Hi everyone and welcome to this week's Squiggly Careers podcast. I'm Sarah and I'm joined by my co-host

Helen. Hello everybody. And this is episode 84 and today we're talking about coaching yourself.

And actually I'm really surprised we've not covered this topic previously because when you know when the topic comes up and you think

surely after

84 episodes there's going to be nothing left for us to talk about but each week we still manage to find

something and coaching is actually something lots of people talk to us about probably partly because

we are both trained as coaches but also because I think it's one of those things that has sometimes

quite a lot of mystique around it.

You know, lots of people don't get access to coaching, but they appreciate how it might be helpful

or they think it might be helpful. We get asked about some of the tools and the techniques.

And actually, the more we've reflected on this, the more we think there is a lot of the things

that we've learned about coaching other people

that you can apply for yourself. So the idea of kind of self-coaching is really what we're

going to focus on today. And we'll talk in a bit about, you know, why there are some barriers

to coaching. And it's something we're really passionate about, actually. We've got some ideas

in the ether about how we could make coaching more accessible, hopefully coming later

this year. But in the meantime, and generally anyway, I think there are some things that you

can do around coaching that can just be useful for you day in, day out, week in, week out.

These are almost techniques I think can just become part of how you work. And so before we kick off, just thinking a bit about what coaching is,

I think sometimes coaching gets misunderstood as mentoring.

So mentoring and coaching often gets married together,

and that's because sometimes people play both of those roles.

...