Susan Britson On Building A Coaching Culture With Neuroscience-Informed Strategies
In today’s episode, we dive deep into coaching culture with Susan Britson, founder and CEO of the Academy of Coaching. With a neuroscience-informed approach, Susan has trained thousands of coaches worldwide. We’ll explore her fascinating journey from a small-town farm girl to a global leader in coaching. Plus, you'll hear practical insights on leadership, resilience, and the impact of coaching on personal and professional growth. Don't miss this episode for valuable insights and inspiration.
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Susan Britson On Building A Coaching Culture With Neuroscience-Informed Strategies
Welcome to this episode of the show. This is a show where you discover the real stories of normal people like you who have become extraordinary leaders. You'll get valuable tips and lessons on how you can grow and develop into the best leader that you are created to be. When leaders are intentional, lives are changed.
The Power Of Coaching And Its Impact
In this episode, we are all about coaching. I hope you tune in to this because you're going to learn a lot about coaching and the impact of coaching, as our guest is Susan Britton from California. As I introduce her, I want to remind you to hit that subscribe button so you know when every single episode drops and you can stay informed on the audio version on all of your platforms or through YouTube.
Susan Britton is our guest. Susan is the Founder and CEO of The Academies for Coaching. Her academy has taught thousands of coaches across all the continents of our world and is making an impact with them. She really focuses on neuroscience-informed coaching, which we're going to dive into in this episode. It’s a very interesting topic. She's also the author of seven books. More than that, like me and like the rest of you, she is a normal person who wants to make an impact on the people that are brought in front of her.
Susan, it is an honor to have you on the show. Welcome.
Thank you. I am so happy to be here.
I'm glad to have you on here. I'm excited about a day of talking about coaching, one of my greatest passions. Every episode, we want to learn about our guests. We want to know about their professional journey because our audience can tap into that and say, “I'm like her. I can do that, too.” Give us a walk through your professional journey and the leadership lessons learned along the way.
I am a farm girl from a tiny little farming town called Firebaugh, California. It had a population of about 2,000 at the time that I was growing up there. My dad was a farmer. We lived out in the country. I was thinking about what leadership lessons I learned there. I learned an agrarian work ethic. It was all about we. That was a beautiful leadership lesson. My dad was in charge of it. We had a really huge ranching farming operation of 10,000 acres. It wasn't a tiny thing. There was a lot of leadership that he demonstrated in national and state volunteer work, wards, etc., along with managing this large ag operation.
I tell people my first real job other than working in my dad's office in the summers was working as a secretary in a cantaloupe packing shed. I had turned old enough to get my driver's license and I drove to my first job in the summers. It was 7 days a week and 12, 14, or sometimes 16-hour days. We were in this outdated little packing shed. We found out later that the union had burned down the good one three days before. No offense to unions, but that's what happened, so we had to move to this other little shed. We were putting in twice the number of hours to pack all of the melons that they had. That added to that whole agrarian work ethic of doing it. That was an early experience for me.
You said you were a secretary. What were you doing in that? How does that play out? What were you doing in the shack then?
There were manifests. There was a ton of trucking. You would support the sales guys that were selling to the markets and that sort of thing. It was quite fast-paced.
You were more of keeping the ops moving forward.
I'll tell you a quick story. One Saturday night, the sales boss said, “You've been working these crazy hours for weeks. You can come in tomorrow morning at 8:00 instead of 6:30 in the morning on Sunday.” I'm like, “That would be so nice.” I arrive at 8:00 in the morning on my Sunday morning off. I come in late. The second salesman tore into me about how irresponsible I was, that I should never have done that, and that if I was going to be late, I should've been calling, etc. Those two little jokers were playing a joke on me and I didn't know it. That helped me realize how responsibility had been baked into me.
I was in tears. Finally, the other secretary in the office said, “You guys stop it. This is not funny anymore.” That early training really made me recognize that when you think a job is done, think past it because there's usually something else or something more that also needs to be done. I learned how to pull myself up by my bootstraps, become resilient, and all of those things. I over-baked that responsibility, the, “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” message, and this affected my leadership down the road. I was very hesitant to ask for help. I was like, “I'll do it myself.” There are two sides to the puzzle there.
When you think a job is done, think beyond it, as there's usually something else or something more that also needs to be done.
Every strength can become a weakness anytime it's ever done. Where'd you move on from there?
College. I had always had a really great musical talent and I had a passion for people. I went and became a music therapist. I worked in mental health. I worked in inpatient psychiatric settings after I got out of college in Dallas County Mental Health. I worked with kids, adults, and all sorts of things. I loved it, but it was also at a time when there were a lot of cutbacks happening in program funding. I found myself out of a job and I thought, “What am I going to do now? Music therapy is not a booming business right now. I can't do that.” That was Texas.
I moved back to California, and honestly, I was lost. I took a test to try to become a stockbroker. I didn't pass it. I interviewed for a couple of things and nothing worked out. Finally, I got a job as a secretary. From those musical talents, I can type 130 words a minute easily, so I was a good secretary. I had great English skills. I could always get my sentence structure and grammar right. I had a great aunt who tutored me when I was writing term papers. I went to work for a commercial real estate office and then I was a legal secretary as well. I hired somebody who was going to be a word processor. She had the vision to say, “I want to start a resume writing service. Would you want to do that with me?” We buddied up and leased this computer for $6,000.
The price is crazy.
I know. It was stupid. It was a highway robbery. We started writing resumes. We'd work during the day, come home, and interview clients face-to-face in the living room. We got really good at resume writing. My first book was Resume Magic. It was in all the bookstores. I was very good at it because I was able to draw out of people what they did well and see the beauty and the brilliance in them.
Here was the turning point. It was a couple of years later. You know when life is speaking to you. Within this little window of time, I had several clients come back and say, “Remember that resume you wrote for me a couple of years ago?” I’m like, “I remember it.” They say, “I hardly had to even interview for the job. They hired me, but I hate my job.” Somebody else would come in and tell me the same exact story. They’re like, “I hate my job.”
About this time, professional coaching was starting to come online. I started hearing about it. I thought, “I've got the cart before the horse. I've got people out there doing things that they don't love doing. It'd probably be a good idea if I understood how to coach people towards this.” I jumped in and learned about coaching. I got my training and certification. I had great mentors. I started my own training organization for career coaching and then later, leadership coaching.
That’s a great story. I love that you're learning at every turn from the people. I want to step back for a second when you talked about the power of your resumes, where you could tap into people’s passions and what made them stand out and shine. That's the essence of coaching. Coaching is not to craft somebody or form somebody into what we think they should be as a coach or even what their leaders think of their jobs. It's for us to pull out of them the greatness that's inside of them. That's the joy of coaching. It is helping people see more in themselves than they can see, realize it for themselves, and become the best version of themselves. That's how we describe coaching all the time. It drives a passion in you, doesn't it?
Coaching Culture: Coaching is not about molding someone into what we or their leaders think they should be based on their jobs. It's about drawing out the greatness that already exists within them.
Yeah. I can remember one of my early first clients. It was a phone conversation. I got off the phone, threw my pen down, and said, “This is what I was put on the planet for.” I knew it in my bones. The other comment I made was something like, “I can't believe I get paid for this.” I was like, “This is a sweet thing. I love doing it.” I was getting good at it. I wasn't good at the beginning, necessarily.
Transition From Career Coaching To Leadership Coaching
You said early on you were doing career coaching and then you transitioned more to leadership coaching. A lot of people don't know the difference between the two. Talk a little bit about what you were doing at career coaching and how that is different from leadership coaching.
I might beg to differ. There might be a lot of similarities. Let me start with leadership coaching. Leadership coaching, and I've heard you preach this as well, is self-awareness of, “If I want the world to change, let's start inside here,” and recognizing, “What am I capable of? What could I be capable of? Where am I growing? What's preventing me? What's stopping me? What's purposeful? What's vision-oriented?” I also work with people to make that happen in a shared collective.
In a career space, there's a lot of that also happening. It’s like, “Who am I? What is possible within me? What can I make possible? What do I need to change? What can I build on?” That's where neuroscience comes in. It’s like, “What was I pre-wired from birth to do well?” That’s nature. It’s like, “What was I also nurtured to do that's added to that?” My nurturing was the responsibility gene.
This might be the difference between career coaching versus leadership coaching. There's still a self-leadership happening in career coaching that you have to be responsible for as the client of the career coach. How do I make sure that I intersect with leaders, companies, organizations, and cultures where I can also bring that nurture-nature combination and make a difference in the process?
I love that. We've talked about nature and nurture on the show before with some other guests. People always say, “Are leaders born or are they made?” There is no blanket answer to that, but in the end, leadership is influenced. It influences behavior. It's about behaviors and developing those leadership behaviors but being true to yourself at the same time. That's why I love that you're sharing about that.
One of my passions about coaching is that we coach people from different walks of life all over the world and in different industries, but everybody's unique. Helping them find their uniqueness and that special sauce for them and how they can therefore, impact other people is riveting. It's a joy to walk that journey with them.
I would add that the career leadership piece, every leader is also going to have a career component to their thinking as well. Certainly, they are leading themself and the team, connecting and co-creating together on that. That's usually going to lead towards some new opportunity, so making some career decisions, thinking about the strategic complex picture, and all of that. It's going to come for everybody.
I have one more thought too. There are some concerns with the direction that AI is happening and going. I’m reading things with the trends and the forecasters who are saying, “There's going to be a time when there's a big portion of the population that's not going to have work because of this.” That could be true. This is where I feel like that self-leadership piece that everybody needs to be thinking about being a leader. If you're not in that self-leadership mindset, it could spell trouble down the road for your career.
Neuroscience And Leadership Coaching
It could. It's an interesting piece. We don't know where AI is going to take us. There's a lot of speculation out there. People are wondering about AI in coaching and AI in leadership. There's a place for AI tools in leadership, those prompts, those tips, and those tools that can be brought out, but leadership is about people. I agree with what you're sharing. Those of us that understand how to lead ourselves and therefore can lead others are going to have a job because there are still going to be people that need to be led. It's the next evolution of it.
You went on to be the founder of The Academies for Coaching. I want to talk a little bit about specifically what The Academies is trying to do through your training. You talked about the idea of neuroscience-focused coaching. I want to dive into that a little bit because neuroscience is very popular in many different realms from sickness and diseases all the way to the realm of where we're going and how AI even plays into that. In the realm of coaching and leadership, how does neuroscience play in?
We've been playing in this space for close to ten years. I got in early. I was fascinated by neuroscience. I was always the one in my family who supposedly wore their heart on their sleeve. I was in tune with people. I knew when people were hurting. I had a sense of those kinds of things. My kindergarten teacher played Puff, The Magic Dragon, on the little record player.
I was the only kid in the entire class who was in tears because I realized that Puff was sorry, Jackie Paper went away, and there was sadness there. I was the only one crying. At the end of the day, my mom comes to pick me up and the kindergarten teacher says, “Mrs. Britton, your daughter wears her heart on her sleeve.” I was also the one always bringing kittens home and stray friends for holidays and all of those things.
I then got into coaching, and I love it because it's got a humane element to it. I was also working with a ton of leaders and executives who were constantly like, “Feelings have nothing to do with it. Don't tell me about emotions. Let me analyze this.” I'm like, “There's a big disconnect between what I know to be true about the relational trust human piece of it and the reality of it's got to make sense and it's got to add up. You've got to have a strategy and you've got to be able to analyze it.”
When neuroscience came around, I was like, “Finally, a way to explain how the emotional human relational side of things plays into the whole picture.” That's what got me excited about it. I felt like it proved that there was a reason that we should be considerate of the human element as opposed to micromanaging people and telling them, “Do this.”
Coaching Culture: Neuroscience has finally provided a way to explain how the emotional and relational aspects of human experience contribute to the overall picture of our lives.
When I learned about neuroscience, one of the first things I learned was the whole biochemistry-neurochemistry side of it. It is common knowledge for people to understand oxytocin, dopamine, and all the happy neurochemicals that get you in a place where you can be trusting and creative, and then the other side of it, which is the cortisol, the fight-flight, and all of those spikes that rob our cognitive ability and our relational ability. That's where I see neuroscience intersecting with coaching.
We talked about self-leadership. Within a coach, and I'm preaching to the choir here, you know that unless your biology is in that parasympathetic nervous system state, the peaceful state where you've got full blood flow to your neocortex and all of those things, that's the space where people are going to be honest enough with you and lower their defenses enough with you to say, “There are things that I can change in my patterns. There may be values that I have held for decades that may not be serving me as well as they could or that I've over-baked them like the basement and balcony Gallup StrengthsFinder or CliftonStrengths language.” That was the first thing that I saw within the neuroscience coaching intersection.
The second thing that I saw, I got two Cs. There’s the Chemistry piece of it and then there’s the Circuitry piece of it. I'll first flip over to Seth Godin, a brilliant thinker. I love one of his quotes. It was something like, “Everyone is exactly right. If you knew what they knew, if you wanted what they wanted, and if you believed what they believed, you too would do the exact same thing.” That is circuitry. That is baked and stuffed into your brain mixed in with the neurochemistry of like, “Am I in fight-flight?”
If you, as a coach, can see that in yourself, you can see it in your clients. It is then taking it a step further for leaders to be able to think for these employees who are doing stupid stuff where they’re like, “Why would you think that?” Everyone is exactly right. Given their neurochemistry and neurocircuitry, they're doing what they think is right.
Internal Vs. External Coaching In Organizations
It’s understanding everybody's coming from their place, their experiences, and what's going on for them. I like that because it gives us the opportunity to sense where people are so we can take them on a journey and take them to become the best version of themselves. You are in coach training. I love that because we need great coaches out there. For our audience, I'll set this up a little bit. Organizations all around the world are hiring coaches from frontline managers all the way up through the executives and sometimes even with individual contributors.
As companies are hiring, they have an option of going one of two ways. They can develop coaches internally in their organization to coach their people or they can hire coaches externally to come into their organization. We're at a place where a lot of companies are doing both. They have an internal coaching pool and an external coaching pool. The Academies really has a strong focus on developing a pool of coaches internally for organizations. My opening question is, why did you choose that focus for The Academies for Coaching, and what does that actually look like? How does that play out?
I am in this because I want to see what I call Blue Zone work cultures across the planet. I want to see leaders who can go into their work, recognize their own chemistry happening or their own circuitry that's operating and that of others, and be able to manage emotions and thinking in a way that makes people trust them.
I like playing in the leadership space because I'm a leader and because I know that that's where the greatest influence is going to happen. I believe that on our planet at this time, there is absolutely a changing point where it has become acceptable to be human at work. I want to help leaders be human at work and understand that every team you're talking to has some mix of chemistry and circuitry going on.
There has been a significant shift in recent times, making it more acceptable to be human at work. I am passionate about assisting leaders in embracing their humanity in the workplace.
If you try to get people to work when they're in the Red Zone fight-flight, you're only going to push them further into the Red Zone fight-flight. You’re only going to lose half of their brain or more. We need every person working to the full capacity. If they can't do that, our companies aren't competitive. We don't have paychecks, we send workers home at night to spouses, children, and family that are like, “Would you get a better job, please?”
What does it look like if a company wants to train 5, 10, or 20 people to become internal coaches in their organization and they reach out to The Academies? What does that process look like?
The companies that we have worked with typically have a cohort of a nucleus that they want to start with. Oftentimes, they will start with an organizational development or HR performance development piece of their team and then later add on leaders in different functional areas to get a holistic approach to this. If coaching is only done in the HR space, that's not going to promote the culture broadly.
It doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen with, “I'm going to go to a 2 or 3-day training thing,” because that is not how your brain works. If you want your brain to get rewired, you have to have novelty, emotional resonance, repetition, and new associations. That wiring doesn't happen in a couple of days, so you have to practice.
If you want your brain to get rewired you have to have novelty emotional resonance repetition and new associations. That wiring doesn't happen in a couple of days, you have to practice.
Our program is really built with the brain in mind. It takes a number of months. It can take anywhere from 6 to 12 months of training to be able to get to that first level of what the International Coaching Federation calls the ACC credential or Associate Certified Coach credential. All of our programs are designed to think about how if you can experience what coaching is like in your classroom, you're going to be a faster, better coach in that process. That's what I love about the neuroscience piece of it. It's not just within the coaching. It's baked into the training piece of it, the practice piece of it, and the experience.
In the coach training that I went through, there was a lot of time spent coaching one another. I may be the coachee for a while, bringing something to share and wanting some coaching from the coach, and then you flip roles with it. What I loved about that aspect of living it and engaging in it was understanding both sides. It was difficult for me to be the coachee, to bring the real topic, and be honest and vulnerable with somebody Who you're meeting for the first time in this course, and yet you want them to be able to help you. It is making those connections and understanding the value of being a safe space for them.
Let me ask you this question. We work with companies. My company, Renogize Professional Coaching, is an external provider of coaching to companies. We're coming in. A lot of the organizations we work in have an internal cadre of coaches. Depending on the people, some people say they love the internal coaches, and some people say they're not a fan of the internal coaching because they’re there every day. They're part of the company and the organization. What would you say to somebody to break down that wall or break down that fear of, “I can't go talk to an internal coach of my company.” Maybe they feel like there's no confidentiality or it's about the company, not them. Have you broken that down?
Is that a question for how do you speak to potential clients that are concerned about working with an internal coach?
Correct.
You know from coach training that agreements are a huge piece of the puzzle. That's one of the earliest competencies in the list of competencies that a coach learned. There have got to be agreements between the coach and the company about confidentiality. There have got to be agreements between the leader and the internal coach about confidentiality, what will be shared, and those sorts of things. Typically, the line is drawn if the client says, “I've been embezzling.” Once there are agreements in place about that, then that's helpful to help ease that.
The other thing is that partnering is one of the keywords that's repeated in the International Coaching Federation language. If there is a partnership around, “What leader do you need to feel like? You can be honest here. What do we want to create? Who have you worked with in the past where you knew that if you said something that was going to look vulnerable, embarrassing, or scary, you were going to get treated respectfully? What do you need?” partner through that process. Put it out there. Even though that might be a little bit scary to talk about and that's going to raise some cortisol in that process, the fact that you're talking about it also creates trust in the midst of it.
I love that. I want to shift the focus a little bit because some of our audience may be in organizations that are considering training a cadre of coaches internally and they could send them to The Academies for Coaching for that. The reason a lot of organizations would be fearful of it is there’s always the thing about the investment. If there's a company that really wants to create a coaching culture and wants to impact its people, what do you share with them as the ROI of developing that internal cadre of coaches? What's the ROI for the company?
The ROI is going to be the creativity, the culture, and the engagement that will change. It used to be VUCA. Now, it's BANI. It's full of anxiety, uncertainty, and incomprehensibleness. That puts people into a fight-flight state. Coaching does the opposite. Coaching can put people still into a stretched nervous, “Can I do this? I'm excited to do this,” as opposed to, “I have to do this. I can't do this.” The ROI is the creativity, innovation, cooperation, and resilience that the leaders and the teams are going to receive as a result of that. If we don't have that, not just within a company but as a species, we're not going to be able to solve the huge complexities that we're dealing with in this society.
Coaching Culture: The ROI of developing that internal cadre of coaches is going to be the creativity, culture, and engagement. Those will change.
There is a lot of return on the investments. When they hear ROI, people typically think of cash. It's not always about the cash. It's about the culture. It's about retention. It's about the effectiveness of people and them coming as a whole person, enjoying coming to work, and enjoying the people they work with. That coaching culture creates that.
When we're with leaders, we always do a coaching action plan. One of the action items the vast majority of the time is developing a coach approach. We're teaching our coachees how to be a coach. I'm a firm believer that the best leaders are coaches. That's not going to change in the future at all. Let me ask you this prognostication question. There is technology. There is AI. We're learning more about neuroscience and the brain. What do you see as the next wave or transition in coaching?
The democratization of it or the spreading of it. What has been a tough nut to crack for the last several decades on, “How do you get out of, “The executives get it. The high-posts get it.” That's the direction. For that reason, I am excited about what AI may be able to bring to the puzzle. I also feel like there's an exponential value When leaders start acting more like coaches and have a coach approach.
There's a blend. You have to have backbone and heart. There is a great book by that title. Once leaders start demonstrating that, then that is going to automatically create more collaboration, more innovation, and more role-modeling. That is probably the most important thing. It’s the role-modeling they see within the leader. Your culture starts acting coach approach-like. In a way, that can also help democratize that process.
I'm a lifelong learner. For a big birthday of mine, I won't say which number, I enrolled in a Master's program in France to get an Executive Master in Change using a systems psychodynamic approach. I met people from all over the world. I was 1 of 2 from the US. The rest were from seventeen different countries. I met a colleague there who works for a very large global tech company. She was telling me about how within their organization, they actually have fellow coaches who will coach one another.
I'm excited to think about not just the leader role modeling and then seeing that happen so that more people act in that manner within their cultures. I'm excited about more proactive actual programs like that starting to unfold. You've got the best of AI that can be added to that but you also get connection and relationship. If you don't have people that you like to work with, like to talk to at work, and that you trust, people aren't going to stay. You've got turnover and engagement issues. I see multiple benefits happening as the coach culture extends.
If you don't have people you enjoy working with, can talk to at work, and trust, people aren't going to stay.
It's awesome. I love that. The democratization of it really is for everybody. It benefits everybody, from the individual contributors all the way to the top. It is not just for executive leadership anymore. Also, it is not punitive. People still have this huge impression of, “I have to have a coach because there's something wrong with me.” Coaching is developmental. It's about maximizing who you are and your ability to lead.
I agree. Having it available and accessible is great. I'm glad that The Academies for Coaching is there to help organizations develop that coaching culture and that cadre of coaches in a powerful way. That's awesome. It has been awesome to have you. We finish every episode with the same question because we want practical tips for our audience to be intentional. What is something that our audience can do intentionally to be a better leader?
It’s so simple. It's not anything new that you've heard. It is to check in with your people. The brain needs novelty to remember something new. The novel twist on checking in with people is to be curious about the person you're checking in with about why they feel right. What is the chemistry and the circuitry happening in their brain at this moment that is putting them in the state of mind that they're in in the way they're making meaning and the way that they're reacting or responding? Have that check-in. You don't have to tell them, “I'm checking in on your neurochemistry today.”
That might push them away.
That'd be a little Red Zone. I would not go there. Check in with people, like, “What's on your mind? How are you doing? What do you need to be your best today?” That's the check-in that will help align that so you get the fullest prefrontal cortex, the biggest heart, and the best results.
Readers, that’s a great tip. I hope that you enact that and make an impact on those that you’re reaching out to. Susan, it has been great to have you. I hope that if you have an organization that is looking to develop a group of coaches, reach out to her for The Academies for Coaching. Thank you so much. Thank you for making an impact on leaders around the world. I look forward to continuing the conversation down the road.
You as well. Thank you.
