#118: The Academic Imperfectionist origin story
Ever wondered how your Imperfectionist friend here got from academic philosophy to coaching? Lots of coaching clients have asked this over the years, so here I am, with an episode to bring you up to speed. I'll tell you all about how it's thanks to COVID that I ended up coaching, how the podcast was born because I realised I was incapable of uttering sentences like 'Would you allow me to offer you a powerful and transformative coaching experience?', and how I came to see that philosophical ideas don't need to be true to be effective weapons against your inner critic.
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Episode transcript:
How does a philosopher get into coaching? Make yourself comfortable, and I’ll tell you.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello everyone! Can you believe it’s been 4 months since my last interview episode? It’s been wall-to-wall solo episodes since then. Just me, sitting here, banging on. You’ll be excited to know that, behind the scenes, I’ve been busy making arrangements to do some more interview episodes, and I am really really excited to share some brilliant ideas from some brilliant people with you. I’m being deliberately vague because, can you imagine being one of these guests and being built up like this? Personally, it would fill me with horror. So, I’ll say no more for now, but stay tuned.
This episode is a bit of a diversion from my usual fare. I’m going to talk about me. Honestly, that feels a bit weird. But often, when I have a new coaching client, they want to know something about me: how I approach coaching, how I got into it, its relationship to philosophy (which is my discipline), and so on. I’m happy to fill them in on all this, and for a long time I’ve thought that really I ought to have a page on the website that tells this story. Then it occurred to me that it might be interesting to dedicate an episode of the podcast to it. Interestingly, if I’d tried to do that a couple of years ago, I think that what I’d have ended up saying is/would have been/would be? - I’ve got myself tangled up in verbs here - different to what I’m going to say. In large part, that’s because it’s easier to understand and make sense of the process in retrospect.
So, let’s go back to the beginning, which for our purposes, is early 2020. I was then, as I am now, a senior lecturer in philosophy, or an associate professor for the Americans. For my entire academic career, I’d been steadily aiming at the full professor rank. But, around this time, I’d started feeling a bit ambivalent about the promotions pathway. Was climbing that career ladder really going to take me somewhere I wanted to go? I’d begun to think not. I definitely wanted to continue to grow and develop, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to end up at the top of that particular ladder. I realised that the idea I had of what a professor is and what a professor does hadn’t really changed since I was a postgrad, long before I had any real insight into that role. It was all just uninformed fantasy. In my mind, being a professor meant intellectual adventure, creativity, peace and quiet to think hard about difficult things, having an attractive and tastefully designed study that was chaotic enough to hint at a lively mind but not so disorganised that it would stress me out, and so on. All that was divorced not only from the reality of what being a professor is like, but, more to the point, from the reality of what I’m like. I mean, give me peace and quiet to think hard about difficult things and you’re likely to find me fast asleep 10 minutes later. It’s a romantic idea, but it’s not an accurate picture of how I actually work, or how I’d be happy working. My most recent productive writing session took place not in a quiet, wood-panelled study, but in a coffee shop, with one eye on the cute toddler at the next table. I fall apart if I try to work without any distractions. I work best when I can find a way of sort of juggling noise and work so I can hold both at the same time. When my kids were little, one of my favourite places to write was in the cafe at our local soft play centre, surrounded by yelling toddlers and Disney soundtracks on a loop. That would be a nightmare for many people. What works for me is not exactly aspirational.
That was where I was, mentally, in early 2020. I decided I’d submitted my last promotion application (for a while, anyway), but there was a real sense of ‘what next, then?’ Like many of you pathological goalpost-movers, I’m thriving when I’m striving (would you believe that I just made up that amazing catchphrase, right here on the spot? I need to trademark it, quick). Anyway, with these ideas fermenting away in the background, I attended a training day at work, for mentors. I was due to mentor a junior colleague, so I had to go along to this training thing to ensure I knew what I was doing. Part of that session involved the presenter walking us through what mentoring is, and how it differed from some similar things - things like consultancy, and coaching. At the mention of coaching, my mind drifted to the handful of people I knew who were coaches, in various capacities. It occurred to me, as the morning and the powerpoint presentation went on, that coaching could potentially be a useful and interesting application of philosophy. Coaching is about helping people think clearly, and for that, it’s helpful to be able to identify and question foundational assumptions and spot glitches in reasoning, double standards, hidden premises, judgments that look at face value to be rational but turn out to be primarily emotional - things like that. Things, in other words, that philosophers are trained to do, and things that philosophers are constantly doing in their research and their teaching. Maybe applying philosophy to coaching would be fun to explore, I thought. Perhaps I could get to a place where I’d do the odd bit of coaching as a hobby, a new way to grow and develop and improve that didn’t involve climbing the career ladder I’d decided I wasn’t interested in climbing. As I came out of that mentoring training session, I messaged a friend who worked as a coach to ask how they got into it and where to go for more info. I talked to a few other people over the weeks that followed. I read a lot of books and articles. I signed up for a few bits of free, online training. I hired a coach and got coached myself. I was pondering whether to take the plunge and invest in a coaching diploma: was it worth it, how much would it cost, did I have time to do it alongside my job and everything else in my life.
Of course, given that this was early 2020, we all know what happened next. The covid plot twist. Everything got cancelled. Everyone’s plans were out of the window. The things we were planning for the next week got postponed to the next month, then to the next year, and then we started wondering whether they’d ever happen at all.
So, whatever plans I’d been making to explore coaching got paused. As the weeks and months passed, I thought: this might not ever happen. There were no clear plans for the training events and programs I’d been interested in. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to do this after all. Oh well. It was a fun idea, I thought. But then I had an idea. A, frankly, terrifying idea. What if, I thought, I just jumped in at the deep end and started coaching? I could start off by offering to coach people, for free. I’d be up front about the fact that I hadn’t done this before, and that my training involved a mish-mash of sessions from various places, along with the philosophical skills that I was convinced should, in theory, come in useful, although I wasn’t sure exactly how. I posted in one of the online communities I belong to, explaining what I was up to and offering 3 x 1-hour online coaching sessions to anyone willing to let me have a go. I made a sign-up sheet on Google Sheets. I thought, maybe a couple of people would take pity on me and let me do coaching on them.
Instead, there was an absolute avalanche of sign-ups. There were a couple of days of back-to-back coaching sessions for 8 hours without a break, before I realised I’d need to restrict my availability to make room for the rest of the stuff I had to do. I can remember sitting there waiting for my very first coaching session to start, my heart in my mouth. I’d not long moved house and I didn’t even have a desk, so I was sitting on the floor with my laptop on a chair in front of me. I already knew the first few people I coached, although not well enough for me to feel awkwardly enmeshed in their lives, and they were very kind and patient. I was surprised by how well it all went. People came back for their second and third sessions. Even people I coached who I didn’t already know came back for more. Some people wanted more coaching after the initial 3, free sessions, so I started offering paid but still cheap sessions. I was keeping a record of who I was coaching and how many sessions I’d done with them so I could keep track of how much experience I was accumulating, and I hit 100 hours pretty quickly and stopped tracking. I was learning on the job, and learning from all the books, articles, videos, and interviews about coaching I was devouring - but I noticed that the main thing I was drawing on was the simple fact of being a trained philosopher who was interested in people’s struggles.
I was struck, in those early days, by two main things. First, how well it was going. I really felt that I had stumbled on something for which I’d been training for decades, without realising. The philosophy, the curiosity about other people, the willingness and the ability to listen. The second thing that struck me was how deeply, profoundly needed this was. As I did more and more sessions, I noticed that the same problems were coming up again and again, and that the people experiencing them were often under the impression that they were the only ones, and they felt a whole range of horrible things as a result - shame, guilt, the sense of being an impostor - things that will be pretty familiar to you if you’ve listened to a few episodes of this podcast. A lot of the time, the people suffering from these things were talking about them for the very first time in our coaching sessions. They didn’t feel able to admit to them. This really resonated with me, because I’d also felt like that. I remember a time, probably not that long before I started coaching, when I posted about procrastination in an online support group for academics. I posted because I was interested in how other people were managing to square the sense of overwhelm that so many of us felt with the tendency to procrastinate. I was genuinely puzzled about this. How can anyone complain about having too much to do, if they’re able to find so much time to avoid doing what they’re supposed to be doing? I realise now that these are not really separate problems, and they’re not contradictary: procrastination can be a response to feeling overwhelmed. Anyway, I typed out that post but really had to work up courage to hit ‘send’. I was worried that people might be absolutely appalled. I thought I might be the only one out there procrastinating. Everyone else, I sincerely believed, was responding to their overwhelm by getting things done, spending their days checking things off their huge task lists like well-oiled machines. So, I nearly deleted that post, but I didn’t, and it turned out that nobody ran away screaming. All of which is to say: the more coaching I did, the more I was convinced that it was a good and useful thing.
So, where does this podcast fit into this story, you might be wondering. The usual story I tell people is that I started doing the podcast as a way of showing people my approach as a coach, something they could explore in their own time with no pressure, and without me needing to do a ‘hard sell’ about the coaching, which is definitely not me. That’s all true: the podcast was born as an advert for the coaching, as a comfortable (for me) way to promote what I was doing. I really didn’t want to be kind of cornering potential clients and badgering them into hiring me, and even the slightest, most subtle bit of pushiness on my part made me feel like I was badgering people. I read lots of bits of advice about how to do better at the ‘sales’ part of coaching, and nothing I read made me feel any better about it. One book I read urged coaches to sell their coaching to people by saying something like ‘Would you allow me to offer you a powerful and transformative coaching experience?’, a frankly ridiculous sentence that I am certain I’d be unable to utter with a straight face. But, of course, not being a natural born salesperson presented a problem for someone who was hoping to get new clients. I needed a way to show people what I was doing. A podcast seemed like a good solution.
Advertising my wares wasn’t the only motivation for the podcast, though. It was also important to me to show that I had something valuable to say, that I wasn’t a complete charlatan. Coaching is a bit of a wild west. Anyone can call themselves a coach - there are no rules against it. And while the industry’s self-regulation goes some way to ensuring quality, and while there are some fantastic coaches out there - the coach I worked with back when I was starting up, Rumbi Moyo, is an example, and I thank her in the acknowledgements section of my book for helping me through some really thorny writing difficulties - there are also plenty of coaches who I don’t think I’d want to be coached by. Since I was planning on coaching smart people who I fully expected to approach any potential coach with a healthy dose of scepticism, I needed a way to show people - not simply tell them - that I had useful wisdom and insight to offer. One way of doing that was to offer a free initial coaching session - and that’s something I still do. More on that later. Another way was to do the podcast.
All of which is to say that the origin story of the podcast is all about its being a gateway into my coaching. But over the 4-and-a-half years since I launched it, it’s taken on a life of its own. New coaching clients find me through the podcast, but - judging by the messages I receive from you lovely lot - people find value in the episodes even when they have no plans to get coached. I’m making episodes that I wish had been available to me over the years - not just when I was a student, but also just a few years ago, like that fairly recent time when I felt afraid to admit to other academics that I procrastinated. A lot of the time, doing the podcast feels like therapy, and it’s a good motivation for me to delve deeply into issues that I otherwise wouldn’t bother to think about at any length. It honestly makes my day when people get in touch to say that the podcast has helped them feel a bit less alone or a bit more confident or less ashamed. Doing the podcast has helped me in those ways too.
Now, I’ve already mentioned that my approach to coaching uses the skills of the philosopher, but let me say a bit more about the relationship between coaching - at least, the way I do it - and philosophy. My entire academic background is in philosophy: I studied it as an undergrad, then as a postgrad, and now I’m employed as an academic philosopher. For a lot of that time, my research focused on philosophical questions that, although interesting and engaging to think about, didn’t really feel to me like issues anyone was likely to make significant progress on. Maybe that’s just me being pessimistic. But, for example, I wrote my PhD thesis on the metaphysics of personal identity. Like a lot of questions in metaphysics, that strikes me as one that humans might still be arguing about 500 years from now, if there are still humans around at that time. I was reading and learning more and more about that area, and I was making my arguments as compellingly as possible - but, was I arguing for the right conclusions? I mean, I was doing my best, but I honestly didn’t know. And what’s more, I couldn’t see what, realistically, could satisfy me on that matter one way or the other. Perhaps I just didn’t have the right sort of intuitions about the stuff I was working on, but I ended up feeling a bit jaded, and after my PhD I left academia for a bit (although my reasons for doing that are more complicated than I’m presenting them here, which is a story for another day). Looking back, I think part of what was going on was that I wanted to be doing research that was making a certain type of impact on the world, and for a long time, I didn’t think I was doing that. At some point, it occurred to me that even those philosophical questions that left me thinking, ‘realistically, we’ll probably never know the truth here’, could be useful frameworks for thinking about the world and ourselves. Issues like that have inspired lots of episodes of this podcast. To mention just a few, there was episode #78: Fix your self-compassion with the metaphysics of personal identity (and an Aeropress), in which I drew on a certain form of reductionism about personal identity to show how we can be kinder to ourselves. There was episode #56: You're not weak-willed, according to Socrates, where I used the idea that there’s no such thing as weakness of will as a strategy to fight back against guilt-trips from our inner critic. There was episode #14: Become your own biggest advocate, with Immanuel Kant, where I showed how Kant’s ideas about the mind can help us view ourselves more positively. Do I think that the philosophical views I talked about in those episodes - Derek Parfit’s conception of persons, Socrates’s view of weakness of will, and Kant’s categories - are correct? I don’t know. I wouldn’t bet money either way on any of them. Perhaps if I were to think about them for way longer than I ever plan to think about them, I’d be swayed one way or the other, but even then I can’t imagine getting rid of much doubt. I don’t mean to say that I don’t think there is a truth of the matter in these cases - I think there probably is, even if I’m not hopeful of ever reaching it. But as I hope I managed to show in those episodes, those views can be helpful, regardless of whether or not they’re true. So, in addition to the philosophers’ clear-thinking superpowers being useful as coaching tools, that’s another way that philosophy makes its way into my approach to coaching: taking arguments and insights from philosophers, and applying them in new ways to show how we can do a slightly better job of muddling through life.
When it comes to drawing on philosophy in coaching and in my podcast episodes, though, I try to keep it light. I definitely don’t want to be schoolteacherish about it - like, sending coaching clients off with a list of reading to do for homework and forcing them to think through philosophical ideas until they understand them well enough to write an essay. I try not to try at all to inject philosophy into what I do here. Instead I approach it by simply trusting that I’ve spent so much of my life doing philosophy that it’s going to find its way into the ways I relate to people, whether I try or not. Beyond that, I’m not sure I could say anything informative about how philosophy informs my approach to coaching, despite being asked relatively often to sum it up, you know, in a pithy sentence. I expect that might change a few years from now, as I get more insight and perspective into how I approach it all. And, of course, it’s all iterative: it’s not just philosophy that informs how I coach people and how I tackle the issues that I make podcast episodes about. It’s also coaching itself, and making podcast episodes itself. The more I do of these things, the better I’m able to do them. And, of course, although I’m sort of lumping coaching and podcasting together at times, obviously they’re very different things. I don’t shut up in podcast episodes - that’s kind of the point - but in coaching sessions, I’m mostly listening. Which, again, is the point.
Talking of coaching, I still do that free initial session, as I said. Feel free to sign up for one, if you’re curious. Sometimes people ask me why I still do free sessions, given that I’m not at the ‘starting out’ stage any more, and sometimes people feel awkward about signing up for a free session if they know they aren’t able to commit to any paid ones. I continue to do them simply because it seems like a nice thing to do - it’s rewarding seeing how just one solitary hour of coaching can leave a new client feeling unburdened and with a helpful new perspective - and because I invariably come away from a session with a new person with some sort of insight about myself, as a side effect. So, if you fancy trying it, I’ll put a link to where you can sign up in the episode notes.
What’s next for The Academic Imperfectionist? Well, you tell me. What would you like to see? You can let me know via the contact form on my website, or via Medium, or via Bluesky or Facebook - just look up The Academic Imperfectionist on any of those platforms. I haven’t, so far, done any group coaching, although it’s never far from the maybe-when-I-have-a-moment agenda. I can see some group coaching focusing on writing goals, or battling the inner critic, or dealing with self-doubt, being useful - a way of building supportive communities, and a way of making coaching more accessible to more people (because the cost per person is less for groups than with one-to-one sessions).
That’s it from me, friends. Back soon with a more normal episode. Take care.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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