, some of us are listening on audio, so they won’t see the gestures you’re making, but as you were talking about those spheres, I was thinking. Of Russian dolls, you kind of contained inside each other the smaller being the smallest inside being that sphere of control, and I suppose what I’ve always found is knowing what you can and cannot control, and not necessarily worrying about some of those things you can’t control, but what I would also say is that increasingly I’ve seen that the sphere of influence can be within your control, so to speak, you can influence more than you think, and that’s the power of impact and impactful careers, and the work you do, the work I do, is we can influence effortlessly, like it’s not quite effortlessly, but it is with lower effort that then we think, and even that is empowering to have that doll in the tier expand.
Speaker 2 20:39
Yeah,
Kirstie Sneyd 20:40
absolutely, and when we have a sense of agency and when we do stuff, as you say, that then empowers us to do more. So, in psychology terms, we talk about it as self-efficacy. So, this belief that we have an ability to control the outcome, and we can do something about it, makes us more likely to be able to do something about it, because we think, oh, I, I talk about with my kids, as you’ve got this, so you know we’re coming into exam season, and people talk about what should you say to your kids when they go into the exams, and one of the most helpful things to say is you’ve got this, so it’s that we have a belief in you that you should be having in yourself in terms of your ability to cope with what’s it’s not saying you’re going to do well, but it’s kind of you’ve got this in terms of actually that belief in yourself as you go into the exam.
Aoifinn Devitt 21:24
Well, that’s a perfect segue to a question about mentorship, because I think that is a key strand of mentors that I see quoted on this podcast, is they believe in the person I’m interviewing, so that will have been the people who believe them, who pluck them maybe out of the rankings, and said, you know, I believe in you, you’ve got this, or they gave a task that seemed very challenging and very out of reach, but they believe that they could achieve that. I’d love to ask about A, the importance of mentors, and B, have you had any of your own?
Kirstie Sneyd 21:55
I don’t know that I’ve had mentors, per se. I have definitely had bosses that I have felt are very supportive, you know, and have stretched me and have believed in me, less somebody that has gone, okay, this is the career path, and I can help you get there, but definitely having bosses who believe in you and give you feedback as well, so you see a lot of the time, and this is particularly when people come back from parental leave, but just generally, that our belief in ourselves, that sometimes we need that external recognition as well. I mean, ideally it comes from within ourselves in terms of intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic, but that importance of having somebody acknowledging that and giving you that feedback can be really helpful, and I think just overall in terms of mentors, but I also think in terms of role models. So I do a lot around career coaching, and one of the things that can be really hard is if we don’t have those examples of other people doing things and examples of people that we can relate to, whatever relating is, you know, and there’s a whole variety of characteristics that might be the things that we relate to, but if we don’t have that as role models, it can be really hard to think, well, I can do that path. There’s nothing to say we can’t. There’s always a first, you know, a first earth to do this, you know, with the example of the astronauts recently as well, but it is much harder, whereas if you have examples of other people, so I almost think that is more important in ways, because you can be a role model to loads of people, whereas you might only be a mentor to a couple of people, because you have that time,
Aoifinn Devitt 23:34
and that’s much to the motivation behind this podcast series, is to present role models, people who look like you, have had similar backgrounds and similar career journeys. I think that’s important to be able to visualize, because visualizing and identifying is such a key part of that. On the feedback point, I’m going to hazard a suggestion, which I’m not sure you would agree with, that when one comes back from a maternity leave, a sick leave, any kind of leave, positive feedback is a lot more important than negative feedback at that point, because you’re already on the back foot, so if someone thinks that, well, this is the time for feedback, I’m not sure it’s the time for the wall of negative or constructive feedback. Even I would think a little bit more bolstering, because there’s a recognition that that person is probably feeling vulnerable.
Kirstie Sneyd 24:15
Yeah, absolutely. There’s a really lovely piece of research that I sometimes quote that looks at both feedback, but also level of support. I’d mentioned this thing around self-efficacy, which is our belief in ourselves. So, most of the time, the research shows that if I give you loads of support, it actually reduces your self-efficacy. So, you know, this thing of kids, and sort of helping them help themselves. So, if I give you loads of support, it basically doesn’t enable or empower you, but actually the research, and they did research people coming back from parental leave, it was mothers, but it would apply for dads as well, and measured it at different points of time, and actually when you first come back receiving support doesn’t reduce. Your self-efficacy, because you actually just need it. It’s so bloody, you just need that support and that reassurance, but that’s only for a couple of months. And then, when you measured it again at 11 weeks, rather than five weeks, the study actually too much support wasn’t right. So it’s really recognizing that very crucial first bit, whether that’s feedback or support, that it is much more important in that phase, and obviously you might be managing somebody that’s never needed high levels of feedback, you know, and they’re very self-sufficient, and they’re very kind of intrinsically motivated, but there’s just something about I’ve been out of the business, even if I’ve been reading The Economist or whatever magazine that you’ve been reading to kind of keep your knowledge up to date based on your industry. Actually, do you know what I feel out of it still? I don’t quite feel like I fit back in the workplace, and so yeah, anything that could be done to help that.
Aoifinn Devitt 25:50
Definitely on the support point, and were there any key people for you? You mentioned not having maybe a mentor, but role models, or even just key people across your life, not career wise, or a coach out there, a professional coach that you think does great work, and this doesn’t have to be an exhaustive list.
Kirstie Sneyd 26:04
No, no, I mean, I think you’d also ask me around people that have kind of influenced my career as well on decision making. I mean, my parents very early on, but interestingly, in different ways, my mum was a, oh, that’s a good thing to do, or to kind of follow, and my dad, or maybe avoid that, and so my dad’s the conversation was when I was around seven or eight, and we were on holiday, and I was was chatting to him, and I just said, “Dad, you seem quite different on holiday, you know, you seem to be a kind of different person, and I said, “Is this the real you, or was is the real you the person at work? And he said to me, “Oh no, this is real me, and I really vividly remember, you know, we’re just on a bucket and spade holiday in Devon, and just thinking, “God, that is awful, you know, that the real you is two weeks a year when we’re on holiday, and this thing called a job means that you’re not you. So I guess a very early sense of work should be something that brings you pleasure, brings you joy, makes you feel kind of more you, not all the time, but that is something that isn’t a burden that’s fundamentally changing you. Whereas my mum was the opposite, she was an academic, she was in a social group where probably there was less females working, but she kind of made it work, so she adapted in that group, so she still fitted in socially where we lived in Norwich, but then she was Dr. Morgan with her kind of academic peer group, so both that as a learning from my mum and also marrying somebody who’s supportive of your career, so I think I’ve mentioned this to you before. The book by Jennifer Petrovieri, the INSEAD OB professor, has written a book called Couples That Work, which is around dual career couples. She starts the book, and I don’t completely agree with it, but she starts the book by saying the most important career decision is who you marry. I don’t believe that I don’t believe is the most important, but that’s more of a headline for a book, but I definitely believe it is important. So, thinking about who have you got in your life that will support you and support you in your career decisions in the same way that you’re going to support them, so that you kind of manage your careers together and how you manage that.
Aoifinn Devitt 28:19
Wonderful reflections. I love that one about your dad, and in terms of setbacks or challenges and growth from them. Obviously, you looked out with lots of coaching clients who’ve gone through challenges. Any of your own that you can point to as being growing moments?
Kirstie Sneyd 28:33
Yeah, I think coping with rejection. So, I’m in a very early example, I was.. I don’t know that I’d use the word lucky, because I don’t believe necessarily in lucky, but I, I got a graduate job in the milk round, I think I was the first in my year to kind of get one, and so that’s when I went to Procter and Gamble, but I applied to both Mars and Unilever as well, and they just rejected me outright, and I just remember thinking, kind of, why, what have I done wrong, or what’s not right, and then years later I met somebody from Mars. We were both together at a workshop, and I was explaining this to him, and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, I got rejected from PNG outright. And so it was a really useful learning on career fit, you know. And actually, the more I understand about kind of Mars, and particularly Unilever as organizations, I wouldn’t have been the right fit. So I think there’s definitely something about about understanding that, and then the other one was was actually Bill, my husband, being very kind of wise. When you work as a coach, sometimes you have chemistry meetings, so they interview three people to see who’s the best fit. And I had started working at John Lewis, which I love as an organization, so like super kind of chuffed to be working there. This was about 20 years ago, and I’d done one series of coaching there, and then I’d gone for a chemistry meeting, and I didn’t get it, you know. And Bill was just really wise, and he said to me, “Well, who would have been the other coaches? And I sort of said, “Well, I don’t know, but, and he was like, “Well, they’d be similar to you, or kind of have similar. Skill set, so I was like, yeah, absolutely, and he just said, well, it’s one in three, then isn’t it, Kirsty? And I just was like, well, yeah, that’s probably true, you know, I mean, actually, so less this is a rejection of me, but actually the odds are again a thing about fit that I wouldn’t have probably been the right fit for that person, and somebody else was a better fit, but we’re hard at the time, but I just, I mean, it’s quite a logical bill, but it was like, yeah, okay, yeah, one in three, fine, I’ll live with that.
Aoifinn Devitt 30:26
I’d say rejection never easy, it’s always going to take it personally, even though we’re told not to, but I think, yeah, building that sort of thick skin around it and the mindset is just so critical. So, thank you for sharing that. My last question is around any key creed or motto or word of advice that you can leave us with, you’ve tremendous experience in the coaching and in dealing with the psychology and emotions. Anything you can leave us with.
Kirstie Sneyd 30:47
So, I guess quite a few of them I’ve talked about, so the kind of controlling the controllables and the tar are more playing big. I think one of the ones that I probably haven’t mentioned that I think is really useful is this idea of responding rather than reacting, so when we are having a conversation with somebody, or when something happens to us, we have a natural reaction to that, which is often an emotional reaction. It doesn’t mean we’re being emotional, but you know, we have a oh sense, just like we were talking with rejection, and so that learning to take a micro pause, so that we are deciding to respond rather than react, so we are choosing, so we’re thinking, okay, these are the different ways I could respond to this, which one is going to give me or more likely to give me the outcome I want, and it may be the same as our reaction, but I’m making a conscious choice around that rather than just my initial reaction to something. So, yeah, that would probably be something I try and live by. Don’t always succeed to try and live by that I don’t think I’ve mentioned so far.
Aoifinn Devitt 31:54
Wonderful. Well, something you said earlier really stuck with me, which was that about the space creating space and the discipline as a coach, not to step into that space to try to fix everything, and I think that is something that all of us, even those who are not coaches, can really take on board, is to just maintain that discipline, whether it’s with our children in a conflict situation or anywhere, just to take that breath, and I think that someone with your experience and your presence, it is a constant reminder to think, and equally to put it all in perspective. So, thank you so much, Kirsty, for coming here and sharing your insights with us.
Kirstie Sneyd 32:28
Real pleasure, lovely to chat to you, Aoifinn.
Aoifinn Devitt 32:30
I’m Aoifin Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring professionals on their personal journey, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, this podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest,
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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Aoifinn Devitt 1:02
I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. This podcast series is kindly supported by Franklin Templeton and Alvin Capital. Franklin Templeton is a global investment management firm that provides a broad range of investment solutions, including mutual funds, ETFs, alternative investments, wealth management, and technology-enabled financial services. Founded in 1947 the firm manages approximately 1.8 trillion in assets under management and serves individual and institutional investors across more than 150 countries. Alban Capital was founded in 2005 It’s European-focused private capital advisory and placement agent that provides capital raising services to investment managers from its bases in London and Stockholm. It creates bespoke capital raising programs that blend appropriate investor targeting and sophisticated marketing to deliver a fundraise aligned with institutional expectations. I’m joined today by Kirsty Snade, who’s an organizational psychologist, executive coach, and the author of Returning Well, a practical evidence-based guide for working parents and their managers. We are both at INSEAD together, and I have followed her career ever since. I’m delighted now to bring some of her learnings to our audience. Welcome, Kirsty. Thanks for joining me today.
Kirstie Sneyd 2:18
Thanks, Aoifinn. Lovely to be with you.
Aoifinn Devitt 2:20
As I mentioned in the intro, we first met at INSEAD, and my sense then is that consulting had formed part of your life and part of your career journey up to then, but I’d love if you could take us right back to where you grew up, what you studied, and how this world of coaching and organizational behavior made itself known to you.
Kirstie Sneyd 2:37
Yeah, happy to. So, and you may not know this about me, I was born in Belfast, so luckily I’m an EU citizen, which is fab. So, yeah, born in Belfast, brought up in Norwich University in Bristol, and then moved to London, and so started. Actually, I started – I wasn’t in consultancy to start with. I started as a product researcher for Procter and Gamble, so I have a toothbrush patent in my name, which is a little known fact about me, and so started to get into understanding people when I was there. So, although I was a scientist and kind of analyzing how products were made and what consumers wanted, I started doing some internal training, and that was when I realized that people actually was the thing that interests me, so understanding people and how they operated and how they were motivated. And then when we met at INSEAD, I don’t, if you remember, but I was sometimes called the OB queen, so organizational behavior. So while everybody else was doing finance and strategy, all of my electives were organizational behavior, because that was a bit that really interested me, and really excited me,
Aoifinn Devitt 3:43
and I suppose that was early into that for you, because I think a lot of us laterally realize that that’s really the bit that matters, that’s really the bit that counts. And then post INSEAD, did you always work as a coach, or how did you then develop this? Were there any surprises in there?
Kirstie Sneyd 3:56
Yeah, I’d started coaching before INSEAD, so had when I was at Deloitte, which was my job move after Procter and Gamble, they put everybody through a coaching program, which was fab, so that was coming up for 30 years ago, and I remember at the time just thinking this is a really useful tool, and then when I left in Sea Ad I switched consultancies to Accenture, which had a much bigger practice around understanding human behavior, and joined that group, and so that was when I started to develop it more, and then went into a very small boutique consultancy, which is where I really have specialized a lot more in coaching and ran coaching programs, so training other people to be coaches as well, as well as doing the coaching myself, and I guess that’s where the passion really started and developed more, and then I ended up going out on my own, so I’ve been, I set up on my own 15 years ago, 1516, years ago, and then really specializing more in organizational behavior, and then I went back and studied again and did a. Masters in organizational psychology, just to really build up the evidence base around it, actually was my key driver for that. Quite a lot of the stuff I’ve learned up to that point had been potentially quite fluffy or consultant driven to be able to make money, and I really wanted to make sure I did things that had a very strong evidence base, which did quite a lot of unlearning, which was quite interesting,
Aoifinn Devitt 5:22
so evidence-based, clearly that’s a core tenet you have is to basically ground it in the evidence. What else would you say are some of your core beliefs or core values when it comes to coaching?
Kirstie Sneyd 5:32
So the very first coaching program I did, so there’s this guy called Sir John Whitmore, who’s recognized as one of the gurus in the field, and he talks about this idea of awareness and responsibility. So, when we are coaching somebody, one of the primary goals of it is to help the person increase their own awareness of the situation and understand what’s really going on. So, we can often start conversations, or the coachee can start conversations and not really know what the problem is, so it’s really trying to help them unravel that and understand what it is, then thinking about helping them take a sense of responsibility around doing something around that, so okay, I’ve now figured out this is actually what the issue is, now what do I want to be doing in terms of what actions do I want to take, or how do I change my thinking around this to help me move forward with it?
Aoifinn Devitt 6:26
And one of my findings with some executive coaching has been often the answer is inside every coachee, as, as we call that, that there’s – it’s not that the coach has the answers, is that they can prompt the coachee to find the answers inside themselves, which is a very empowering journey of discovery, but can be initially a bit frustrating for the person being coached, because sometimes they may just want to be told. How do you find that agency develops, and do you find many people are surprised that a lot of the action has to come from within?
Kirstie Sneyd 6:55
I would say part of it is culturally, so at the moment, for example, I do quite a lot of coaching in the Far East and the Middle East, and I get Miss Kirsty tell me what I should be doing, and it’s kind of like that’s not quite the point of coaching, so we do always start coaching sessions with that understanding, and I think it’s the nerve as a coach to hold the space, because quite often you may well have an answer that would be a perfectly adequate, helpful answer, and you may well have a lot of knowledge in that area. So, it can be incredibly tempting to give that answer, and so being able to sit with that level of uncertainty and help people through that can be quite tough. And I think, as you develop as a coach, you develop that as a skill, and learning to hold with it. I mean, as a junior coach, I remember just thinking, well, if I come out with a list of actions, that’s a good coaching session, and actually it’s not necessarily because they may not be the right actions, and your desire to have a tangible bullet point list actually detracts from the really getting that depth of understanding for them of what is the real problem and what’s the real thing to work on, rather than a surface level thing that might make us both feel good at the end of it, but doesn’t actually mean we have a change,
Aoifinn Devitt 8:12
so interesting. And then your book, Returning Well, so clearly focused on a particular cohort, the returners, for various reasons why they may have left the workplace, now returning, and importantly, their managers, I think, as well, embracing that it’s not just about the individual, it’s about the ecosystem that they’re joining. Can you tell us a little bit about the book and the motivation behind it, and some of the key messages?
Kirstie Sneyd 8:33
Yeah, so I guess the motivation behind it is a start point, so the research that I did as part of my organizational psychology masters was around specifically parental returners and that journey, and what made an effective return. I was meant to present my research at a big European psychology conference, which massively excited about, and then Covid hit, so I didn’t get to present it, which was a bit of a bummer, but I then thought about trying to get it done as a paper, so really thinking about, okay, how can I get this out there, and then when I thought a bit more, I just thought actually an academic paper is going to have a relatively limited audience, and although that might feel quite prestigious in terms of having a paper in my name, actually practically I want something that is going to be useful for people and helping the people that I’m not able to coach, because clearly there’s a limited number of people I can coach, and quite a lot of people may not be in organizations that have the finance or resources to pay for coaches, and therefore, How can I produce something that is genuinely going to help people using all the knowledge I’ve got in my brain that I’ve built up over the years of working in this field, so it really guides people through the journey. So, before I go off on leave, when I’m off on leave, when I’m preparing to come back, and then I also look at once we’re embedded back in the workplace, what’s it like being a working parent, and how do we manage that, and for each stage of the journey. Journey looking at it also for the manager, so what kinds of conversations should I be having as a manager at each of those stages, and also understanding as a returning parent how tough it can be for the manager as well, trying to tread that line between wanting to make sure you’ve met the needs of the returning parent, but also you’re balancing the needs of the business and not necessarily knowing what they want because they haven’t told you,
Aoifinn Devitt 10:26
and I suppose that’s a critical point, is balance, right? Because I think any business owner and your own entrepreneur, so you know what it’s like to be a small business owner, having an employee leave and return is massively disruptive and can be a cost factor, so there is obviously a tension inherent or conflict inherent in the whole leaving and returning, even though it’s something that is part of daily life and part of the life cycle. What do you find? I presume in a book you do have to give some pragmatic advice as well as answers. So, maybe what is maybe some of the key points that you find have resonated with the audience in terms of takeaways or maybe rules of thumb in terms of approaching this.
Kirstie Sneyd 11:04
Yeah, so I think there’s definitely something about a shared responsibility, so there’s something about understanding where the other person is coming from as well, whether that’s as the returner and what the business needs and what your manager needs. So, for example, things like when do you notify somebody that you’re pregnant, so when’s that, so not at a time that’s going to be bad for the manager in terms of their own pressure and workload, and you’ve hit them, and also how do you do it, how do you do it in a way that’s going to help the business, because you’ve thought through the implications of how’s your work going to be covered, what could wait until you come back, you know, so not just, oh, I’m pregnant, be happy for me, but actually, what are the implications for the business, and how can you make it easier for them at the same time, and then conversely, as a manager, helping think through what are the conversations that I need to be having, for example, about the person’s career, around the communications that they want when they’re off and their cover and how’s that going to be managed, so that’s one of the acronyms I use, is the 3c’s so career, cover, and communication before we go off on leave, and then when we come back, thinking about finance, flexibility, and fulfillment, which are the three areas we have to balance for ourselves around what do we want from our career and what’s important for us in our world.
Aoifinn Devitt 12:24
Each one of those, I think, probably has its own chapter there in terms of what each means. One of the things that strikes me, and I see this because I work with women across the workplace, returners or not, is visibility, and I think for women in particular, they have to find their space, find their voice, be visible, and increasingly, as a minority in a workplace, it is important to be visible. I think when you’re away, you’re not visible. When you’re returning, you’re making yourself visible again. What do you advise around that, around the making sure that you get the mind share, especially if a promotion is in your future, or you just want your work to be noticed?
Kirstie Sneyd 12:59
Yeah, so there is a really fab book for this. I’m always a fan of recommending books, and not just because I’m an author, but the book’s called Playing Big by Tara Moore, and it’s around our inner critic, so it’s around the voices in our own head that potentially stop us. So I mean, there’s things you can do in terms of what do you do in terms of making yourself visible, and what’s your brand, but the thing I really like about this book is thinking about what are the things that we say in our speech habits that undermine us, so it’s a very practical actually looking at my own language and what am I doing in my conversations that might be undermining my credibility, so a really small example is the word just. So, when we’re writing an email, do we ever put I just wanted to check with you? So, just is effectively saying I’m not quite sure I have the right to have your time, rather than just saying I would like to talk to you about x. So, there’s a whole list of different things, whether we raise our voice at the end, so I’d like to talk to you. Makes it sound as if we’re not as confident or certain about the things that we are proposing. Thinking about those habits of how we speak is just a very practical, relatively easy thing to look at, and think about how does that impact my communication and the power of my communication,
Aoifinn Devitt 14:22
and another key transition – it may not be an actual physical transition, but it is certainly a transition of stage – is when you move into maybe the 50 plus chapter of a career. Sometimes that means winding down of a traditional career, sometimes it means a shift to a portfolio career. Not sure whether retirement is something we talk about today, but how do you cope with that area, which is also coinciding with the midlife stage for many people as well. Any rules of thumb there?
Kirstie Sneyd 14:49
I think, and this is, I think, throughout career, is thinking about what’s important for me and really having that understanding of what does success look. Look like for me at this stage, and we also talk at this stage of thinking about who am I now, because we have a level of identity throughout our career. So we’ve been a professional in a certain field, we may or may not have been a parent as well, and have an identity around that as we’re moving into later stage career. What’s my identity now? Is that still tied up with the work that I’m doing? Do I want it to be an identity as part of that type of work, or something else? So, really thinking through who is it that I want to be now, and for this next stage of my life, and if we have a partner, thinking about how we’re doing that together, so the contracting between the two of us on what does this stage look like for both of us? Because if we’re in it as a partnership, what does that mean? Because you’re a dual career couple and therefore thinking about that stage of managing both of your careers, assuming your partner is still working as well and has a career as well.
Aoifinn Devitt 15:55
And do you see the level of anxiety is rising at this stage, and they say 50 plus bracket, I suppose, because there is a sense of younger talents perhaps being more relevantly trained than the need to skill. I used a brilliant expression, compare and despair, in a session that we went on, which really resonated, because I think there is a tendency throughout one’s career to compare, but particularly when there’s that divergence, then in terms of maybe wealth creation, if that’s important, or just status, which is also important. There’s also the empty nester phenomenon. Children are moving on. There might have been a lot of one’s identity around that, and then that’s no longer part of the identity in terms of the day-to-day caregiver. Any aspects of this that resonate more?
Kirstie Sneyd 16:35
I don’t know where the anxiety has increased more. I think it is different, and I think what is better now is we are more likely to have portfolio careers, so previously most people, not everybody, but you joined a job, you might have stayed in it for life, you might have potentially, and then it was this really hard cliff edge, so you basically you retired, whereas most of us now, and if we look at both of our own careers, we don’t just have a thing, we do, we have a variety of different things. So, when we move into later stages, we can think about, oh, I want to keep this thread on, because that satisfies these needs. But do you know what this thread of my career I’m less interested in pursuing now, because I don’t need that stress, I don’t need that hassle, or level of travel, or whatever it is, but actually this strand I’m going to continue. I think there’s a much greater awareness now, which might increase anxiety, and there’s a hell of a lot more decisions we can potentially choose, which definitely increases anxiety. There’s lots of research that shows the more decision options we have, the higher the level of stress and the level of wellbeing, but I would say unless you are in a very black and white career that you’ve just had a job and people do, where it is much harder to make that transition, a lot more of us are set up in a way that it’s going to make it easier for ourselves.
Aoifinn Devitt 17:57
My last question on the coaching, before we move to some reflections, if you were to say, employ a pattern recognition approach to the coaching clients that you see, what topics come up over and over again, and do you think are these fixable? Some of these issues that people come to you with,
Kirstie Sneyd 18:12
I guess, thinking about what are the things that I most commonly share with people as examples to help them through. So, definitely, the book I just talked about, playing big, I think the other thing is around our sense of control, so often where concerns are in the workplace are around, do I have control of this, so we can spend a hell of a lot of time in what we call our circle of concern, so there’s a whole chunk of stuff that I’m worried or concerned about. Within that, there’s a smaller circle or sphere of things I can influence, and within that, there’s a smaller circle still of things that I can control. And I know I’ve talked to you previously, even about cognitive coping, which is around how do we think about things, or view things, or reframe things, and that is within our control. It may be tricky to do sometimes, but really thinking about how am I choosing to view this situation, and is that making it easier or harder for myself, is something we have control over. But what somebody else is doing, we can influence potentially, but we really don’t have control over, we may not even be able to influence it, so actually, What can I focus on, which in itself energizes us and motivates us and makes us more likely to be able to do stuff rather than sitting in this pattern of, oh bloody hell, this has happened. I always pull people up if they go they, who are they, you know, who’s the person, so is there a person you can influence, or or is it this amorphous? They are doing this well. What can you do? What’s the thing that you can control and do? So, I would say that’s probably one of the most common themes that comes up.
Aoifinn Devitt 19:53
That’s wonderful. I mean, some of us are listening on audio, so they won’t see the gestures you’re making, but as you were talking about those spheres, I was thinking. Of Russian dolls, you kind of contained inside each other the smaller being the smallest inside being that sphere of control, and I suppose what I’ve always found is knowing what you can and cannot control, and not necessarily worrying about some of those things you can’t control, but what I would also say is that increasingly I’ve seen that the sphere of influence can be within your control, so to speak, you can influence more than you think, and that’s the power of impact and impactful careers, and the work you do, the work I do, is we can influence effortlessly, like it’s not quite effortlessly, but it is with lower effort that then we think, and even that is empowering to have that doll in the tier expand.
Speaker 2 20:39
Yeah,
Kirstie Sneyd 20:40
absolutely, and when we have a sense of agency and when we do stuff, as you say, that then empowers us to do more. So, in psychology terms, we talk about it as self-efficacy. So, this belief that we have an ability to control the outcome, and we can do something about it, makes us more likely to be able to do something about it, because we think, oh, I, I talk about with my kids, as you’ve got this, so you know we’re coming into exam season, and people talk about what should you say to your kids when they go into the exams, and one of the most helpful things to say is you’ve got this, so it’s that we have a belief in you that you should be having in yourself in terms of your ability to cope with what’s it’s not saying you’re going to do well, but it’s kind of you’ve got this in terms of actually that belief in yourself as you go into the exam.
Aoifinn Devitt 21:24
Well, that’s a perfect segue to a question about mentorship, because I think that is a key strand of mentors that I see quoted on this podcast, is they believe in the person I’m interviewing, so that will have been the people who believe them, who pluck them maybe out of the rankings, and said, you know, I believe in you, you’ve got this, or they gave a task that seemed very challenging and very out of reach, but they believe that they could achieve that. I’d love to ask about A, the importance of mentors, and B, have you had any of your own?
Kirstie Sneyd 21:55
I don’t know that I’ve had mentors, per se. I have definitely had bosses that I have felt are very supportive, you know, and have stretched me and have believed in me, less somebody that has gone, okay, this is the career path, and I can help you get there, but definitely having bosses who believe in you and give you feedback as well, so you see a lot of the time, and this is particularly when people come back from parental leave, but just generally, that our belief in ourselves, that sometimes we need that external recognition as well. I mean, ideally it comes from within ourselves in terms of intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic, but that importance of having somebody acknowledging that and giving you that feedback can be really helpful, and I think just overall in terms of mentors, but I also think in terms of role models. So I do a lot around career coaching, and one of the things that can be really hard is if we don’t have those examples of other people doing things and examples of people that we can relate to, whatever relating is, you know, and there’s a whole variety of characteristics that might be the things that we relate to, but if we don’t have that as role models, it can be really hard to think, well, I can do that path. There’s nothing to say we can’t. There’s always a first, you know, a first earth to do this, you know, with the example of the astronauts recently as well, but it is much harder, whereas if you have examples of other people, so I almost think that is more important in ways, because you can be a role model to loads of people, whereas you might only be a mentor to a couple of people, because you have that time,
Aoifinn Devitt 23:34
and that’s much to the motivation behind this podcast series, is to present role models, people who look like you, have had similar backgrounds and similar career journeys. I think that’s important to be able to visualize, because visualizing and identifying is such a key part of that. On the feedback point, I’m going to hazard a suggestion, which I’m not sure you would agree with, that when one comes back from a maternity leave, a sick leave, any kind of leave, positive feedback is a lot more important than negative feedback at that point, because you’re already on the back foot, so if someone thinks that, well, this is the time for feedback, I’m not sure it’s the time for the wall of negative or constructive feedback. Even I would think a little bit more bolstering, because there’s a recognition that that person is probably feeling vulnerable.
Kirstie Sneyd 24:15
Yeah, absolutely. There’s a really lovely piece of research that I sometimes quote that looks at both feedback, but also level of support. I’d mentioned this thing around self-efficacy, which is our belief in ourselves. So, most of the time, the research shows that if I give you loads of support, it actually reduces your self-efficacy. So, you know, this thing of kids, and sort of helping them help themselves. So, if I give you loads of support, it basically doesn’t enable or empower you, but actually the research, and they did research people coming back from parental leave, it was mothers, but it would apply for dads as well, and measured it at different points of time, and actually when you first come back receiving support doesn’t reduce. Your self-efficacy, because you actually just need it. It’s so bloody, you just need that support and that reassurance, but that’s only for a couple of months. And then, when you measured it again at 11 weeks, rather than five weeks, the study actually too much support wasn’t right. So it’s really recognizing that very crucial first bit, whether that’s feedback or support, that it is much more important in that phase, and obviously you might be managing somebody that’s never needed high levels of feedback, you know, and they’re very self-sufficient, and they’re very kind of intrinsically motivated, but there’s just something about I’ve been out of the business, even if I’ve been reading The Economist or whatever magazine that you’ve been reading to kind of keep your knowledge up to date based on your industry. Actually, do you know what I feel out of it still? I don’t quite feel like I fit back in the workplace, and so yeah, anything that could be done to help that.
Aoifinn Devitt 25:50
Definitely on the support point, and were there any key people for you? You mentioned not having maybe a mentor, but role models, or even just key people across your life, not career wise, or a coach out there, a professional coach that you think does great work, and this doesn’t have to be an exhaustive list.
Kirstie Sneyd 26:04
No, no, I mean, I think you’d also ask me around people that have kind of influenced my career as well on decision making. I mean, my parents very early on, but interestingly, in different ways, my mum was a, oh, that’s a good thing to do, or to kind of follow, and my dad, or maybe avoid that, and so my dad’s the conversation was when I was around seven or eight, and we were on holiday, and I was was chatting to him, and I just said, “Dad, you seem quite different on holiday, you know, you seem to be a kind of different person, and I said, “Is this the real you, or was is the real you the person at work? And he said to me, “Oh no, this is real me, and I really vividly remember, you know, we’re just on a bucket and spade holiday in Devon, and just thinking, “God, that is awful, you know, that the real you is two weeks a year when we’re on holiday, and this thing called a job means that you’re not you. So I guess a very early sense of work should be something that brings you pleasure, brings you joy, makes you feel kind of more you, not all the time, but that is something that isn’t a burden that’s fundamentally changing you. Whereas my mum was the opposite, she was an academic, she was in a social group where probably there was less females working, but she kind of made it work, so she adapted in that group, so she still fitted in socially where we lived in Norwich, but then she was Dr. Morgan with her kind of academic peer group, so both that as a learning from my mum and also marrying somebody who’s supportive of your career, so I think I’ve mentioned this to you before. The book by Jennifer Petrovieri, the INSEAD OB professor, has written a book called Couples That Work, which is around dual career couples. She starts the book, and I don’t completely agree with it, but she starts the book by saying the most important career decision is who you marry. I don’t believe that I don’t believe is the most important, but that’s more of a headline for a book, but I definitely believe it is important. So, thinking about who have you got in your life that will support you and support you in your career decisions in the same way that you’re going to support them, so that you kind of manage your careers together and how you manage that.
Aoifinn Devitt 28:19
Wonderful reflections. I love that one about your dad, and in terms of setbacks or challenges and growth from them. Obviously, you looked out with lots of coaching clients who’ve gone through challenges. Any of your own that you can point to as being growing moments?
Kirstie Sneyd 28:33
Yeah, I think coping with rejection. So, I’m in a very early example, I was.. I don’t know that I’d use the word lucky, because I don’t believe necessarily in lucky, but I, I got a graduate job in the milk round, I think I was the first in my year to kind of get one, and so that’s when I went to Procter and Gamble, but I applied to both Mars and Unilever as well, and they just rejected me outright, and I just remember thinking, kind of, why, what have I done wrong, or what’s not right, and then years later I met somebody from Mars. We were both together at a workshop, and I was explaining this to him, and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, I got rejected from PNG outright. And so it was a really useful learning on career fit, you know. And actually, the more I understand about kind of Mars, and particularly Unilever as organizations, I wouldn’t have been the right fit. So I think there’s definitely something about about understanding that, and then the other one was was actually Bill, my husband, being very kind of wise. When you work as a coach, sometimes you have chemistry meetings, so they interview three people to see who’s the best fit. And I had started working at John Lewis, which I love as an organization, so like super kind of chuffed to be working there. This was about 20 years ago, and I’d done one series of coaching there, and then I’d gone for a chemistry meeting, and I didn’t get it, you know. And Bill was just really wise, and he said to me, “Well, who would have been the other coaches? And I sort of said, “Well, I don’t know, but, and he was like, “Well, they’d be similar to you, or kind of have similar. Skill set, so I was like, yeah, absolutely, and he just said, well, it’s one in three, then isn’t it, Kirsty? And I just was like, well, yeah, that’s probably true, you know, I mean, actually, so less this is a rejection of me, but actually the odds are again a thing about fit that I wouldn’t have probably been the right fit for that person, and somebody else was a better fit, but we’re hard at the time, but I just, I mean, it’s quite a logical bill, but it was like, yeah, okay, yeah, one in three, fine, I’ll live with that.
Aoifinn Devitt 30:26
I’d say rejection never easy, it’s always going to take it personally, even though we’re told not to, but I think, yeah, building that sort of thick skin around it and the mindset is just so critical. So, thank you for sharing that. My last question is around any key creed or motto or word of advice that you can leave us with, you’ve tremendous experience in the coaching and in dealing with the psychology and emotions. Anything you can leave us with.
Kirstie Sneyd 30:47
So, I guess quite a few of them I’ve talked about, so the kind of controlling the controllables and the tar are more playing big. I think one of the ones that I probably haven’t mentioned that I think is really useful is this idea of responding rather than reacting, so when we are having a conversation with somebody, or when something happens to us, we have a natural reaction to that, which is often an emotional reaction. It doesn’t mean we’re being emotional, but you know, we have a oh sense, just like we were talking with rejection, and so that learning to take a micro pause, so that we are deciding to respond rather than react, so we are choosing, so we’re thinking, okay, these are the different ways I could respond to this, which one is going to give me or more likely to give me the outcome I want, and it may be the same as our reaction, but I’m making a conscious choice around that rather than just my initial reaction to something. So, yeah, that would probably be something I try and live by. Don’t always succeed to try and live by that I don’t think I’ve mentioned so far.
Aoifinn Devitt 31:54
Wonderful. Well, something you said earlier really stuck with me, which was that about the space creating space and the discipline as a coach, not to step into that space to try to fix everything, and I think that is something that all of us, even those who are not coaches, can really take on board, is to just maintain that discipline, whether it’s with our children in a conflict situation or anywhere, just to take that breath, and I think that someone with your experience and your presence, it is a constant reminder to think, and equally to put it all in perspective. So, thank you so much, Kirsty, for coming here and sharing your insights with us.
Kirstie Sneyd 32:28
Real pleasure, lovely to chat to you, Aoifinn.
Aoifinn Devitt 32:30
I’m Aoifin Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring professionals on their personal journey, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, this podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest,
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
