Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Wisdom Chat.

I'm your host, Phill Holdsworth, and my wonderful guest today is Rachel Surtees.

Hello, Rachel. Hi, Phill.

How are you doing? I'm good, thank you.

It's wonderful to have you here again.

And I know because we've done some co hosting in the past and so we've had long

conversations and had interesting guests that you and I have sort of interviewed.

So just to have a chat with you, just you and I, is wonderful.

So thank you very much for agreeing to do that.

Feels very cosy and intimate.

I'm looking forward to it.

It does, doesn't it? Yeah.

So for our listeners sake, I know Rachel's often known as the rambling

psychotherapist, but actually I want to pick up on something.

Rachel has done a lot of work around leadership.

Do you want to tell us something about that work, Rachel?

Yeah.

So I actually found myself kind of coming to it organically.

It's not something that I intended to do

when I became a therapist, but what I found was that there were a lot

of people seeking out my services as a therapist who were in leadership positions

and they were getting to the end of therapy, really, and then not leaving.

And I was like, what on earth is going on here?

So obviously, due diligence and being

ethical and all that, I started to ask some questions and ultimately the answer

was, is you really support us to work out what we're doing at work, in our

relationships there to make our lives easier at work.

Because something like 95% of leadership work is actually about managing

relationships rather than the technical aspects of the job.

And it's usually the relationships that people struggle with.

That's the bit that they find difficult.

I've moved into leadership development as a side branch of what I do, I guess.

So supporting leaders to up their

relational game so that they can find ease.

In that role, that's fantastic.

And I say that because leadership can make or break a business, can't it?

In terms of whether it enhances the relationship of a

team of individuals and sets the culture for an organisation.

So leadership has a lot of sway in any kind of business.

What kind of things have you been seeing then, in your conversations that

you can see where the challenges are that leaders are facing?

One of the biggest things that tends to come up is that, I guess, projection.

So the idea of projection, that when you

are in a leadership position, you are not just you, you become this kind

of receiver of people's beliefs about what a leader should be.

So you're the receptacle of people's

projections about authority figures, parents, leaders, et cetera, et cetera.

And it changes the dynamic of your relationships.

So that is one of the biggest things that

I tend to help people with, actually, is to understand that they're not

necessarily just rocking up at work and being them as an individual.

They're also turning up as a

representative for an awful lot more as well, and helping them to actually inhabit

that space, get comfortable in it, and own it for themselves as well.

Yeah, I like what you say

in a description that you talk about leaders not necessarily being the total

experts in their area that they're managing.

They don't have to be that.

And yet my experience of observing leaders

sometimes has been not knowing something is like a sign of

weakness, and so therefore, they don't want to let on they don't know something

or they're not as skilled in something, because how will it sit with them in terms

of how they're received and how they're perceived?

Is that something you've seen?

Definitely.

Just talking myself.

Don't mind me.

No, it's definitely something that I've seen.

And one of the questions that I often end up, or one of the themes that I end up

working with with people is how do I be the perfect leader?

And what we tend to do is we start with this image of a perfect leader that the

individual is carrying around with them, and we pick it apart.

We start to kind of look at the beliefs

that kind of underpin that image that they have and then look at what reality could

or should be for them and also look at the standards that they

hold of other people as opposed to themselves.

And we come to a slightly more organic, more comfortable place of what a perfect

leader should or could be for them that is achievable.

Yeah. And I suppose as well, when they identify

that and start to sort of work in that area, that sphere,

that's when things like stress and anxiety would come down, wouldn't it?

And again, when we're talking about stress and anxiety, a lot of what I actually do

is the crossovers with therapy are quite significant.

I do distinguish if somebody comes to me

for leadership development, they are not coming for therapy.

So there is a line that we draw between what is therapeutic support and what is

actually kind of more coaching, leadership development support.

But a lot of what I do is actually teaching people to manage that stress and

anxiety, to self regulate, to be able to kind of hold space in that really kind of

regulated, calm, grounded place for other people as well.

So skilling people up so that they can hold that space for themselves and others.

Yeah, I just had this thought, as you

said, about the difference between coaching and therapy, and the thought was

why does there have to be a distinct difference?

And the reason why.

I'll explain why I was thinking that and it's one of the subjects we wanted to talk

about, which was about people leading their businesses.

Business owners, entrepreneurs.

Self employed carry an awful lot, don't they?

And if they've got staff, they've got to lead the staff.

So that's where the leadership sort of

understanding and skills and practises come in.

And that can make or break

how successful they are or whether they're successful or not, full stop.

But equally at the same time they're carrying an awful lot of weight

and responsibility in so many areas that until you probably never really fully

understand and appreciate it, until you actually run a business yourself and

become self employed, something like that, all of a sudden all those things that

somebody else did for you, they're now your responsibility.

Absolutely. I've just had a chat at the breakfast

table this morning about the difference between the book stopping with me or

the book being passed around or held by numerous people within an organisation.

As a self employed individual, as a

founder of my own business, the book stops with me.

So if I don't do something, it's on my head.

Yeah, and so when you're sort of working through things, you can have.

Like we've talked about, we've had weeks where perhaps it's been quiet and then

we've had weeks where it's been absolutely full on.

Not only that, then you're also dealing

with your own sort of circumstances and how you feel in those.

So that brings me back to that question of

why the difference between coaching and therapy.

Because in a way,

when you're coaching somebody, I would say for me, can be quite therapeutic.

When you and I have gone for a walk and

we've chatted, I found that very therapeutic, even though there are

elements of it like coaching and good questioning by yourself.

But equally at the same time, the fact

that we're out walking in the countryside and I'm able to talk about things without

any kind of judgement has felt quite therapeutic.

Absolutely.

Like I say, the crossovers are huge between coaching and therapy.

If I'm wholeheartedly honest with you, Phil, for me it's actually about

the differentiation is about what a person actually wants to sign up for.

So what the individual who is seeking out my services wants to sign up for, because

with therapy, we will dive into areas that people don't necessarily want to go to.

There's additional support that I offer around that.

There's a different understanding of where we might travel to.

Right.

It's less focused, it's less solution orientated, whereas with the coaching,

it's much more kind of solution orientated.

It's much more forward moving.

There's action required in it,

and we have a contract about where we will go to and where we won't.

Yeah.

This is to say that actually with therapy, I will make people go to areas that they

don't want to go to because ultimately I'm not going to do that.

The way we work is different.

Right.

You need both sides, really.

I suppose when you're leading a business, whether it's just you, whether it's you

and some employees or even you and some business partners,

there's still all the stresses and strains that come with it.

You get the highs of the successes and

then you get the lows of seemingly knockbacks or disappointments because you

thought something was going to happen, then it doesn't.

So there's all sorts of things going on there.

Yeah. And I would tackle those things in both

arenas, but I would probably just do them in slightly different ways.

Yeah.

So I'm just thinking stress levels in people knowing full well,

like you said, using your term, the book stops with you.

So, you know, if something doesn't get

done, nobody's around to do it, so you've got to do it.

Or you're the type of person who feels nobody can do it as good as you,

so you're reluctant to delegate it, because that's the other side of the coin,

isn't it, in leading something is, can you trust people to do something and not feel

like you've got to be there controlling it?

And that in itself comes with its own stresses.

And the impact on an individual can be far reaching, can't it?

Absolutely can, yeah.

So I'm just thinking in terms of the

challenges that business leaders face, whether you're

small, medium, large company, the challenges may be slightly different.

They might be varying in degrees, but they're still challenges nonetheless.

How do we help people in those circumstances find that equilibrium

and that place where they can reduce their stress and anxiety?

Yeah. So for me, I guess when I'm working with

people, the one thing that is pretty consistent is that there's a set of

beliefs that people hold unique to each individual.

So the beliefs will be different depending on who I'm working with.

But there's usually asett of beliefs that

underpin the way that we operate in the world that are somewhat limiting us.

And they often limit our capacity to create time and space for ourselves.

They often limit our ability to look after ourselves.

They limit our ability to ask for support.

They limit our ability to welcome in a flow of plenty.

There's all sorts of ways that they limit us.

So for me, the one thing that's consistent

when I'm working with people, whether I do that in therapy or whether I do that in

leadership development, is that we kind of isolate what these limiting, we identify.

Sorry, not isolate.

We identify what these limiting beliefs are and we start to work to change them.

So one of the things that is absolutely the foundation of everything that I do

with people, most people that I work with have somewhat of a limited capacity to

actually create space to support themselves.

Most people feel like they need to be working most of the time, and they find it

very hard to kind of section off those spaces for themselves that are sacred.

I advocate for with people.

Is that right?

I was just thinking some examples of that would be, for example,

you know, where we will say, right, I'm going to have a cut off time.

So 05:00 is my cut off time.

But some people can't do that.

And they'll work into the night and they'll work to the early hours of the

morning because they feel the weight of responsibility

to get these things done to work over the weekend.

So taking your point about, for example, their belief about

themselves, it could be, well, my well being takes a lower status.

And I just wonder there, how do they see themselves?

One, but also in terms of if they've got other people working for them, but they

feel they still need to do all this, because I suppose in many cases, not in

all cases, but in many cases, we've been brought up in a society where

if I was sat reading, even though I'm learning and I'm doing something specific

in my work, I'm reading something because I need to know about it.

If I'm sat there reading, it doesn't look like I'm working.

We used to have this joke about

how do you give the impression that you're busy working?

So if you're walking around the office, for example, make sure you've got a pile

of papers in your hand, you look like you're on a mission, you're

going somewhere, you're probably just going for a walk.

Absolutely.

The pile of paper, you're actually just building muscle strength.

Yeah.

Somebody else said they found it really useful to have piles of paper on the desk.

And then when somebody came and asked for

something, they'll go, oh, yes, I know it's somewhere here.

And they're flicking through the paperwork and all these little techniques to give

people the impression you're actually doing something.

And I know I can remember myself sometimes feeling, even though I'm reading

something, but I don't look like I'm working, I felt guilty myself.

So I wonder what other people must feel

like if they've got those similar mindsets.

I must be working all the time.

I must be seen to be working.

It's interesting, isn't it?

So one of the things that I would start

with at that point in time, if somebody comes to me with this kind of problem, is

just point out to somebody how much of your energy is tied up in working out what

other people are thinking about you, how other people might be judging you.

And imagine if you could free that energy up to just spend time looking after

yourself, doing the actual work that you want and need to be doing, if you could

just free that time and energy up those things rather than actually

concentrating on what's going on out there and what other people might be thinking

and feeling about you and how other people might be judging you, or what other people

might need from you, guessing what people might need from you, free that energy up.

How might that feel for you?

Most people take deep breath and go, oh, that would feel amazing.

It's interesting, isn't it?

Because the thing is,

I think there's an element of ego in not being able to let go.

For example, being constantly thinking

about what other people might be thinking about you.

I think oftentimes it's pretty obvious people are not thinking about you.

They're absolutely

not thinking about you at all because they're focused on their things.

But yet we have this mindset. Oh, yeah.

Well, if I don't appear to be, or if I don't get that finished by that date or

that time or whatever, what will people think?

And I just wonder whether there's a bit of an ego there.

Yes and no.

If we think of ego as like our construct

for dealing with everyday life, then, yes, it is absolutely ego.

If we think of ego as this kind of like

raging, narcissistic, overblown thing that's quite

full of its own self importance, then, no, I don't agree with you on that.

Right. But if we think of it as our construct for

dealing with everyday life, part of us has somewhere in our lives,

usually very early in childhood, learned that it's really important to be concerned

with what other people think of us in order to survive.

Yeah.

That part of us is tied up in that because it supports our survival.

Yes.

The thing is that actually that part of us is also

capable of being trained into a different way of thinking and feeling as well.

It's just that people don't necessarily know the steps to take to do that.

Yeah, there's two points there, because

one is the statement to be successful, you need to work hard.

To earn lots of money, you need to work hard.

So you need to work hard is the common denominator in our thinking,

as though working hard is going to solve all our problems.

You're right.

That's one of those limiting beliefs that some people carry.

Not all people, but some people carry that in order to be deserving of money, in

order to be deserving of people's gratitude, in order to be deserving of

people's high regard of me, I have to work hard.

Yeah. And be seen to be working hard as well.

So the whole thing of sending emails, ridiculous o'clock at night or early hours

of the morning, I've done it myself, so I've got to hold my hands up to that.

But things like that.

And then how people feel in terms of, oh,

my boss has sent me an email, I need to respond to it.

And so we're almost like being controlled

by the circumstances, not being in control and actually then managing our time and

giving ourselves that time to have more positive thinking.

Yeah.

And in those circumstances, when a person that I'm working with is dealing with

that, Phil, they're in that projective space.

When you receive an email from your boss

or a client at stupid o'clock at night and you go, God, I need to respond to that.

And I feel the need to do it now because

that person that I had one a few weeks back, I've got a big contract with a large

governmental organisation that's coming up, starting in a couple of weeks time.

And the person, my contact or one of my

contacts there, sent me an email at half eleven at night.

Stupidly, I read it and then immediately I was filled with that.

Oh, God, I must get on with that straight away.

There was no compulsion.

I was like, at 11:30 at night, I have no

brain capacity to actually deal with that, so I'm not dealing with it now.

There is in me at least level of, I have

no capacity to actually think about that right now.

So I'm not dealing with it right now.

But it's then in my psyche and I have to

kind of carry it to remember it for the next morning.

And it takes up a little bite of my energy

to carry it for that long in my unconscious overnight.

It's going to affect my sleep.

It's going to have that impact.

I have to hold it.

Yeah,

that's a really interesting point, Rachel, because

there's some experiences we've had, both myself and my wife, who

we have been dealing with some tricky issues, and we've been sent an email on a

weekend, on a nighttime, and we agreed, we made a pact between us that we would not

read those emails or really go into our emails on an evening.

We give ourselves a break and likewise on

a weekend, if it comes at a weekend, it can wait till Monday morning.

And at first that was really hard to do because everything you describe really

started to kick in or I need to respond to this and so on.

But we found that if we didn't follow that agreement, we'd have sleepless nights,

we'd feel quite stressed and anxious until we dealt with that situation.

And if some of those situations are, say,

long running, you just feel like you're in a constant

state of stress, which is obviously not good for.

I mean, let's take the email thing as a prime example.

Phil, I've got emails coming to my phone.

Do I need them there? Yeah.

Do they need to come to my phone?

Or actually, can they head to my outlook on my laptop only?

So the only time that I get emails is if I

actively log into my laptop and open my outlook.

Yeah.

So I'm actually primed to deal with emails in those moments.

Do I need them coming to my phone?

Or actually, would I be doing myself a

favour by just taking that email app off my phone?

Yeah, I mean, you can do.

There's an easy way of doing it in terms

of just switching certain email accounts off.

So, for example, if you've got a personal account which has got nothing to do with

work or anything like that, you can leave that on.

But have all the others turned off on your phone?

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

And yet, when I suggest that to people

when I go, do you need it coming to your phone, they get really anxious and kind of

go, we're really highlighting that belief that's at the bottom of it there.

And that's the stuff that we kind of dig into.

Like, actually your survival is not banking on this anymore.

Let's look at strategies to regulate yourself.

Let's look at strategies to support yourself.

Let's look at strategies to get out of that projective space.

Let's start asking people what they expect of us rather than trying to work it out

for ourselves, because that ties us up in knots and uses up so much of our energy.

There's all sorts of ways that we can actually counteract that anxious survival

energy in ourselves and really look after ourselves.

Yeah, and that's the important part, because if we don't look after ourselves,

then at the end of the day, that will have a knock on effect on our business

and actually just create a more stressful situation.

So we're just adding to it as opposed to reducing it, aren't terms.

Some of my clients find it quite amusing.

I'm very clearly from Yorkshire.

One of the things I say to people is, if you don't look after yourself, you know.

Good to know.

I mean, you're talking about setting healthy boundaries that actually reduce

stress and anxiety and actually put you in a good place to operate at your peak.

Yes.

And to be available and to do your best

for other people as well, which is really supportive of relationships.

So actually, it has a really positive effect in your relationships.

Ongoing.

But people have this anxiety that it won't.

That people will be cross with them or

that people will be upset by them not being available, cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, I'm just conscious of time, Rachel, so I just want to

say, first of all, thank you very much for the conversation, albeit brief.

We skimmed across the surface and covered.

A number again in a short period of time.

Yeah, no, but very poignant things as well.

Now, if this has piqued the interest of any of our listeners

and they'd like to talk further about it, how could they get hold of you?

So, the best place to find details of what

I do, et cetera, et cetera, is on my website, ramblingpsychotherapist.

Co. Uk.

You can find me on Facebook and Instagram

under the same moniker, the rambling psychotherapist.

And I'm also on LinkedIn as Rachel Certes, as you know, hit the socials.

Give me a follow. I talk about this stuff all the time.

Lots of hints and tips.

Plenty of my Yorkshire humour. Yes.

Great to see people in those places, and that's brilliant.

You're definitely right about your Yorkshire humour.

Yeah.

If it's of interest to any of our

listeners, just to say that Rachel is one of these wild water swimmers

and she likes those ice cold plunges in the morning, which really gets

your brain cells operating and gives you that sort of wide awake alertness.

Absolutely does, Phil.

So, for me, a daily exposure to outdoor

cold water is one of my sacred things that focuses my brain like there's no other.

It regulates me.

It makes me feel calm.

It makes me feel in a place where I'm

actually able to tackle the world every day.

It makes me feel grounded.

It makes me feel really solid.

So that is one of the spaces that I

reserve for myself that is absolutely sacred.

Nobody and nothing comes in between me and that.

Right.

Rachel, thank you so much for this conversation.

Really enjoyed it. Pleasure as always.

Thank you.

And have a great rest of the day.

You, too. Bye.

Open.