The Role of Psychological Concepts in Coaching

Motivation

• Nancy Alhyari • Season 1 • Episode 8

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What if the secret to achieving your dreams lies in understanding what truly motivates you? In this episode of "The Role of Psychological Concepts in Coaching," your host Nancy explores motivation with Dr. Natalie Lancer, a leading Chartered Coaching Psychologist. Discover how Natalie transitioned from teaching to establishing an educational consultancy and career coaching practice, emphasizing both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

Imagine transforming idle moments into productive opportunities. Dr. Lancer shares practical steps to sustain motivation, highlighting the importance of addressing basic needs like sleep, and offering strategies for integrating productivity into daily routines. Through real-life success stories—including a client overcoming a two-year writing hiatus—we demonstrate how incremental progress and positive reinforcement can lead to monumental achievements.

We also discuss the critical role of habits and self-care in maintaining productivity and well-being. Discover how to plan for success, establish good habits, and prevent burnout. Dr. Lancer emphasizes self-care for coaches to ensure they can effectively support their clients.

Join us for an insightful episode packed with practical tips and resources to elevate your coaching practice.

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this episode belong solely to the guest speaker and do not necessarily reflect the views of this podcast or its hosts. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the role of psychological concepts in coaching, where the realms of psychology and coaching unite. I am Nancy Alhiari, your guide on this journey, brought to you by the passionate teams at Trace and Thrive Through Coaching. We're dedicated to equipping coaches like you with a cutting-edge, evidence-based strategies to enhance your practice and impact. From emotional intelligence to neurodiversity, each episode is a deep dive into the tools and techniques that can transform your coaching and your clients' lives. Let's embark on this journey together, one insight at a time. What if the secret to achieving your dreams lies in understanding what truly motivates you? Welcome to the role of psychological concepts in coaching. Today, we're going to focus on the power of motivation in achieving both our personal and our professional success.

Speaker 1:

Joining me is Dr Natalie Lancer, a chartered coaching psychologist, a trustee of the British Psychological Society and the chair of the division of coaching psychology. Natalie is also the host of Coaching Psychology Pod. With a profound commitment to helping doctoral students finish their studies in good psychological health, she supervises coaches and emphasises the importance of finding meaning in their work. Dr Lancer is a master's and PhD supervisor at the New School of Psychotherapy and Counseling. In 2016, she co-authored Techniques for Coaching and Mentoring with David Klotterbach. As a registered supervisor, an accredited member of the Association for Coaching and a regular keynote speaker, natalie brings a wealth of experience and insight to our conversation today.

Speaker 1:

In this episode, dr Lancel will share her expertise on understanding motivation, identifying intrinsic and extrinsic factors and practical steps to sustain motivation. Whether you're a coach aiming to improve your practice or someone wanting to deepen your knowledge of motivation, this discussion offers key takeaways, so let's get this conversation started. Hello, nathalie. Natalie, and welcome to our exploration of motivation in coaching psychology. Thanks for having me. To start off, can you please share how your journey into coaching psychology started, like what specifically drew you to focus on motivation?

Speaker 2:

I did a psychology conversion degree whilst I was working as a teacher and at one point I decided I wanted to leave education and become a psychologist. And as I was finding out more about psychology and where my own ethos and skills lay, I came across coaching psychology, which at that time was fairly new and it was a special group within the British Psychological Society, meaning there was an interest group, but that wasn't necessarily big enough for it to be what is known as a division and I started at this point a PhD and decided to focus on coaching psychology. Whilst I was doing my PhD, I did volunteer work at the British Psychological Society as the student rep for this special group in coaching psychology, which eventually became a fully-fledged division and I ended up chairing that division. So eventually I became the chair of this division. So I've always been involved with education. Although I was working with school-aged children previously, I also had a focus on their careers and what they might do as a degree, and around the same time I started an educational consultancy and I didn't realise at the time but really I was doing career coaching with them.

Speaker 2:

As the profession developed and my knowledge developed, I started an educational consultancy. So when I was essentially coaching students in the educational consultancy, their parents started approaching me and saying, do you do this for adults? And I thought, no, I don't. I don't really know how to do this for adults. And then that prompted me to go on a coaching course and I guess the rest is history, because I opened up a coaching practice and now my focus is actually coaching PhD students on what can be a very long, lonely journey as a doctoral student.

Speaker 2:

Sometimes it seems like the end will never come and people get disheartened. They get unmotivated, particularly in the middle of a PhD. I think this is a time when people often give up, and I found my own PhD to be the hardest thing I've ever done, and I am quite an academic person and I had to use all my skills not of academia but of coaching on myself in order to make sure that I could finish the PhD. I had to think positively. I had to think about the future, why I was doing it, really tapping into my values and, of course, my intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Along the way I developed a number of techniques to apply to myself and then I decided to start applying these to other people when I finished my PhD, and that's what my coaching practice consists of now, which is I use tried and tested motivational techniques to get people to actually feel positive about their PhD, feel a sense of agency about it, and just get them to finish.

Speaker 1:

Well, natalie, that was an incredible journey For me. It's always fascinating to see how every coach begins with their own experience before they start helping others. You've mentioned using coaching strategies on yourself to uncover intrinsic and extrinsic motivation when you needed them the most, which really sets the stage for my next question. Can you tell us more on the concept of motivation, the context of coaching psychology? Specifically, I'm really interested in intrinsic motivation because I know many people find it very challenging to have Well, there's many theories of motivation.

Speaker 2:

In fact, in my own PhD I drew on the theory of Maslow's hierarchies of needs, which is a very well-known theory. So Maslow thought that we had innate needs and that we have to satisfy the level of one need before we go on to the next need. So it's often drawn as a pyramid, although interestingly he didn't draw it as a pyramid. That apparently was a publisher who did that later. The first need is physiological. This is about making sure that we're not hungry, we're not ill, we're not tired. So many people I work with are trying to work on their PhD and other projects exhausted, and wonder why they can't face doing it. If you haven't had a good night's sleep, you know this is a really simple fix. Now I say it's a simple fix, but of course it's quite difficult to have a good night's sleep if you've got your phone next to you, if it's emitting blue light, if your room is not the right temperature. So there's a whole area of psychology about how do you have good sleep. So we shouldn't sort of underestimate the importance of that and indeed about eating healthily. So our physiology has a massive impact on whether or not we can even attempt to do a task. So if you're working against your physiology, that's not going to help you at all. The next level up is safety, so we need to know that we can avoid pain and other danger. Above that, we've got social needs. Now, for me, this is actually the most important one, because I discovered when I was doing my own doctorate that the way to actually get it done was to work with other people in silence, on Zoom, but nonetheless I could see other human beings in front of me. If you think about doing, you know whether you're writing a book or a doctorate or whatever it is, it's a lot of time on your own. It's a lot of reading and writing. It's not a particularly collaborative enterprise, but that doesn't mean that we can't be with other people when we're doing this work, and it made an enormous difference. To be honest, I call ititting. I needed to be babysat whilst I was doing this work. Now, since I coined the phrase babysitting for this, there's many more words that are much better.

Speaker 2:

In the ADHD community there's something called body doubling, which is essentially the same thing, which is seeing somebody on the other side of the screen who is also working makes us stay put because otherwise I'll find a million and one things to distract me and I just won't sit down and do my work. There's also an accountability element with this social part as well, which is if you've said to someone you know I will meet you at 11 o'clock and I will do an hour's work on Zoom with you, the chances are you will actually turn up, not because you want to do your work, but because you don't want to disappoint them in doing theirs. We attribute more weight to someone else than to ourselves. So taking this social approach is a really important part of psychology and, I think, for me, the most impactful in terms of motivation. The next level up for Maslow is self-esteem. So this is our desires for status, and we want to feel part of a group. We want to be admired. That might be an external motivating factor. So maybe it's important to you that your family, your friends, maybe it's important to you that you gain this doctor status and your friends and your colleagues and your family respect that you have got this qualification. It might be important for your professional development. It might be that you can't actually move forward in your job or you can't get a better job without this doctoral component.

Speaker 2:

I think the other way that self-esteem comes into this is through self-efficacy. So self-efficacy is a concept that just means that you know that you are competent to do something. So a lot of people I work with don't believe they can finish a doctorate, and some of this work is proving to themselves that in fact they can. Now, a doctorate takes years and years, so you can't actually prove that you can do a doctorate until you've done it, which might be seven years. But what you can prove to yourself is that you can work on daily goals and tick them off. So if you can show yourself that you've set yourself three goals maybe you had to read a journal paper, maybe you had to write a paragraph and maybe you had to send some emails to your supervisor I suggest that people set these very small goals and then tick them off, showing themselves that they are capable of doing this, because of course, lots of these goals added up make up the whole doctorate. The whole doctorate can be spliced into these little goals.

Speaker 2:

And then the final part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs is self-actualization, and this is about becoming a complete version of ourselves. We're free to act as we choose and we can align with our values. Now, this, for me, is a mindset rather than a state at the end. This really is a mindset throughout, because my clients have chosen to do a doctorate. No one said you have to do it. It's one of those nice to haves, rather than something you necessarily need to do. I have to ask them why they have chosen to do it, because, of course, if it's really too hard or if it's really taking too much of a toll, they can walk away. There's no obligation to continue with it.

Speaker 2:

So then we have to think about what's your higher purpose, what's your values? Why is it important to you to get this? Do you believe in the pursuit of knowledge? Is reading and writing and thinking, being in conversation with like-minded people about your particular field? Is this something that's a core value For many people? Of course it is. So I think it's really important to be in touch with why you're doing your doctorate and write it down on a piece of paper in bullet points, because when you have a bad day which you inevitably will, because we all have good and bad days you can look at this piece of paper and literally remind yourself why are you bothering with this? So that's one theory of motivation.

Speaker 2:

Um, the other one I wanted to mention was hertzberg theory of motivation, and he talks about hygiene factors and motivators. And hygiene factors are the things that you need in order to move forward at all what Maslow might have called that physiology safety and say social or something like this, whereas the motivators are what we might call both the intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. You know, is it recognition from others that's motivating us? Is it earning more money as a result of the doctorate? Is it producing something new and creative? And I think it's really important to emphasize that.

Speaker 2:

Back to what I was saying about sort of sleep, but also about time. We have so many hours in the day, 24 hours in the day, we all have 24 hours in the day, and we need to make decisions about how we use our time and how we use our energy as well, and it might be that you have to give up some other aspects of your life if you want to make time for whatever we're talking about in this case, the, the doctorates. So you know someone who's training for a marathon and who is doing a part-time job and who has children and looking after them and who's trying to do a doctorate, you know, with the best will in the world you could have the maximum motivation, but if you don't have time, you can't. You know you won't prevail. So we have to be realistic about our energy and our time.

Speaker 2:

I think for me this is the hygiene factors. So this is, you know, can we even do it? Is it even possible? Have we set up ourselves to fail? But once we've said you know what, I do have time I've allocated this time, I'm well rested, I've, you know, well fed, etc. Etc. Then that doesn't mean automatically we're just going to spring it into action and do our work.

Speaker 2:

We do need to do things that are going to make us sit down and work, and there's loads of little tricks. So I've already mentioned those little goals setting. I've already mentioned about the social aspect, body doubling. There's other things we can use dictation functions rather than typing. We can divide our time into chunks, like 25 minute chunks, rather than trying to do something for hours and hours. So that's about our attention, working with our attention span rather than against it. So you asked me what is the significance of motivation within coaching psychology and the answer is there are ways, specific ways, that we can enhance our ability to do something by using, I guess, tricks and tips. There are loads of them out there, but that is what I help people do.

Speaker 2:

The important thing is how do you integrate these tips and tricks into your day, because they have to be things that you can do.

Speaker 2:

I'm going to give you one example. So sitting down and reading a paper, a journal paper, takes me about half an hour, and if I sit down in my office and do it, it's not a very nice environment to do reading. It's a very good environment to do writing. So we have to change the environment to make us want to actually do the task. Now I've found that when I go and pick up my children from school, if I arrive half an hour early which is good because then I get a parking space and just stay in the car I would much rather read my paper for half an hour than do nothing. It's too boring to do nothing. So I, on purpose, give myself a choice of read the paper or do nothing, and inevitably I will choose the lesser of two evils. So I will read the paper, and that is how I do my reading. I create these pockets of time in the day and I now be motivated to do the task I've set for myself in that pocket of time.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, natalie. You've set a strong foundation, using Maslow's and the Hygiene Fact to help us meet our basic needs and then understand what drives us from intrinsic to extrinsic motivations and, as you mentioned, being realistic about the way how many hours we actually do have in a day, even when we find ourselves very motivated. You know, this is especially true for people with ADHD, who often take on so many projects and then find themselves feeling overwhelmed.

Speaker 2:

I've read a lot of the ADHD literature and in fact, a lot of people who come to me have ADHD, and I think it's a useful. It's a funny thing to say, but I think having ADHD is a useful adaptation for people doing PhDs, because one of the positive parts of ADHD is you can see the bigger picture whilst attending to details, and in a PhD you might have to integrate 500 papers into a cohesive argument, which is quite a difficult thing to do, but actually someone with ADHD is probably well placed to do that. So I sort of trained myself, if you like, on how do you help these PhD students like what are the tactics? By reading the ADHD literature and using some of those practices with these students, and it's useful. Whether you've got ADHD or not, you are beautifully said, I've never looked at it.

Speaker 1:

Thank you Like. I love how you frame that. I love that. Thank you. And building on these theories, now, tanique, can you please share with us an instant or an experience with one of your clients where you use one of those strategies and you saw brilliant or, let's say, a big shift in their lives?

Speaker 2:

Well, I had a client who hadn't worked on her PhD for two years. She hadn't written a single word for two years and I worked with her about doing a tiny amount every day and I mean tiny, I mean like 10 minutes. And then we built up the next day to 20 minutes and 30 minutes and etc. And within a month she was working on her phd about four hours a day, ended up, you know, finishing a chapter that she'd stalled on for two years and she never thought she'd be able to write again. And of course she did. And it's just testament to this idea of just taking on a tiny amount. You know, we can find it completely overwhelming to say, oh, I'm going to write this chapter, I've got to write this chapter because a chapter is actually too big for us to think about. But to say I have to write this section is more manageable. Or even better, I have to write this paragraph, so she's a success story. It doesn't mean that once you've broken that barrier, you don't have to reaffirm all of this. In fact, when she got to the end of a chapter, she again had this pause and she couldn't bring herself to start the next chapter and the work starts again. We have to do all that work again about. Well, can you do 10 minutes? Can you do 20 minutes? What's the prize, what's the incentive for you to sit down for 10 minutes? We literally have to give ourselves a prize, like I don't know. You get a nice cup of coffee or you get to go on a walk. These sorts of incentives really work. Eventually, you can do without these incentives, but to start with, it's always good to have something to look forward to, and this is really a positive reinforcement. So this is something that you begin associating the walk, for example, with doing some work. So it's really good to make a positive association. Obviously, doing a walk is something that we could all do. Moving around is very important, particularly when you're doing very sedentary work. For myself, I got really into cycling for three hours and then go on an hour's bike ride, which obviously had health benefits for me, but it was also a very pleasant thing to do. So I think it's important to incentivize yourself and this is a very good strategy.

Speaker 2:

The other thing with this student is to report in every day. So every day she would take a photo of a picture of a wall. Now this might sound a bit strange, but she drew bricks, like empty bricks, making up a wall, and every time she did a 25 minute block of work she would colour in a block. And so we would say, well, are you going to do three blocks a day for five days? So that's 15 blocks, and every day she would show me the same wall. Day one would have three, day two, you'd see the six, et cetera, et cetera. And although it's amazingly simple and you think, oh, how could that be the answer to writing, there is something about showing someone else. It's this accountability again, and we all know we can do three, lots of 25 minutes. We know that that can't possibly be too much to ask. I wouldn't start this process saying you've got to do eight blocks in a day, because I think that is too much to ask. So there's this building up over time as well, that's brilliant.

Speaker 1:

It's really interesting how she found her own way to motivate herself, showing how we are all different and unique. Taking baby steps is really important. Doing few things at a time can boost our motivation and encourage us to continue. This leads me to my next question. Within your work and experience, I'm sure you've encountered coaches who showed resistance or faced challenges when working with these or other motivational strategies. How do you handle that resistance or those challenges when they come up during a coaching session?

Speaker 2:

I think there's some days where you just don't want to do the work, and I think when you're having one of those days, you can find something else to do that's still useful, but might not be the thing you had in mind to do. So let me give you an example, again from the world of doctorates. Doing references is very boring, but it is something we need to do. Attending to email is pretty boring, but it is something we need to do. So when you're having a real lull in your work, you can just match the activity to your mood. However, there is a danger that we use all these activities as a displacement activity. A displacement activity means we're doing something in its place. So instead of doing our work, we're feeling busy and we're feeling productive because we're answering 50 emails when actually those emails weren't very important. So I think it's important to prioritise the different things we need to do, but to also get to know when our most energetic times of the day are. So it doesn't matter if you have a barrier for an hour in the day. For example, after lunch most people get a bit sleepy. So does it matter that you're unable to read or write or do something productive in that hour. No, I think you should go to bed, have a nap, have a walk, do something else. But once you have found when your most productive time is, let's say well, for me it's eight o'clock in the morning, so eight to 11 is when I'll do my most difficult work. And I know that if I won't do my work between eight and 11, then I'm in a danger zone that something's happened is again setting yourself up so you can't fail. Example is for me not to use that fresh brain you wake up, you know you feel all fresh on admin. Not to use that fresh brain on planning what you're doing. I plan the night before what I'm going to do between eight and 11. So there's no thought process involved, there's no decision-making. I'm minimizing any amount of decision-making so that when I wake up in the morning I know exactly what I'm doing. In fact, I do that for the whole week and I make appointments with myself in the diary. So this is called time blocking as a technique, and I put in half an hour appointments and I tell myself what I need to do. Read this paper, write this presentation you know whatever it is, and it's actually diarized. Write this presentation whatever it is and it's actually diarised. If something happens, and I can't avoid it, I would simply move that appointment to another space in my diary, which points to the importance of having free space in your diary. There's no point it being chock-a-block with loads and loads of things, because then you don't have that flexibility with loads and loads of things, because then you don't have that flexibility.

Speaker 2:

Now, what makes me sit down at eight and actually do my work? Habits. Habits are very strong, so I like to have a cup of tea in my office, I sit down at the computer and by sheer habit I will work between eight and 11, at which point I'm starting to think about lunch and we'll start to do something else. Habits take a while to set in. I think there's different numbers of days, how many days habits take to embed.

Speaker 2:

But we can also break habits. We can break bad habits, but unfortunately we can break good habits. And that happens to me when I have a holiday. So I forget that I need to make my goals the day before. I forget what it takes for me to sit down and do my work. So I literally have to remind myself. And what I do when I go on holiday is I make myself a sort of handover document before the holiday. I will literally write down instructions as if I'm passing my work over to somebody else, but it's actually just to myself, and when I read it I I'm like, oh, that's what I was doing. That's what it will take to get this thing over the line.

Speaker 1:

Thank, you, natalie. These are great strategies planning for success, creating good habits and even writing little instruction for ourselves before we travel. And yeah, it's so easy to create new habits and then forget about them when we're on a vacation. And I totally agree with you Some days we wake up and just don't feel like doing anything. For me, those are admin days. I listen to music and just do the boring work. It makes me feel productive. So we've talked about setting ourselves for success, finding our intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, understanding our needs and being realistic about our times and goals. But I have to ask how can we maintain that motivation and sustain it?

Speaker 2:

So I think one of the things is is we must be aware that we can burn ourselves out. We can get into very good habits and think to ourselves I think I'll just carry on with that, I won't have a break on the weekend, I won't go on that trip I was going to take, I'll just carry on. And we can't because our bodies need a break. And what I found is is that if you just carry on and work really, really sort of pushing yourself forward, high energy, you know lots of investment of yourself in your work and you don't take a break, you'll basically get ill. So your body will force you to take a break, whether you want to or not. So the question you have to ask yourself is do you want your body to impose this on you or do you want to preempt that and you want to have a break at a scheduled time in a way that suits you?

Speaker 2:

So two years ago I got laryngitis and I couldn't speak and my whole job is about speaking to other people. So for a week I had to just cancel everything and I could feel that this was happening. I knew I was going to get ill because I sort of arranged too much without a break, and that's when I really realized that you know we have a choice. You can't push yourself without end. We do need to give ourselves scheduled breaks time with other people, time with family, time in nature, time outside. There's so much research that attests to this need. So the advice I would give is as much as you plan what you're doing to be productive, you need to plan what you're doing in your downtime and when your downtime is, and make sure you take it. So when I'm working with students, I'll often say, oh, I worked all weekend as if that was good, but it's not good because they're going to trip themselves up at one point.

Speaker 1:

That's a great point, natalie, about scheduling, well-being and maybe self-care. Awesome, awesome. Could you share one takeaway or maybe one piece of advice for coaches on how they can foster their own motivation before helping their clients?

Speaker 2:

Yes, I think it comes back to what I was talking about earlier about hygiene factors that you know coaches need to be well resourced themselves. They need to have had enough sleep. They need to not be thinking about lunch. They need to be totally focused on their client. They also need to have breaks and to have time to recharge. So I think there's that aspect, you know, as you called it, self-care how do we? What self-care is the coach doing for themselves? Because if you're not okay, you're not going to be able to support your client.

Speaker 2:

And in terms of fostering motivation in others, you know people work in different ways. For some people, what I was talking about incentivization, you know, having a nice coffee after 25 minutes of work is going to work. It works for me. For other people, that is not going to be enough reason to sit down and do some work. So it's really important to take the time to find out what does motivate your client and even sharing some of these models that we've been discussing. I'm a big fan of sharing the theory with our clients and saying look, this is what Hertzberg said about motivation.

Speaker 2:

Does any of this ring true for you? What needs to happen for you to be at your best. When have you last felt in flow, the state of flow when you are effortlessly doing your work and you are lost in time? You can't even feel the minutes go by. You're just so focused on your work. If we can recreate those conditions, what was the environment? What had you eaten? Who were you with? Where were you working? What were you working on? How long had you been working for? Then a coach can really help their client recreate those moments so that we can have those every day.

Speaker 1:

It really does start with us, doesn't it? And knowledge is truly power. As we conclude this conversation, natalie, are there any resources, books, programs or anything else you would recommend for coaches or anyone interested in deepening their understanding of motivation?

Speaker 2:

Well, I would always direct coaches and psychologists to the academic literature, which is enormous, about motivation. So there's lots of studies being done on all sorts of populations. Personally, my own research is about existential psychology, which we haven't actually mentioned yet, about seeing life as a set of challenges that we can constructively navigate, and I have a training course that people might be interested in. You can go to my website, natalielancercom, which is training to become an eight tensions coach. Personally, I have found that by working through these eight tensions, clients get more ownership of their life. They get more aware of what motivates them, why they're doing things. Rather than find themselves passively doing things, they're taking active choices to make things happen and to, if necessary, change things.

Speaker 2:

My last piece of advice is to hear about the lives of role models. So this might be people you know personally and you find out how they overcame some barrier and how they got motivated themselves, or indeed, by reading autobiographies or biographies of famous people and you hear about their life and what they had to overcome. The reality is that we've all had to overcome lots of hurdles to get where we are, and that's just because that's how life works, and rather than worrying about why is life full of hurdles? I would just accept that life is full of hurdles and the question is not why is it? But given that it is, what can we do to help ourselves and help others?

Speaker 1:

Thank you, Natalie. That was really great. I've learned a lot and I'm sure our listeners will too. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you for joining us on the role of psychological concepts in coaching. Stay curious, stay inspired and join us next time as we continue to explore the transformative power of psychology in coaching. Until then, keep thriving and making a difference. I am Nancy Alhi Al-Hayari, on behalf of Raise and Thrive Through Coaching, wishing you all the best on your coaching journey.

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