Coaching Primary Care Workers During the Covid Pandemic and Beyond
Hello, and welcome back to the Coaching York podcast. How can we possibly forget the years 2020 and 2021? And what are your memories of the Covid pandemic? And if someone asked you today what your part was in it all, how would you respond? One American author said this: Instead of shutting ourselves off in fear, becoming victims, part of the problem, we became a solution.
Geoff:And that's a great introduction to my guest today, where I'm joined by Heather Simpson, who is sharing about a four year coaching intervention designed to support people on the front line of health delivery during the pandemic. Heather was the prime architect of the programme and she shares how it came about, who was involved and how we know what difference it made. And believe me, it really did make a difference. In the show notes, we share some of the evaluation of the programme and Heather's details. But let's begin, as we always do, with some introductions.
Heather:Hi, Geoff. Good to be here today.
Geoff:You're very very welcome. So could you just tell us a little bit about yourself before we start? So when people ask you those questions like who are you and what do you do and where are you from? What sorts of things would you say to them?
Heather:Okay, so who am I? I live in York. I'm Heather. I've been a coach for many years. I've been a coach, I think about nineteen, twenty years now.
Heather:And I, it was something I built on my clinical background. So I was firstly clinician therapist in mental health services. And I've always believed in the power of coaching to support people achieving their optimal outcomes, which essentially aligned very much with my career pathway early on. I live in York with my family and yeah I worked in the NHS for many years for nearly thirty years. Now I still do work with the NHS but I'm not employed within the NHS And I do that alongside being a tutor for the University of Manchester on the Healthcare Leadership Masters programme.
Geoff:Okay, so there's plenty of strings to your boat. If you don't mind me saying so, you don't sound like you have a Yorkshire accent.
Heather:No. Okay, though. That's a very fair point. I don't. I've lived in Yorkshire most of my life now though, so I I claim an honorary title of Yorkshire being a Yorkshire woman.
Heather:I grew up in the South in Hampshire. I came up to university and didn't leave, like a lot of people I think who come to York.
Geoff:Enticed by the North. Had a similar experience.
Heather:Yeah, my children have all been born here and all grown up here so they're I'm the I'm probably the only one in the house who hasn't got a Yorkshire accent. Although when I go South everyone says I have a northern accent, and when I'm here, everyone says I have a southern accent. So I just don't fit anywhere really accent wise these days.
Geoff:Just just feel comfortable in your own skin. Yeah. Alright. Heather, COVID, we remember hugely hugely challenging time for all of us who lived through that, and you're engaged supporting people working in primary care. Now I hear this phrase primary care banded around quite a lot, and sometimes I think I'm not entirely sure what that means.
Geoff:So could you just explain to us what actually is primary care?
Heather:So primary care consists of all those services that we are the gateway to the rest of the NHS. So probably the most well known is our general practice services. So if you go to see a GP or a nurse or a physio these days or you know social prescriber within your general practice that's a primary care service. Alongside that all of our pharmacy services so the high street pharmacies and the local pharmacies, community pharmacies that you'll see on the high street and in your villages and optometry services. So it's a collective of all of those.
Heather:So there there are thousands and thousands of small small businesses that all come together to create what is known as primary care, which is commissioned by the NHS to deliver all of those services.
Geoff:Okay, interesting to think about each of those as a gateway into the wider NHS and services that it provides. Now we all remember from our own experiences with Covid, the particular challenges that we've faced. Now if you're in primary care, what particular challenges would you say people in that sector were facing during Covid?
Heather:Well I think there were ongoing challenges within the service pre Covid, so but I think what Covid added to that was that the challenges for individuals of you know families overnight had school children at home for homeschooling So they were juggling work alongside being the teachers of their children and juggling that. So all of the challenges that all of us experienced in terms of COVID feeling isolated in some cases if you lived alone, Feeling there were so many rules weren't there, you know, limited in what we were able to do and what we couldn't do. But what exacerbated it was that the individuals working within the primary care were on the receiving end of supporting other people living with those problems whilst living with them themselves. So it was a bit of a double whammy and overnight and there's been a long standing agenda to support primary care becoming more digital first I think is the phrase but essentially making use of the you know number of options we have these days to undertake healthcare across digital so whether that's telephone or videos video conference modes and overnight what happened in Covid was overnight that just happened because it you know it enabled that safe environment.
Heather:But that immediately pushed people into a completely different landscape to work within. You're not in many cases not physically seeing the patient that had reached out for an intervention. A very different experience and left people with very different levels of anxiety. People described it as that you know have I done enough? Have I caught everything?
Heather:When they've not physically been with a person and it was quite a journey really. A journey which there's been a lot of learning from you know yeah thrown into it really. Yeah.
Geoff:Obviously people who are providing care themselves need care and support. So you're involved in setting up a coaching program. So could you tell us a bit about that and why people were asking for coaching as opposed to some other kind of support like counselling, for example?
Heather:Yeah, I don't think people set use the word coaching but what they were describing was coaching. So at the point at that point I was working in a national organisation and my work role at the time was supporting more transformation of services. Overnight, everything, everything that didn't need us to stand up tomorrow was sort of redirted. All resources were redirted. So I was asked because of my background to think about very quickly what we could do more of to support primary care services to keep going.
Heather:So I engaged with many people across the country about to find out what was it that people wanted and needed. There was a this was work that was being done alongside other work being done nationally which was providing a lot of support for staff right across the NHS. But what was different in primary care was that if you work in a hospital there's often a lot of inbuilt resources to support you. There might be have workplace assist programs, to therapy or musculoskeletal services. Primary care is a little bit more hit and miss about whether they're accessible so the intention was to provide that additional layer that secondary care already had to map across to what was also being managed and sort of created nationally for the whole NHS.
Heather:So what was really clear when I spoke when we connected with people was they were really clear what they didn't want as opposed to more what they did want and what they didn't want was counselling and that was really voiced. They didn't want to be speaking to people who didn't understand the context that they worked within. They didn't want to say, they said I don't want to spend the whole session telling them what primary care is or what it or how it is to work here. I want people to understand that. What they didn't want was really a lengthy process for accessing the service.
Heather:What they didn't want was permission to access the service. So what people were then saying they did want was something that was really accessible, that was available seven days a week outside of usual working hours so they could choose where they accessed it and when they accessed it. They also wanted to have choice about how much they access. So they didn't want the service to be really prescriptive. So they made they want maybe just wanted one session or more if they wanted.
Heather:And they were really clear that what they want to do was something to help them keep going, something to help them process. That was the face really. So really, when I was on the receiving end of hearing all of that, what I, what I heard was that really what they were describing was coaching and something to help people keep moving forward, a space to be listened to and heard and in a way to set themselves, you know, look at strategies or techniques or ways of coping to keep going.
Geoff:Now as as as coaches, we like we like to tell ourselves we don't have to be subject experts, and we can adapt to any situation we find ourselves in. In fact, what you're describing here is is a very particular kind of coaching challenge. So you've got people with certain expectations in terms of the kind of support they want. They have professional issues they're working through. They want people to understand the the context that they're working in.
Geoff:People who are experiencing a massive change in their own normal working arrangements, and coaches who'll be coming into this possibly not really sure who they're talking to, what they're gonna talk about, time constraints, which might be a bit unusual for them, and perhaps quite difficult. They they may not actually the coach may not get the chance to build up any kind of relationship with the client. They may not speak to the same person twice. So with all that in mind, you've got to recruit a team of coaches who are skilled and competent enough to respond to this. So who did you recruit?
Heather:So we already had a partnership with a couple of organisations that were supporting some national programmes in coaching. So initially we engaged with them to share the service model. We did also connect with another organisation that was very well recognised for its expertise in health coaching. So the model that we designed was very much pulling upon the health coaching model, which differs slightly to I guess our normal, a more normal business type of coaching model in that it brings in an expertise, a sort of third element, it brings in an expertise of the coach or the coach background. Now in this sense we weren't necessarily bringing in specific expertise like in a health coaching contest it might be that somebody's a physio and their expertise would be blended into the coaching approach.
Heather:What was being brought into this space in the design was the knowledge of the additional support resources that were available for people in primary care. So as I've said primary care is it is a different part of the NHS. Often people were describing feeling, were not feeling disconnected, just feeling that having little awareness of their connection as an NHS employee and what that meant was that people weren't also accessing the resources that were being curated for all NHS staff because they didn't necessarily identify themselves as a NHS worker. They identified themselves as working for such and such a pharmacy or such such a GP practice. So part of the offer was very much about ensuring everybody that had a session or more than one session was connected with the wider support services available for them.
Heather:That that's what I guess defined it as a more of a health coaching approach. So we had three different organisations that worked on a, we commissioned, we did that, we have to, we have to do the usual sort of very formal commissioning process. We were really specific in the ask of what we wanted from a coaching perspective and recognising what people had told us we were really clear that we wanted coaches who were put forward to have a good level of understanding of the primary care services. That could be through having worked within them themselves or it could be having worked extensively with people within primary care. So that was one element.
Heather:The other element was that we were looking for coaches who were really experienced with you know probably at least ten years or you know maybe not years but significant coaching experience and accreditation of at least level seven and above. We needed to have confidence in the coaches because we were essentially coming into a service model which we held closely together with a community of practice which I can talk a little bit more about later but we needed to have some real assurance that they were they were signed up to the model and the other element was which was really really key for me was that this the cohort of coaches needed to be diverse and they needed to look and be representative of the workforce that they were coming in to serve both in age, gender and ethnic diversity. And that was a really key element of the ask for people in the bidding and very specific.
Geoff:How challenging was that to get that level of diversity that you were looking for?
Heather:Surprisingly not. You know, I mean, they all of the people who bid and were successful delivered on that. And we had we had a really great range of coaches across all those elements, ethnic diversity, age and gender.
Geoff:I'm getting a picture of an intervention which provided both coaching and leveraged the wider support available in the NHS to people who may not have known that support was there. So the coach seems to be a part, actually very much a moving part among other moving parts that together provided support. One of the things that's generally thought to be important to make coaching work well is some level of matching between the coach and the client. But what we have here is the client deciding when and where to access the service. So some of the normal things you might do in coaching, a chemistry session, looking for specific skills and experience to match, that's not happening.
Geoff:So as the program developed over time, what refinements were you able to make, for example, in response to themes that emerged to make even better use of a coach's area of expertise?
Heather:Yeah, so as you say, the matching was very much based on when someone's available, but what we built into the service model was that, so if I was seeking coaching, I could go onto the platform and I could book a session today and it would just tell me there was a session, number, give me a picture of all the sessions available. I'd click that time and then that would be the match happening behind. And the first time I'd know who my coach was and conversely the coach know who their client was, would be when you joined on the screen. Now where the flexibility came in was that if somebody wanted more than one session, they could stay with that coach for up to six sessions. If they didn't feel that that session worked but they didn't want more sessions, they could go and book another session with an alternative coach.
Heather:So that provided that flexibility. Later on in the programme because of the, because of I think the real commitment to ensuring the coach workforce was representative of the workforce it was serving. What we were able to see through figures was that we had an over representation of uptake from the workforce who described himself as ethnically diverse. So that was really unusual. It was something going on that suggested that, you know, it had become more accessible.
Heather:Or you could argue actually that that workforce felt more of a need and stepped into the space to take up the offer. And what that led to recognising the benefits that also people were sharing as a result of the coaching led to a new commission where a sister service was set up essentially which was open to staff right across the NHS so in acute trusts and all hospitals right across the country and that four staff from a diverse ethnic background.
Geoff:So what you've got there is sort of in flight evidence of success and then a commission comes in saying we need more of this. Yeah. How did you scale that up?
Heather:Well, we were constantly scaling things up. It was a bit like that Wallace and Gromit film where they're laying the track as the trains going round. And that's what happened. You know, that's how the service developed. So from the point of the ask to the service being live with platform developed etc, it was six weeks and every week we developed it was a very inbuilt to it was a very continuous improvement model.
Heather:They've had a really strong team working on this which obviously included the delivery partners and every week we like what needs to change, the platform change that we really responded to what we knew was happening. Another example of that was that we were able to collect themes of what people were stepping into the coaching for. And it became very evident that yes, people were accessing it to support their own well-being and their own mental health, but also became evident that they were also stepping into it to access coaching support for stuff that probably was was pre existing Covid. So career conversations as an example. What was also really clear was that a number of people were accessing it to support themselves because they were in roles where they were supporting others and they were seeking support to help them be able to support others, if that makes sense.
Heather:So we again quickly redesigned over time that service was redesigned to essentially have different front doors. So we had the one service was looking after you, looking after you too as an individual well-being service and we had looking after your team and we had looking after your career. Looking after you too for staff from a diverse ethnic background was a fourth door and behind each of those doors if you like we had a different set of coaches and the skill set required for each and the service model to some degree was slightly different so all coaches within the diverse ethnic service were from a diverse ethnic background. And then coaches in the looking after your team, they had more of a team or OD background in addition to their coaching and could bring that in because that was an offer which was for more than one member staff. People could come in up up to four people could join a call on that and work as a team on things.
Heather:And then the career coaching we pulled in again a different set of coaches again. So we had coaches were only able to work on one service. We were quite clear on that so that they kept the service model really distinct. The length of sessions were different depending on the service and we you know we really pulled the service design was really pulled through and based on the evidence that we knew and could find on what worked best for each of those needs, coaching needs, if you like.
Geoff:So you mentioned a community of practices or possibly a number of communities of practices given the different emphases here. How did they work?
Heather:Initially, what was really important, I mean, coaches were very clearly describing this as being very different to their usual practice, you know, and COVID threw every everybody into new stuff. So overnight everyone went virtual so that for many people is a completely new way of working. For the initial service, the sessions were forty five minutes for initial session and then thirty minutes follow-up sessions. So for many people that was a significant shift. And we had, as I've said, we built in the health coaching approach.
Heather:We did expect people to retain awareness of the ongoing offers being developed and support people are connecting with those. So what we decided to do was invite people and it was an expectation of being a coach in the programme to attend a monthly community of practice session which was ninety minutes. It was facilitated by myself and one of the other team members, one of the commissioned organisations delivering the programme. It was there really for a number of elements. From a programme perspective, was about helping be assured that the coaches were staying on piste, if you like, weren't going off piste and doing their own thing.
Heather:And that's not to say that people couldn't bring in their own, obviously their own experience and skill sets and stuff. You know we were talking quite short sessions and we had an expectation of what elements would come into that session. It was also really important those sessions for the coaches to connect with each other and to be able to share their experience of being a coach in the service and the challenges that they came up against. Being a coach in the service which did lead on because it was quite an interesting journey and at the end of the first year we did invite the organisation who was undertaking all the evaluation of the programme to undertake a piece of evaluation on the coach experience and the coach journey because it was quite interesting. So right at the front end of the service I did get a lot of pushback from coaches Asked, you know, wanting to know who was coming to their screen before they came.
Heather:They wanted to know, you know, what role the person was in and they wanted details which is what they were used to. Now that what happened in this process was people booked online. There was some demographic data collected and people were asked to complete data on their well-being and resilience and burnouts. As a coach you received that so you got a sense of where somebody's well-being resilience was but you didn't know if they were a GP, you didn't know if they were a receptionist, or you know, a technician in a dental practice, you had no idea. And I really held the line on that because from being a coach myself, I you know, I asked myself the questions when that pushback was coming.
Heather:Knowing that what's that going to mean? And for me that would knowing that brings immediately into that space assumptions about what that means. So if somebody if somebody told me a GP was coming I'd layer on my own assumptions of what a GP is experiencing during Covid or if somebody I knew there's somebody who is a GP receptionist and actually what was important to me was that people came in and used this space for whatever they wanted and needed it for. Some of it was work context, some of it wasn't, some of it was just keeping going in a home context and actually if it mattered to the individual that that the coach knew their role they would share that And if and it did it and if it didn't matter, and if it wasn't part of the coaching that didn't get shared. And I think that the other thing which was a really significant challenge coaches was the short sessions.
Heather:But there was a lot of learning, particularly during that first year and real shifts in the coaches' experience and what the coaches then wanted to, you know, shared in terms of what they would go on to do in terms of their general practice had really shifted.
Geoff:That's really, really interesting. How did those conversations change over time? What were your coaches bringing to the community of practice as the program developed, for example, that was different from what was energising them in the early stages?
Heather:Yes, the early sessions, it was very much about wanting to know who was coming, feeling uncomfortable with landing and not knowing the person, not having the history or the detail of the person and the short sessions and virtual delivery. So all of and obviously over time but people became much more accommodating became much more comfortable with delivering virtually and also felt much more comfortable with its shorter sessions. Another theme that came into into the conversations often was it was very different for most of the coaches in the program working in a service if you like because the it was very the design was very set up as a service, know, it was a, there was an operational set of instructions that people were expected to follow. So there was quite a defined line that was very different for people than sort of working on their own, you know, bringing their coaching experience and skills into that space, but actually with really clear parameters. Yeah, so they for many people, they were saying that was very different.
Heather:Initially, there was quite a lot of overwhelm brought into that space from the coaches perspective about the overwhelm that was coming into the coaching space. So whilst coaches were you know were fairly rehearsed and comfortable with holding emotion that was exacerbated significantly. So a lot of that space as well was supporting the coaches and their well-being and us exploring that and a space for coaches themselves to decompress and connect with each other. And it really was a what we really did try and build was that community. At the end of the first year we did a celebration event.
Heather:Everyone who was a coach in the service joined that and we you know we told the story from beginning to end. So people felt and people were describing that they felt part of something and actually that it gave them a role during Covid because for a lot of people you know work had just stopped. So this had given them a focus and something they felt that they were, you know, they obviously they were being employed, but they were giving back. They felt they were they had they held a purpose during that period of time when a lot
Geoff:of perhaps
Heather:work they'd previously been doing was sort of stilted in some way because of COVID.
Geoff:Losing your place in the world is a huge huge challenge to individual sense of agency. You said when you were introducing the idea of community practice, you said that coaches had learned or experienced things which they then took into their practice after they'd finished. So when you were celebrating and sharing at the end, what kinds of things were coaches saying in terms of, oh, this is what I got out of it, this is what I'll be taking forward?
Heather:Well, definitely the shorter sessions. Everyone was saying their sessions were shorter. That, you know, that actually they recognize the power of the of time and actually, you know, they saw results happening despite their initial anxieties that the sessions were too short you know and that's very much a health coaching approach short sessions you know it the focus enables that and that's what people wanted so that's why we designed it that way. They yes they really did say that was a really significant part. Lots of people had become hugely more comfortable with the virtual world throughout the program.
Heather:And also the other thing which was key for people were feeling much more able to support emotion in the space. Having again been exposed to that quite significantly, we built things like decision trees in, you know, to support people to know when they needed to pass on to other services. But a lot of emotion and was was held in the service, know, people were stepping in with pre existing mental health problems, trauma as a result of COVID and the work they were expected to do during COVID. It was interesting, you know, we had dentistry obviously was a significantly impacted profession and many NHS commissioned dentists were asked to were redeployed and many some of them were redeployed into a hospital setting into an ICU and their job was to turn patients every few hours. Something that they just had not been trained for.
Heather:The trauma I guess that came into the space was unprecedented as as was there were so many things during Covid and as a coach on the receiving end and holding that, that was unprecedented. So the community of practice was really a place for people to feel held and to be heard. That was obviously a layer on to supervision, which was an expectation of the Coaching Commission to provide us supervision, that the Co Community of Practice was an additional layer.
Geoff:Going from Coaching York, obviously, we're great believers in coaches being parts of communities of practice. There there is this saying that you only really find out what's inside you when you get squeezed. A lot of coaches who are being squeezed, it sounds like discovered areas of strength and ability that they didn't realize they had. You talked earlier about evaluation of the programme, so the classic question is always how do you know this was any good?
Heather:It was commissioned for a year initially. Nobody knew Covid would continue. But I knew at the end of that year if it did work and they wanted the service to keep going, I needed to have some evidence. So right from the outset, I commissioned the Institute of Employment Studies to evaluate the service from day one. So we built in some standard questionnaires around some questions around well-being and resilience and burnout to understand if people accessing the service, whether accessing the service supported improvement in that.
Heather:We had some comparative data from the same questions being given out across the country to have staff generally in primary care. So we had some comparative data and what was clear from the evaluation was that people who access the service had improved well-being and resilience as a result of accessing. So that was that gave us the I guess the big data and then on an ongoing basis and if you access the service after a session you'd be pinged a text from the system asking if you'd felt listened to and supported and if you felt able to move on. And again we had really high ratings on both those questions over 99% on both consistently and so they were sort of smaller measures and then the Institute for Employment Studies also and we commissioned them to undertake extensive suite of case studies because the stories that we were that coaches were hearing and were bringing to the community of practice were really powerful. The impact the coaching was making in people's work, in people's lives was really significant and we wanted that to be really captured as well as the quantitative data.
Heather:So yeah, we built quite a significant bank of evidence and at the end of that first year the service also won the Health Service Journal Workforce Initiative of the Year award.
Geoff:An award winning project. Yes. It was great to be able to say you've been part of that.
Heather:Yeah and you know all of that then led to it being continued which was amazing. I mean that was the intention behind the evaluation really. Know there's no point keeping something going if we don't know it works. The community practice also brought an opportunity and the system we'd created with support of the system designer we were able to see the themes that people were stepping in with. So that feedback was able to be fed back into other areas of work going on and other interventions be developed as a result of that to support the workforce.
Heather:So it yeah, it was overall really, really impactful.
Geoff:And what kind of numbers are you talking about at the end when you sort of evaluated how many people have been impacted by this? So you've thought there's the direct people you coached. Obviously there's numbers beyond that that you you don't know where people were being coached to support their teams. But in terms of the numbers of people who went through coaching interventional conversations, what what kind of numbers we talking about?
Heather:So we had over 30,000 sessions booked, obviously that's across the different services. And we had a range of people booking. Some of those were one off, some of them would have been the six sessions.
Geoff:99% satisfaction across tens of thousands of interventions. Wow, that's hugely impressive. We've got links in the show notes to some of the evaluation that's available. But thinking now about now and the future, can you reflect a little on the legacy of the programme? You mentioned some activity that's continued post COVID, and it sounded like there were challenges faced by primary care workers pre COVID, challenges that coaching could have helped to address.
Geoff:So what kind of coaching support is now available to people working in primary care in England? How would you say the programme has shaped any of that ongoing support? And what would you say has been the programme's continuing legacy?
Heather:So the program was available till March 24, when lots of things had historically been commissioned nationally. The expectation of where things are commissioned from is changing. So the expectation beyond that point was that things would be commissioned at a more local level. And I think it's, you know, very apparent in the news that the significant changes that are ongoing within the structure of the NHS at the moment. So historically people in primary care there were some offers for people to access coaching.
Heather:There as I said we had some services at the time we diverted the resource from to this programme. So we had we had had that programmes for GPs coaching. We had quite a significant investment in practice managers in terms of coaching. Across the whole country, we've got leadership academies for the NHS and they hold coaching banks so people can access them and ask for a coach. I think the resources varied and that was one of the challenges that people had shared with accessing things was quite a challenge.
Heather:There are still you know people can still access through some leadership academies do have you know a fairly healthy in terms of coaching and do offer support either commissioned or internal support for coaching to their to staff across their areas which is really really good and helpful. And there are pockets of commissioned programmes of coaching across the country recognized so the needs recognized What that looks like in terms of then an offer created is very varied, region to region across the country, service to service. That's the picture presently.
Geoff:So when you're sitting in your garden, in the Yorkshire air and ruminating on your own experience, what are your fondest memories of all this and what did you take away from it personally?
Heather:I loved the fact, I mean I felt really privileged to be thrown into a space of, hey Heather, can you, we can't do this now, can you do that? And I love, I'm, I love being creative in terms of design. So it was, and it was, it was a crazy few weeks. I mean, it was six weeks, like eighty hour weeks trying to get everything done, building a system, building a design. The team were amazing, pulling together an amazing team that was really, really exciting.
Heather:I love the team I worked with on this. It we really gelled and we really worked well together and connected. So I love leading that team and just feel really chuffed that it worked and the evidence demonstrates it worked and the legacy will continue and it does you know all of the coaches that worked in the programme are out there still coaching and their experience of being a coach in the service will have influenced their approach in their coaching now. A new service based upon the same principles will be coming live very soon for people, for organisations that wish to commission it. So its legacy lives on.
Geoff:So what are you in the market for now? And if somebody wanted to get in touch with you about anything that you could support them in, how would they do that?
Heather:Okay. So I'm a coach and I'm a coach supervisor. Love doing both those things. So if anyone wants to reach out for me in either of those things, that would be great. My newest venture is I'm doing with a very good friend, Sarah.
Heather:We're doing world swim retreat, well-being with coaching and well-being retreats. So yes, very, yeah, very excited that that launches that our first session start in May and June this year. So that was a different side again. And also collaborating with some colleagues on setting up a coaching supervision offer that's a group offer but really connected to nature. So I'm really keen on using nature and the outdoors to support both individual coaching practice but also supervision practice.
Heather:So those are the things that I'm working on at the moment. My head is never, never stops worrying Jeff. Like, I'm probably a creative at heart.
Geoff:I can imagine. We'll put your contact details in the show notes. Do you have a website?
Heather:I don't. I'm building that at the moment.
Geoff:You're building that?
Heather:I've sort of resisted a website for a long time, I've accepted that it would be probably a helpful thing. But I'm on LinkedIn, Yeah. And I've got I'll I'll have to share my email as well if people want to connect.
Geoff:Okay. Well, great. Great. Great to hear your hear your story. Heather, the world is the world is listening to you.
Geoff:Have you got a final message, final thought you'd like to leave with people?
Heather:I'd say I never believed that we'd achieve what we achieved in that program. And don't let your beliefs hold you back because anything is literally possible. So follow your dreams.
Geoff:Brilliant thought. We shall leave with that. Heather, thank you so much for your time. Much appreciated.
Heather:Goodbye now. Thank you, Jeff.
Geoff:Thank you for listening to this edition of the Coaching York podcast. I'm Geoff Ashton, and I curate and edit the show. Coaching York is a social enterprise, a community of coaches serving the communities of York, North Yorkshire and beyond. We offer commercial and time gifted coaching, mentoring and coach supervision services to businesses and to other sectors. And if you're a coach looking to join a supportive, generous and expert community of coaching practice, find out more about us at coachingyork.co.uk.
Geoff:That's coachingyork.co.uk.
