Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Before we dive in today's episode, I want to take a moment to share something that's been on my heart, something I've been working on behind the scenes for a while now. I'm officially writing a book. This book is called let's Be A Practical Guide to Leading Through Change. And it's deeply personal to me. It's built from real experiences. The uncertainty, the challenges, the moments where I didn't have the answers but had to lead. This isn't just a leadership book filled with theory. It's about navigating uncertainty when there's no clear direction, building internal clarity when everything around us feels unclear, having courageous conversations, even when they're uncomfortable, and leading with value, especially when it's the hardest to do so. I'm also going into topics that don't get talked about enough, like what it feels like to be challenged, overlooked, and even bullied as an adult in a workplace. And how those moments shape the kind of leader you become. This book is for anyone who's ever thought, how do I lead when I don't feel ready? How do I show up when I don't have all the answers? And how do I stay true to myself in environments that challenge me? If this is you, this book is for you. I'll be sharing more about the journey behind the scenes, moments, and opportunities for you to be part of it as we go. So stay tuned, because this is more than just a book. It's a movement around how we lead through change together. All right, let's get to today's episode.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Opinions expressed in this episode are personal. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this streaming platform.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: Good day, wonderful people, and welcome to another edition of let's Be Diverse. I am your host, Andrew Stout. This episode is dedicated to all my loved ones who've supported me through this journey. Those who have left us will always be in our hearts and will never be forgotten. Our topic today is the missing piece of workplace wellness, why therapeutic support matters. Our guest today is one fantastic human. Her name is Emma Lawton. Emma, welcome to the show. So thankful and happy for you to join us today.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: Oh, thank you. It's really good to be here. I'm really excited about the conversation that we're going to be having.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: Me as well. What's been energizing you these days? Give us the tea, give us the deets, give us it all. Emma, what's going on?
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Well, I think for me, as you know, there's a lot of things going on in the world at the minute that are Creating some kind of unrest with people. And I suppose what I've been doing and working with people around person and professionally is trying to keep the focus on the here and now. So it's important to have the wider context of what's going on in the world and some of the difficulties that other people are experiencing. But we almost kind of must keep track of where we're at as well and what we're doing and how we're incorporating positivity and fun into our lives. Right.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: I love that. Then, yes, you're absolutely right. There is so much going on in the world. It's such a polarizing time, I would say I don't remember all through my lifetime ever having this polls arising. So it's just something that we just have to just manage and get through. And this is why I enjoy doing this podcast, because it gives me an opportunity to talk about the things that I love and enjoy and have the opportunity for people to maybe not necessarily change their thought, but maybe have them think a little bit differently on things. So, yeah, I love it. Well, thanks so much for letting us know and glad that things are going well with yourself. Before we begin, Emma, I always have a fun, thought provoking question that I ask all of my guests to get things going. Are you ready for yours today?
[00:03:32] Speaker B: I think so, yeah.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: Okay, so your question is, if you could press a button that gives you any skill instantly, but it also erases one random skill you already have, would you press the button?
[00:03:45] Speaker B: Oh, that is an interesting question. Because first of all, what I came to mind was if I'd like, then could become a comedian. But then I think the second bit around, what would I then take away? And I don't think I would take away any random skills because I think, I don't know how you feel about this, but I always feel like everything leads to this point. Everything is relevant, everything we've learned, every skill. There's no waste of anything that we've ever learned. People might disagree, but I always think, yeah, so I think I wouldn't push the button actually, Andrew, I would keep it as is.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: Wonderful. That is a great way to answer that. And I love the fact that you put so much thought into it and not even knowing that what the question was, you did so great. I really appreciate you having fun with me. Thank you so much for that, Emma, to get us started, who are you and what really drives you to do the work that you do?
[00:04:34] Speaker B: Okay, so I'm Emma Lawton. I am the owner of Unknot Coaching and therapy based in the uk and I am dual qualified. So I'm a life coach who works systemically, which I know we'll talk about today because it links right into what we're talking about. But I'm also a social worker and a therapist and so my work is very much combined in healthcare, social care, working with mental health and adverse childhood adversity. And in my life coaching, what I do is I bring people into their own system and I help them to unpick and understand some of the things that are going wrong or happen in their lives that they're not actually always aware of. So you know that niggling feeling sometimes that you might have had yourself or other people kind of go, I feel like I should be happy, but I'm not. And I don't know why that's often systemically rooted. So I help people see what they can't see from the angle they're looking at it. And I've stolen that from Rich Lipvin.
[00:05:27] Speaker A: I love that and I love the fact that when you talk about what you do, like to get them to figure out what is possibly going on through my conversations. In the last few years, I'm in the process of writing a book and one of the things that has come up in the last three years is the word uncertainty. So. Yeah, and I think that that is something that I think you probably deal with quite a bit where people are so uncertain. And it's not just personally, but it's professionally as well.
[00:05:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And we get a lot of people where, you know, people don't want to stay st in therapy and stay stuck in the past. But what a lot of people don't understand until they do the work is, is that actually a lot of the here and now is based on our previous experiences and our unhealed parts. And actually we don't always need therapy, but we do need self awareness. And that's kind of where systemic comes into its very own kind of way of working really. And this will come to some of the things that we talk about within our industries and what we're talking about today.
[00:06:24] Speaker A: So, Emma, when we talk about workplace wellness, many organizations focus on things like benefits, fitness programs and work life balance, which is a word that I don't really believe in.
Why do you believe therapeutic support is the missing piece that is often overlooked?
[00:06:43] Speaker B: Right. Well, first of all, I think my first challenge would be the therapeutic support element of it. So straight away, what we have, I think, Andrew, is this stigma around the word therapeutic and what that means to people. And so I think that when organizations are looking at that kind of hal. Holistic approach for people, they often get it wrong. So I think it's really important to acknowledge that people are trying, but I don't think we're really there yet about how we understand how people's minds work and how they work. And I'll give you a little example of it, if you want, which is just that if you have an issue in work. So I had a client who came to me. She was referred by her manager who's a head teacher, and there was some bullying in the workplace. And they came to me and in one session I was able to kind of understand from that person that they were being bullied outside of work as well. Well, and what was happening is that the. That was being brought into work and then there was kind of this transfer into work. And so what employees do is, is they forget that the person outside of that environment. So these things that are, well, being led, gyms, memberships and stuff like that, they don't actually deal with the core issues that people have got going on at home and we kind of miss a trick. I think employers, they have the best intentions. I don't want to insult, and probably some better than others, Andrew, but I often think that they, you know, they also don't inform kind of people who are in psychology quite often. They don't kind of look at the research. They kind of look at the fads or the people and what's got on offer, and they use that. And so when we talk about kind of like therapy, you know, eap. So have you heard of EAP in your country? Employee assistance programs?
[00:08:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:08:19] Speaker B: And we say, right, we've got this for our employees. You can access that if you're struggling at any point in time. Most people don't actually access it. And one of the reasons is because it's. There's a barrier and, you know, it's a concept. And the concept is the idea that you don't know if that's going to help or that's going to work work until you try it. So the problem is there's a barrier to trying it, especially when we use language around the mix of therapeutic stuff. Does that make sense?
[00:08:42] Speaker A: It totally does make sense. One of the things that I have noticed is that they miss out on this aspect of it. And I think it's hard to have everything available.
But I think it's the job of the organizations to do a little bit more research because employees are a lot more Intelligent and in tune with things. We just talked a little earlier about how polarizing, polarizing the the world is today. And I think that's also professionally, I think they've also realized what's going on in the organizations as well and they have figured out what they believe in or what their goals are, what their core values are. If organizations kind of did a little bit more digging into more stuff, I think there would be higher engagement.
[00:09:27] Speaker B: Emma yeah, yeah, absolutely. Because things like exercise, we know that that's great. The research tells us that it's great. If you have memberships where you can go and do a bit of meditation, that is great. But it's not the is it? And I think that's where we, we do miss it. Right. And I think one of the things in the uk, I don't know if you have this in where you are, but basically we will often in public sector, for example, people will work in a job and they will go up and be promoted in grades and they're not promoted into leadership roles quite often with the skills that they need. And one of the problems that I see all of the time is people in leadership roles who have no systemic knowledge, they have no human to human and well, they have some not not have no is the wrong, is the wrong thing. They will have some skills around it. There's often a lacking. So what I see is leaders who don't know how to look after their staff or their employees from an emotional perspective. You know, people without self awareness and a lack of insight about how they behave, how they speak, how people experience them. Right. And in as a therapist we do this for years, we train for years. Andrew and we look at ourselves and we pull ourselves apart and we're like dig so deep and so in the world we haven't really caught on to that. And if we're not digging deep and we're not understanding ourselves, we often then see the results of that in work workplaces and how people suffer. And if someone has an incident outside of work that they're really struggling with and they then come into work quite often some of these people who've moved through, moved through the grades and haven't really done people skills, haven't done emotional intelligence things, we then see that that like that kind of makes the problems worse for that employee. And no counseling, no therapeutic eap, no gym membership, no thing is going to help with that. Right.
[00:11:05] Speaker A: We might have talked about this already, but I kind of want to dig into this a little bit deeper. Yeah, there's still Sometimes a stigma around seeking therapy support.
[00:11:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:15] Speaker A: How can leaders create a workplace culture where asking for help is viewed as a strength rather than a weakness?
[00:11:22] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I think that it's in the language. I think that it's how we promote it. I'm a big fan of, as a dual qualified therapist and life coach, what, you know, if it's okay to give you a bit of information about my background was I was, I built quite a big therapeutic service from scratch in a mental health hub. And what I found was when people were really struggling with their mental health, us saying, well, here's a few sessions of therapy, here's some sessions, it wasn't helpful. They often became struck and what they needed was that kind of push sometimes to move forward, they needed companionship, they needed those different things. Sometimes they needed challenging. And so I used to think, actually something's missing here. So therapy fits for some people, therapeutic support fits for some people. But then this is how I became a coach. Because what I started to realize was people needed to hear things, they needed to understand themselves at a deeper level. And if we're vulnerable in therapeutic settings, that can't happen. So it's kind of, it's almost moving away from that kind of stigma and almost thinking about how do we create, how do we use language and how do we use growth and strength based language to promote some of those things? Because most people I speak to, I don't know about you, but most people say, I don't need therapy, I don't want therapy. And it is. And it hasn't. Often therapy hasn't really evolved with the times. You know, as a systemic therapist and coach, systemic stuff is around. The person isn't treated or supported in their own individuality. They are an individual, but they are made up of lots of different parts and systems like home life, work, community groups, they're part of the religious groups that they're part of. And what we do is, is that if we don't take all of that into account, we miss a lot of the things that go on for people. So, yeah, so I think that language and how people get, when they consult with people in psychology about how they put these schemes on what their organization needs, they also need the context of the organization. So I've worked with solicitors, I've worked with schools, I've worked with different people and those contexts are all very different. So their approaches should be very different. Not one size fits all. Or we've got a counseling service, or we've got an EAP or We've got a this. Does that make sense? So those kind of industry specifics are important?
[00:13:30] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. The language is super important for sure. I think it's how it's said and I think it's the toilet tone as well of how it's comes out. Not everybody thinks they need therapy, but maybe understanding or having a little bit more understanding of what your co worker or your family member could be dealing with is going to give you a little bit more compassion and then you'll understand them a little bit better. You won't fully understand it, but it'll make things a little bit more easier for you rather than just saying, well, I don't need it in this world today. Sometimes it's not always about what we need or what is good for us, it's good for the environment as well.
[00:14:11] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And there is something that I'd just like to add is, is that we, in psychology we often have things called reflective practice, reflective casework where we talk to another person and take them deep about how they're feeling about their work, how are they feeling about their colleagues, how is that for them. And we are skilled and trained to do that. And that reflective practice is really, really important. And it's called reflective practice because the person's reflecting on themselves, how they feel, how they're showing up, how the other person's impacting them. And often you see such growth and self awareness come from that. Now the problem here for me is that we don't have that in other industries. So we have it in therapy, we have it in psychology. But our teachers, our really stressed out teachers, our really stressed out solicitors, lots of those industries, they need something. Social workers need a different type of reflection. When social workers go through their cases with their managers and they say, where are you up to with that case? How is it doing? Yes, it's here, it's there, it's factual, right? It's not, it's not reflective, it's not. How is this affecting you? How is this working? What way can we look at that differently and do this differently? So I think in the broader spectrum in actually in the world in which we live, we haven't quite caught on to reflection and deep reflection and many of those roles. I think I gave that example of the school teacher before. That was like a light bulb moment for her. She went, oh my goodness. I did not realize that this was. I did realize it was happening at home, but I didn't realize that the reason it was affecting me so much because it's actually minor in school was because of this. And, and it's that kind of self insight that many industries haven't caught up with. And I think that's some of the work we've got to do. That's some of the work is psychology and colleagues we've got to do. And with HR partners.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: Right, for sure. So Emma, what role do leaders and HR professionals play in recognizing when support is needed while also respecting boundaries of creating psychological safety?
[00:16:06] Speaker B: Yeah, well, so this goes back to what I was saying before. If you have a leader or somebody who is in a senior position and they have not done insight work or reflective work on themselves at any point during their lifetime, they will bring. They will have limitations to how they support people. Right. And because some of that work is around understanding our own judgments, our own kind of values, the things that we bring to the table as people.
[00:16:30] Speaker A: People.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: Right. Not because they're wrong, but because actually that's who we are. That is then how we then communicate and work with other people and our colleagues. Right. So if we don't have that, what we then have is, is that leaders who aren't self aware enough to then kind of pick up on things. But then what we have is these other issues around how do we judge a particular situation. If somebody's had a death and our policy is, is that they have two weeks bereavement leave, that's that. But they've had their leave and now they come back. How do we deal with that person? What's our own experiences of death? What's our own experiences of that?
Leaders for me need to have some sort of coaching, reflective practice, some training in active listening and the sort of active listening that we do in therapeutic settings because it's assumed that people know how to do this. And actually Andrew, people might be like shout at this now, but a lot of people aren't good at listening. Right? A lot of people are not good at real listening. We hear and we want to give solutions and we often can't tolerate what the person is saying to us because it makes us feel a certain way. So we then react in a particular way that often isn't helpful to that staff member or that employee because we haven't necessarily done all of that work. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting every person in HR or every leader should have to go be a counselor, do a counseling degree. But there is something about skills and about actually that's why we got taught it because it is a skill.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: What I found is that HR and leadership has changed over the years. And I feel like leaders, they may not be psychology majors, but there is some psychology that they do need because people are going to be coming to them with specific things. I'm working under you, and I say, emma, something's wrong with me, and I just don't know what it is. You're probably not going to be able to give me a solution, but you're going to be a good listener and you're going to try to guide me through it. And I feel that that's kind of something that should be a strength of a leader.
So we need to know, is it time to listen, just to listen, or are we listening to give feedback? And we need to figure that out.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And there's a little skill. Andrew, you will have heard of validation, right. A lot of people don't know how to validate someone's feelings because they think that if they validate, they're in agreement or they're colluding. Right. But we, I promote often with my service users, clients, whoever I'm talking to, around the difference between validation and agreement because people actually really just want to be heard. And validation is one of those key skills where we go, I hear you, this is awful. Or I get you must be so stuck. You might have all the rationale in the world and think actually, you know, they're putting themselves in that position sometimes or whatever, but that's not relevant. The idea is, is that that communication skill around validating is often the starting point, that people need something. And like you say, being able to communicate and say, I do want to listen to you, but maybe right now it's not the right time. Can we put some time aside? And we, and we often struggle with that, don't we? Because there's so much pressure on leaders. There's so much pressure on employees as well. You can see how it happens, can't you? We're not. Most people are just doing their best. Right. They're not bad people, but it, it. But there's so many ways in which we could help people a lot more than necessarily the schemes that we spoke about, for sure.
[00:19:39] Speaker A: So, Emma, looking ahead, how do you believe workplaces need to evolve when it comes to supporting the whole person, not just the employee who shows up, up to do their job?
[00:19:48] Speaker B: Yeah. I think that being a systemic, they need to kind of adopt a systemically informed approach, in my view. And that isn't something that's really complicated. And systemically informed just means what I said before, which is being aware of People complexities. And not because people need necessarily therapy or they need fixing, they don't. But also, Andrew, as the. The world is changing, as the globe, you know, the global stuff is changing and that unrest comes. We're not changing, just dealing with the life of somebody in their life. And we're talking about things beyond that, aren't we? And how there's people who get stressed out about what's happening in the world and we have to be able to respond to that. And yes, okay, we can't sit and not do our jobs because of it, but we have to be able to respond to it. So I think that wider attitude to systemically informed approaches is really important, which is going to involve a level of training. It's going to involve a level of people wanting to do the work and developing their own insight to be better. You know, you've heard of Stephen Covey's How Habits, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and those sorts of books where you're reading them because you want to do better, you want to show up in the world. But not everybody wants to, right? Not everybody. Some people want to go to their job and they want to earn the money. They don't want to hear people moaning, complaining, or emotional, and they want to go home. And that is fair enough. But that's not the world we live in.
[00:21:06] Speaker A: No, it's not, for sure. And there's a lot of people who do want to go in, do their job, and at the end of the day go home and spend time with their family and that's okay. I think we have to understand that. That. But yes, if you're taking a position in leadership, then we have to understand that there's those a little bit of extras and it's just that compassion component for the people that are under us that we need to learn and understand and be okay doing that. There's a lot of leaders out there. I know that they took the job because it was a pay bump and because they've never been in that position before. So there's a lot of new leaders out there that have never done the job job before. So we get that. But you're absolutely right. You're going to want to do good things and you're going to want to improve. And just like us personally, professionally, you're going to want to be better all the time. And if you want to do that, then you're going to put in the work. If you don't, then. Then you don't.
[00:21:56] Speaker B: Yeah, and you're absolutely right because we do deserve to fill our own clubs. We should be able to go home and turn off and switch off. Right. And so that is absolutely bang on. And we, and we need to be able to know when we're not doing that just as much as when we are doing, doing that. And that care and compassion, that word that you're using there. I think for me a lot of the work, a lot of the. You've heard of social constructionism, right? Which is the idea that we are society and we create our own misery in many ways because of our judgments, because of the values that we hold. Right. So you know, homophobia wouldn't be there if people weren't judging what people were doing. If that was, if we weren't judging, it would be absolutely fine and people would get on their lives. And that exists everywhere, doesn't it? It. Right. And so when we are in our workplaces, we are then all these humans with judgments and things like that and judgments about how we think someone should react, how long someone should grieve for all of this, how they should behave or talk about something. And so I think that's really important because if we don't understand our own values and judgments, and I've said that before, is, is that we then put them onto other people and then that's how people end up suffering more in, in, you know, the workplace. And I think hr, our consultants and HR staff have, over the years that role has changed, doesn't it? They have become therapists in many ways that the problems are often like, you know, they're so diverse now and that's had a big shift and you can't blame them for not being able to keep up with that. Right?
[00:23:18] Speaker A: Right, right. Absolutely. Absolutely. So before we wrap up, Emma, what is one key takeaway that you'd like our listeners to remember from this episode?
[00:23:27] Speaker B: Well, I suppose for me, I'm not, not like a, I wouldn't say that I was one of those people that's like really overly optimistic and expect people to be really positive. I'm quite far from that. I'm a realist and I think that we can, we have a lot more control and power over our lives and the things that we kind of think and do than we often think. So for me, my, my, the takeaway that I would want people to take is to take the risk and take the chance on the idea that doing self development work like coaching, looking at oneself, whether that's in the workplace, whether you're an employer or HR person, thinking about how you Help people? Yeah, it's about kind of being creative. Co production. Ask the people, right? You've heard of the word co production. Are we asking the people what they need and want or do we just get some, you know, so someone might come say, well, I've got this new offer. A friend of mine, she's a laughter yoga therapist. I did the training, but I was too miserable. I couldn't do it very well. And stuff like that where you're actually getting people active, moving, laughing and because it's impossible to be depressed while you're laughing. And so using creativity and different things but recognizing that obviously not one size fits all. So, yeah, the takeaway, long way around is, is to kind of recognize that we have more power and control over ourselves and to give that kind of self insight, self reflection, development a chance and instead of being a concept, give it a go. And actually most people I work with go. That was absolutely life changing. You know, I can work with people in an hour and they go that conversation. I've never had a conversation like that. And that just tells me how cap are as a human race to, to just help ourselves instead of waiting for someone to come and help us.
[00:25:02] Speaker A: Am all on board with what you just said. That was so well said and I couldn't have said it any better. Thank you for that. My call to action would be to like share and follow this episode. I want to take the time to thank you for coming on today, Emma. Some of the things that I admire about you is your spirit, your passion, your versatility and your energy.
It was such an absolute pleasure to have you on as a guest. I think you're just an extraordinary human and I'm thankful that you were able to come and chat with us today. So thank you so much.
[00:25:34] Speaker B: Are you so welcome? It's been an absolute pleasure.
[00:25:36] Speaker A: A pleasure was all ours, Emma. On behalf of myself and my guest today, Emma, I would like to thank you all for listening today. And until next time, be safe. And remember everyone, that if we all work together, we can accomplish anything. Yeah. You have been listening to let's be Diverse with Andrew Stout to stay up to date with future content.
[00:25:58] Speaker B: Hit Subscribe.
