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A weekly interview podcast hosted by Melissa Hague features Courageous Coaches who explore the grit and bones of what it takes to be truly courageous. Whether you're a coach, consultant, or a leader, join us each week to explore what it really takes to be transformational in your coaching practice, your business, and your life.
Hi, everybody.
Welcome to the Courageous Coach podcast.
Thank you so much for being here, whether you're watching or you're listening.
And today I am delighted to be joined by Claire Norman.
Thank you so much for being here and joining me in conversation today.
And Claire and I are here to talk a little bit about mastery.
And that's really, you know, that's as much as we've kind of agreed, really, we're going
to have a conversation about mastery.
and what that means to us and what it means in the context of kind of coach development
and becoming a courageous coach.
And Claire and I, feel like it's, I have to share this because I feel like Claire has
pretty much been with me since the beginning of my trepidatious, if that's even a word,
trepidatious steps into kind of setting up my business, being an external coach.
Claire was kind of really there from the beginning.
In fact, I think that when we met, my very first conversation with you was, really want to
start my coaching business and what did you do and how did you do it?
And Claire shared openly and beautifully and we've worked together many times since
supervision and coach, mental coaching and all sorts of things.
And I'm delighted that we've become friends too.
So she is a big part of my own coaching journey.
So I'm delighted to be having this conversation.
So,
Claire, let's start, as I always do, with just tell us a little bit about you.
Hmm.
It's such a big question.
Where to start?
And um...
Yeah, so.
So perhaps I'll start in the context of mastery, given that that's our topic today.
I am a master certified coach with the International Coaching Federation.
And I'm really proud of that.
And I'm really proud of all of the development that went into becoming an MCC.
And I notice how mastery is a never-ending journey.
And so I'm still very much on that.
explorative journey with the inner work and I'm sure we'll talk a lot about inner work as
we progress today.
My um specialty as you know is mentor coaching to support other coaches to credential and
competencies are really important as a grounding but they are not enough and we'll talk
about that I'm sure.
uh And then I am also a coaching supervisor and these kinds of questions around mastery
and how to be the best coach I can be they are always coming up in coaching supervision.
So um
in terms of the coaching I do, because I do believe that we all need to have our own coach
as well as supervisor, as well as mental coach and therapist.
But in terms of the...
coaching, well actually I'm just saying that topsy turvy, we all need our own coach, which
I do have a coach, we all need our own supervisor, I have my own supervisor, all, etc.
And I believe that in order for me to support other coaches in their discovering who they
are as a coach and how to be the best coach they can be, I also need to be sure that I am
keeping myself sharp by actually coaching and knowing, you know, experiencing what is, um
what are the kinds of themes that are coming up time and time again, because they have
shifted over the course of my 20 odd year career in coaching.
Um, so that to me feels really important as a part of my portfolio.
that I'm not only here to support other coaches, but I am doing the coaching as well, such
that I experienced in that faith, renewing experience, know, always figuring out, how
could I have done that differently?
Or we, because it is a partnership.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm going to stop there.
There's so much more I could say, but I'll...
I mean, this is is going to be a really rich conversation because I, I noticed that that,
for me, it has never been truer in any other kind of professional capacity that I've had
than in coaching that the statement that in order to do the work with others, we must do
the work ourselves.
And I think that you and I ah are similar in as much as we work or have work, do work with
leaders in a coaching capacity, but we also work with other coaches.
And I too feel this real responsibility is kind of like twofold.
The first is I'm still doing the work and will continue to do the work forever, right?
I'm not finished.
I am not done.
I am not the expert here.
And also, you know, therefore, that's such an important part of how we show up in the
world as coaches.
And I think this term mastery, you know, there's a lot of maybe we might say contention or
discussion, debate around what we mean by mastery.
And I think you made clear in your intro there and I'm
I know we're aligned on this, that mastery is not the destination, it's not the done
point, right?
I am always moving towards mastery.
And so I think this is why when we talk about mastery in the context of being courageous
and developing our grounded confidence, it's about recognising that we are committing to
mastery and practice and that continual journey.
And it's that commitment piece, which I think is the piece that I spot in others, like
that real commitment to, just, I want to learn, I want to grow, I want to discover, I'm
curious about what's around the corner, what this client might bring.
I mean, the richness of that is what excites me about
doing this work, more so than any work I've ever done, right?
It's just the joy of it for me, the joy of pursuing and committing to that mastery,
really.
And so how do you define, define might be too like narrow a word, but I'm really curious
about for yourself, how are you defining mastery?
How does it shape, what shape does it take?
There's the question.
What shape does it take for you?
Oh gosh, I think it's an amorphous blob of a shape.
In that it's really elusive.
You know, you might be trying to grab hold of it and yet this thing called mastery is just
beyond reach.
And then it's over here and then it's over here.
So...
It does shift, you you said it's not a destination.
The more we know about ourselves and what we don't know, the further out that might feel
to us.
But there's something about...
the commitment, as you said, the discipline of always attending to sharpening our edge.
And so, you know, that's, that's how I describe mental coaching.
Is it sharpening our edge?
And then with supervision, I talk about that being about staying safe and sane.
So
sharpening, safety, sanity, they all feel very important as part of this mastery.
and
It is not a destination, as you've said.
And it's one of those words that I think is really hard to pin it down with a definition,
except to say that we will have gone through other stages in order to get there.
So we will have gone through a beginner stage and then a practicing stage and then a...
you know, will graduate towards kind of an expert stage.
So mastery is past expertise.
It's more than expertise.
um
It's the depth of understanding, the depth of figuring things out, the continuous quest.
I suppose it is a quest, really.
Yeah, yeah.
I think that's, uh that's really interesting, actually, to me, because I think that
I think I spent a lot of time in my early coach development, kind of, I think as many of
us do, right, learning the process and getting really skilled and comfortable and
confident with the process of coaching.
And that looks different for different people, whatever your process looks like, but
getting really skilled, confident, and maybe we might use that word expert in that
process.
And I think in my journey where it tipped for me into there's something beyond expertise.
So I love this idea that mastery is that beyond that, right?
um Because it was that tipping point of, okay, this thing I'm holding that I think I've
been told is a rule.
And I don't think I actually was told it was a rule, but I'd taken it as that.
uh
It's not about you, it's about the client.
The way I read that or interpreted it, internalized it was, you know, keep yourself out of
this completely.
It's not you, it's them.
And so I think I lost a bit of my humanity along the way.
Yeah.
Yeah, totally.
there's something about competency frameworks and rules and, you know, putting stuff into
boxes and doing it right in inverted commas.
That is quite...
um
It strips it back to something, to a rubric that we can tick off, but it removes that
humanity.
It removes the soul to soul connection.
And I think you know that the work I'm doing at the moment is around love in coaching and
how can we reintroduce love over and above the competencies.
to reintroduce this humanity into the work we do because as Carl Jung says, I won't get
the quote exactly right, but learn your tools and processes well, but then touch the
beauty of the human soul.
That is where, I mean, I've just had a tingle going right the way up my body as I say
that, it's like, that is the work of my.
it's touching one soul to another soul, one human to another human and bringing back this,
you know, it's quite a feminine archetype I suppose um into our coaching.
The competencies are quite a masculine archetypal way of seeing the world and we need
both, you know, I'm certainly not saying we've got to get rid of the competency.
um by any stretch of the imagination, we need those to ground us, to make sure we have the
basics.
But once we get those into our bones, then we can transcend those, move past them.
It's not leaving them behind.
When I say move past them, I don't mean leaving them behind.
mean, you know, making sure that we're...
reintroducing if we got rid of it in the first place, which is kind of what happened to
me.
And it sounds like it's what happened to you that when we work with competency frameworks,
we feel like we're a bit boxed in and the work that I'm doing with the mental coaching I'm
doing with aspiring MCCs now is the both and it's yes, you've got all of these
competencies.
to meet from, know, the assessors will be looking out for whether you're demonstrating the
competencies.
But not in isolation, not as tick box exercises, but really as a human to another human,
they will be looking for this additional...
um
um Presence, I suppose is the way to describe it.
Yeah.
I think it's really important that you what we're clear on here is that this is a yes and
right.
Yeah, totally.
And, you know, all of those competencies and the processes and the tools and just like you
said with young learn them well, right, but then be prepared to to be, you know, to let to
put them aside when you meet that that beautiful human in front of you.
And I think that there's something interesting here because
I'm struck by something I said earlier on, and then, you know, we're talking about mastery
as this, this, this journey, this direction, if you like, that we're moving in rather than
a destination that we're getting to.
And the thing I was struck by is that, for me, where I am right now, there's a real joy in
mastery for me.
I'm loving it.
I love it, right?
I'm, what's the next piece of
you know, self development, personal development that I want to do need to do, you know,
based on, you know, where I'm at my reflections, my story, where I'm going, all of that.
So there's a real joy in it.
But I said that and then you were mentioning about supervision and talking about sanity.
And that made me smile because the other thing that I have discovered is that alongside
the joy is also the recognition that sometimes
this kind of development is exhausting.
my god, yeah.
like, like for every bloody question, there's an answer.
And then there's another flipping question afterwards.
Yes.
m I'm like, sometimes I just think I just please just, can I just be finished?
Can I just be done?
Because this is hard, right?
And it Yeah, exactly.
And so there's something wrapped up in this for me as well about around kind of self
compassion.
Yeah.
because what I see in a lot of coaches, and I know I do this myself as well, is we beat
ourselves up for stuff that we don't think we've got right or that we think we could have
done better.
We're so hard on ourselves.
And also what I've come to realize really only in the last, I don't know, maybe even just
two years, is that it's not really about getting rid of stuff.
like, I don't like that piece about me.
I want to get rid of it.
It's about, oh, okay, there's a piece of me that I'm hiding or I'm keeping away or I'm
suppressing.
What is that about?
What's underneath that?
What's the need that's not being met?
know, all of those questions.
Because I think it's so important when we're on this journey towards mastery that we...
We go gently and we are kind to ourselves in that process, right?
It's so important because it's blinking hard.
It's not an easy path to choose, right?
I agree.
And, um you know, what you're describing is quite different from uh horizontal
development, where we might opt for another content laden course, where I must learn
another tool.
That is really different to what you're describing.
of this inner work, the depth of m understanding myself and what my blocks are and...
and unpacking where those blocks have come from.
And um so in my case, the blocks to love, uh blocks to humanity, we might call it.
um So I think what you and I are both talking about is more akin to vertical development
rather than horizontal.
And, and
There's a...
kind of when we're, I read a lovely quote the other day, I won't be able to remember it,
but there's this, we're kind of on the cusp of uh some kind of breakthrough into some kind
of new discovery about ourselves, it's bum-clenchingly horrible.
It's like,
Yes, I wanna, I'm so close to something new, I can feel it.
But, this is hard.
I'm having to tussle with this.
One part of me is telling me this, the other part of me is telling me the other.
They're having this argument in my head and in my body and it's causing my body to do all
sorts of stuff.
ah
Yeah, it's like, why would anybody ever want to do this really?
Because it's really quite tricky.
But it's worth it.
It really is worth it because as you say, there's such joy in that.
To be able to.
yeah, harness all of who we are.
um And
become more of who we are.
So it's all of and more of.
That makes sense.
And I think what I've found as well is that, and again, I don't know that this is true for
any other like professional or profession that I've been in, is that what I find with
coaching is that, or what I've discovered is that what I'm actually doing is I'm
developing and growing as a person.
So that is not
just about how I work with a client, right?
This is about who I am in my entirety, in all my glorious technicolor and in all aspects
of my life.
And I think that's the other bit that I maybe wasn't quite prepared for when I thought,
I'm going to, yeah, I'm, yeah, I want to, I want to go down this road was that actually
this is going to impact on all areas of my life as I learn and shift, you know,
my loved ones, the people closest to me, they're all going to experience that shift as
well.
so, yeah, it's working on you as a human and therefore don't think it's just going to make
you a better coach.
Right?
Yeah.
m
much.
I mean, it's worthwhile anyway, doing it to make you a better coach, but it's even more
worthwhile when you see the impact it has on your relationships in the rest of your life.
And, um, you know, I love the expression.
Um, I think it was Edna Murdoch who came up with it.
Who we are is how we coach.
And so we are inextricably linked to.
the human in us when we are coaching and we bring all of that with us.
We can't leave it out as you so rightly said earlier on.
And anything from our past that is still needing some attention will get in the way of us
being the best human, the best coach we can be at any given time.
And, m you know, we do our best now and as we learn, we will do our best up a notch and up
a notch and up a notch.
um Yeah.
So I'm now curious about your journey towards, not to mastery, towards mastery.
Yeah, of mastery.
Ah, yeah.
A destination.
Yeah, a journey of mastery.
Yeah, I like that.
Nice little switch.
Because I think there's some obvious stuff here, right?
Like you have worked
I know very hard and over a number of years and really invested in getting towards your
master certified coach accreditation.
And you're rightly proud of that achievement as you should be, And you know the value of
supervision, mental coaching, you mentioned therapy, being coached yourself.
And these are all support mechanisms and ways
of that or parts of that journey right but what I'm really curious about is what else has
been part of your journey of mastery outside of those things that probably the audience
recognizes quite well what what else has there been for you?
I know.
Well, I do want to come back to the therapy thing at some point, because I think that's
important and I don't think we pay enough attention to that as coaches.
But the other kinds of things that have helped me with mastery are completely, you know,
non-coaching related, for example, watercolour painting.
So with watercolour painting, you have no control over where the paint goes, because the
water takes it wherever it takes it.
And so your painting ends up being something other than what you might have intended.
And my watercolour teacher says that's the whole joy of it, is that we need to let go of
control.
Let go of knowing.
Let go of a final outcome.
It will be what it will be.
So you can hear in all of that how useful that can be when I transpose that into my
coaching.
um So that's one kind of thing that I do that might be less obvious.
And I'm not saying everybody needs to take up watercolour painting, but hey, it's really
good for...
if those are the kinds of things you need to be practicing.
I'd also say singing in a choir because of the harmonies that you're creating.
So there's something about practicing being in partnership, not being solo, how to bring
out the
best in, you know, in that harmonious way of being together.
um
I also, and you know, I didn't start going to choir because I thought it would help me
with coaching, but I've recognized as I experience it, what is going on there, it then
comes into my coaching work.
Even something for me like weightlifting, which again, you'd be thinking, how did that
help?
But there's something for me about posturally being able to, know, shoulders back, feel
the strength in myself so that I can show up as a full partner to them, not stronger than
them, but strong enough in my own...
core, my own body, um so that I'm not shrunk with, you know, there's something about the
physiology of how I am able to stand because of the weightlifting that I do um and how
that um broadening of the chest is also actually giving my heart a chance to open up.
So it's
It's really not obvious stuff, but I feel how all of those kinds of things that I do in my
hobbies and whatever, support my sense of being fully human for a start, but also
something about the transposition into my coaching.
Yeah, see, I find that, you know, those things fascinating, because I think they're,
again, coming back to this idea of joy, that there are many, many opportunities to, you
know, to expand and create space and, and understand yourself in as a whole, that you
know, aren't in a textbook or, you know, that, but, but it's being able to, well, I think
it's two things for me, it's, it's recognizing
that there might be a connection between, that thing I'm doing over here.
I wonder how that might connect with the work I do.
But also, think it's also recognizing that you're going to have experiences in your
personal life outside of your work that you might go, oh, that was cute.
Oh, wonder.
That's interesting, right?
So it's a real wide.
I love this idea of widening your view.
And I think there are also ways that you can
be more playful with this.
It kind of coming a little bit back to this works heavy.
Sometimes you can be playful with it too.
And I think that's important.
You know, and I've heard people talking about, you know, throwing pottery.
And if you force it, it will collapse.
I'm like, what a wonderful metaphor for coaching, you know, I'm a huge fan of improv, just
for fun, just for fun.
but it's a wonderful way of partnering, putting down your clever, yes and, being in the
moment, absolutely saying what's right there on the tip of your tongue rather than
overthinking.
Lovely.
And I'm gonna have to share, I started last week, I went to my first ever line dancing
class.
Now, I went on my own, I knew not a soul there.
And I did it actually quite deliberately, not linking it to coaching, but linking it to
courage.
I recognized it was, this was a courageous step for me.
But I've chosen it because it's silly and it's playful.
And I'm not very silly and playful, naturally.
It's something that I've learned to not be for many, many reasons, which we don't need to
go into, but I'm like...
I need to be silly and playful.
And I was like, I like the idea of line dancing.
I like the music.
I like the idea.
I don't have to dance with someone else.
I can just do my thing.
I'm going to go right.
So, but that will that whole experience and I've only done one class.
I'm going back because I love it, but I've only done one class, but already I'm thinking,
Oh, that's curious.
Why do I want to practice that dance more than that dance?
The one that was hard.
So there's some really interesting and I love that.
that widening, that breadth of look at all this glorious growth and learning that's
available to us if we just open up a bit, you know.
not thinking so blinkered about, I've got to do another coaching related course, know,
more tools or whatever, but actually looking, well, starting with what is it I want to
develop in myself this year?
And therefore, how might I go about getting that that is not necessarily competency based
or whatever, in your case, it's courage linked to...
getting on the dance floor.
I think that's absolutely brilliant.
I might join you, because we live just a little bit too far away from each other.
know, but you've already got the cowboy boots, right?
So, yeah.
in.
So look, let's come back to therapy because you said you wanted to come back to therapy.
So let's let's go there.
Yeah, so um what I've discovered in the last two years of therapy is that I don't know how
I ever managed to coach, well, cope as well, but cope before having therapy.
It's like, my God, all this stuff that's been getting in my way.
it's, you know, the interjects from upbringing and the
the um things that I've internalized from messages from all sorts of different places that
um I needed to pay some attention to in order to free myself up from those in order to be
a better human and be a better coach.
And so...
I talk about it quite openly because I, it does, I think it still has a stigma.
And I mean, I have found it to be absolutely the most life-changing thing.
So I want to encourage coaches to think about it for themselves.
partly because it will help them as human beings.
I think we all need it.
We don't need to have suffered some big trauma because we will all have experienced these
interjects, these messages that we received over course of our lifetimes that will have
made us the person we are today.
And um yes, being able to integrate those things.
And it might be therapy, my case it's Gestalt therapy, or it might be shadow work, which
may be in therapy, but now I know of supervisors, I think you know of one supervisor who
does shadow supervision, or supervision with shadow in mind.
Hmm.
And that feels so crucial to our work, for us to be able to get ourselves out of the way.
It's not about not bringing ourselves into the coaching, it's about getting this stuff out
of the way so that we can be um there fully for them.
um So yeah, I think that's what I want to say about.
Yeah, I think it's such an important point, because you're right, I think there, there,
can still be a kind of reluctance or, or if I, you know, if I say out loud that I'm in
therapy, people will think I'm broken, or there's something wrong with me or, you know, so
that I absolutely agree.
And I think the more people talk about it and share it, that, you know, and what they what
they what, not the detail, obviously, but what they're gaining from it, that, you know,
that I think is so important.
Yeah.
And I know I found that because the reality is we are walking around with lots of stories,
you know, that we've carried some of us, you know, our entire life.
And we have carried them for so long that they are our truth.
So they're just they're just there, aren't they?
We don't question them.
just it's the truth.
And I think to be able to sit with someone who can
in whatever uh philosophy or approach they use, but someone who can help you to think
about where did that story come from?
What was or is that story protecting you from?
And does it still need to protect you or is there a different story that you might choose?
And I think this is where for me,
So I say this in a lot of a lot of the work that I do, and it so applies to therapy, or it
certainly did for me as well, is that I think awareness gives you choice.
What choice you make is, that's your that's up to you, right?
But you have to develop the awareness first in order to have a choice.
And that's where our autonomy, our agency, our power, our confidence comes from, right, we
can make choices.
But to do that, we've got to have awareness.
And I think actually all of the things we've probably talked about, perhaps more
traditional formal stuff and also some of that, the slightly obscure stuff maybe, that's
all about developing that awareness so that you can then make a choice, right?
And a choice with your life, a choice with your client, a choice with your business, it
applies across the whole spectrum, right?
Yeah, yeah.
OK, so uh well, I'm going to stop drawing this to a close because I am fully aware that
you and I could now continue to chat and we could go on for a very long time.
So maybe there's a part two.
There's something else maybe here that we can work on or talk about, have conversation
around.
But so what I'd like to close with, Claire, is the people,
probably predominantly coaches, but there will be others of course in the audience.
what would you want, while the coach is listening, what do you want them to know about
this commitment to mastery?
I want to say that learning does not stop after you've finished your first coach
qualification.
um You know, I sometimes get people coming to mental coaching three years after they got
their first credential and they say, oh, I didn't realise that I needed to do 40 hours of
continuing coach education.
in those three years in order to get my renewal at the end of it.
how am going to do that?
And I'm like, really?
You weren't naturally doing that and developing yourself.
so although you and I, and I think a vast majority of coaches are learners, you know, in
our core, there are some who kind of
think, right, I'm done now.
Yeah, exactly.
So I want to encourage people to be thinking seriously about, you know, at the beginning
of each year, um planning for the year planning their development for the year planning
their line dancing equivalent for the year.
um Not as a New Year's resolution, but as a
um having a plan of here are the things that I feel I most need to develop as a human
being and I'm going to um develop by choosing to do X or Y or Z and that's not always
about courses.
It is much more broadly about having supervision, um having mental coaching.
therapy, painting, dancing, whatever.
The whole spectrum of developmental opportunities.
Yeah, yeah.
I always call that deliberate development, right?
I want my development to be deliberate, not haphazard, not just stuff I fall into.
I want it to be deliberate, you know, and maybe we'll...
Yeah, absolutely.
there is room for that as well because some of these things come up that you could never
have predicted that you're like, that looks great.
But it's, yeah, being deliberate and intent.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
And I guess I would say, know, I will reiterate what one of the things that we've kind of
explored is that, you know, if you're on your own journey of mastery, or thinking about
that or contemplating it, right, there is enormous joy to be found.
And, but it's also really hard.
So go gently, be kind to yourself and really take the time to invest in the support for
that to happen.
You do not want to do this alone.
That's my bottom line.
You do not want to do this alone.
there's a lot of vulnerability in it as em Brene Brown would say and we need our own
tenderness to ourselves but also support.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, Claire, it's been a delight.
Thank you so much for taking time to have a conversation, explore mastery with me and
share your thinking and, you know, share our, allow us both to share our thinking around
mastery.
Because I do think this is an important message because of this, you know, debate around
what master, what does that mean?
And it's like, I want to just, you know, this is about commitment.
master in and discipline and practice.
Yeah, absolutely.
piece feels like it's the more important piece than the badge of mastery for sure.
yeah, yeah.
Wonderful.
Claire, thank you so much.
Take good care of yourself.
You too.
And have fun line dancing.
yes, yes.