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COACHING FOR PEAK PERFORMANCE

Podcast Interview by Robert Holmes with Ian Snape

Male Voice: This is the Coach Mentor Podcast proudly brought to you by Frazer Holmes and

Associates making the most of your greatest asset. This podcast covers a wide range of

topics related to the coaching industry. Interviews with industry leaders, coaching

experts and exploring areas of expertise closely related to the coaching industry. Here's

your host Robert Holmes.

RH: Hi and welcome to the coach mentor podcast. In today's episode, we'd be looking at

high-performance coaching with Dr. Ian Snape.

Ian is a high performance coach with NLP training and a passion for neuroscience. His

specialty is designing experiences and learning opportunities so that people can quickly

deploy new improved skills, unconsciously.

By background, Ian is a geochemist and principal research scientist for the Australian

Antarctic Division. He leads and coordinates multiple multi-disciplinary teams of

researchers from the CSRIO and universities in Australia, Canada and the U.S. Ian has

written about a hundred peer-reviewed journal articles and a similar number of

environmental consultancy reports, ministerial briefings and conference abstracts. He

also co-edited the book Bioremediation of Petroleum Hydrocarbons in Cold Regions, a

subject we're not going to be addressing in this interview by the way.

Ian holds a Bachelor of Science in Earth Science, a PhD in Antarctic Geochemistry and a

graduate certificate in New Code NLP from Inspiritive.

Behind all of this science expertise Ian has developed a keen interest in neurological

processes that underpin high performance. Becoming an NLP trainer, trained by Dr.

John Grinder, the co-founder of NLP. He now spends time doing high performance

coaching across a range of diverse fields including executives, scientists, frontline

services, elite athletes, and people who have suffered head trauma or PTSD.

My interest in interviewing him is our shared passion for the neurology of coaching and

peak performance.

So now for the interview.


Good day, Ian. How are you?

IS: Hi! How are you doing?

RH: Good, thanks. What a fascinating trajectory your life has taken? You look like you've

been in and out of a range of different fields. I wonder if before we get to the core topic

if we can explore your journey a bit.

IS: Sure. Yeah.

RH: Beautiful. You kicked off with sort of the Antarctic leg of the journey in 1998. What

happened before that?

IS: Yeah. Sort of an interesting mix of stuff I guess, sort of shaped where I ended up with

Antarctic and coaching focus. I think at school, it'd be fair to say I bounced around in a

fairly uncontrolled sort of way. Sometimes I'd perform really well, sometimes I’d

perform really badly and I think by today’s standards most people would probably have

given me ADHD and medicated me. I'd either perform really well and be into everything

or drift off and not really have much of a focus. So, yeah, that was sort of school.

I drifted into finance for a year and decided that wasn't for me. Then I ended up working

in a factory and I decided that wasn't for me either. And then, at about 19, I decided

that life wasn't that exciting, putting pencils and leads in a pencil factory and then I

decided to change and do something different so I just made one decision which was to

follow my nose and do things that I was passionate about.

The other decision that related to that was really just if I'm going to do something, let's

just do it at a 100%. Let's just commit, set a goal, follow it through and that really just

led me on for the next 10 years or so. Following, chasing goals, getting into things and

just being excited about the world around me. That led to expeditions to the Arctic and

Antarctic. I setup a geological consultancy and followed my nose into a PhD. I really got

lucky there by being mentored by a first-rate scientist. Just a fantastic guy. Really taught

me how to think at that high level as a scientist so I'm very lucky there.

RH: Just out of interest, who is that?

IS: Simon Harley.

RH: Ok.

IS: He's a geologist, geochemist from Edinburgh University. He's a passionate outdoor guy,

many expeditions to the Antarctic. Just extremely bright. Very, very clear way of


thinking about science and the ability to pass on those skills and really how to structure

your thoughts as a scientist. I got fantastic mentoring from him.

RH: So I'm assuming at the end of your degree then you'd obviously given the subject

material that led fairly naturally to the Antarctic division?

IS: Yeah, I guess it did. I mean, it's a little bit of a topic switch and part of that was I had a

range of things I was interested in at time. Curiously, I guess it's a convergence of a

couple of things back in 1997-98, one was the opportunity to go scuba diving under ice

in Antarctica. I was pretty excited by the prospect of doing that. And the other was just

sort of looking around the Antarctic program and realizing that there's a fantastic

research niche there that nobody else had sort of capitalized on around contaminants

and pollution and finding applied solutions to environmental problems. So a

combination of my passion for scuba diving at that time and an opportunity to just grow

a whole new field of research was just very fortunate, I think, came together.

RH: Just to diverge and dock down that path for a bit. You know, most of us think of the

Antarctic as a pristine wilderness, photographing penguins and so forth. But the area

that you've got into that hadn't been tapped into was sort of dealing with

petrochemicals and so forth down there. And now we see obviously Russia getting

excited up in the arctic circle about pulling oil and gas out of there. So bioremediation

has to do with mopping up after things have gone wrong?

IS: Yeah, that's it exactly. Finding low-cost, low-tech solutions to pollution. How can you

rehabilitate a site, remediate a site once you’ve had an accident or some sort of

contamination problem. The trick obviously down there is, or up in the arctic for that

matter, is a combination of socio-political problems in a remote areas, sometimes

cultural issues, there’s always financial problems and then you've got cold and extreme

weather, a whole range of other technological challenges as well. It's a great space to

work with. Lots of interesting challenges in there.

RH: Yeah. So your mentor had an interest in the outdoors. You've mentioned scuba diving

there. We share a passion for extreme sports. I'm into skydiving and high-speed

motorbike racing and so forth. You've obviously got into an area of scuba diving that's

quite dangerous and quite different to what most people would experience. Other

sports? Other interests?

IS: Yeah. I kind of split my attention or switch my attention a lot between the science of

sports and coaching over the years. I've always come back to rock climbing, ski

mountaineering, scuba diving and martial arts. So mixing in amongst all of those things.


Sometimes I might have a break for a few months but I usually seem to find my way

back to those particular sports.

RH: Okay. You've mentioned coaching there so obviously not just the application of those

sports for your own life but helping other people achieve in those sports?

IS: Yeah, absolutely. I'm still pretty active in all of the things that I coach. Particularly in the

full-contact martial arts, that kind of area, I do a lot more coaching now than perhaps

the practice. I guess there’s this very simple model of learning which is you see one, you

do one and then you teach one and it's only really when you start teaching it or

coaching it you go, "Hang on a minute. Maybe I don't understand as much of this as I

thought I did." So, I'd always encourage people to get out and give it a go and have

some coaching or do some teaching and you really understand then what you don't

know.

RH: I agree. Practitioning. You get to learn twice.

IS: Absolutely.

RH: So what was the first toe in the water when it came to coaching.

IS: Good question. I think that the coaching begun a long time ago probably tutoring

science students. I think that the process that I naturally landed at was less around the

traditional broadcasting information at somebody, hoping they sucked it up, and more

around asking questions and delivering some sort of experience so that they could

discover for themselves what the answers might be. Really generating that sense of

curiosity. And then the same sort of things in martial arts, trying to find ways of getting

different people to excel or get some sort of high performance.

RH: And so where did that lead? You're obviously into peak-performance coaching now,

helping people. So what's your basic coaching philosophy?

IS: The basic philosophy is that I approach everybody as a potential elite performer. So

really, I look at what is it that they can do well already. What can I leverage off. I'm not

really focused on their problems. I don't spend too much time thinking about their

problems. Quite quickly I ask questions to enable them to identify what outcome they

want and then really my job as coach is to help them, through experience or design or

whatever it might be, work out how they can get there. That's probably the first part of

my approach.


I think the second thing that I do that might be a little bit different to a lot of coaches or

a lot of coaching modalities is that I'm very careful to not put people in a pigeon hole or

category. I don't do behaviour profiling or personality profiling or you know you’re a…

[insert whatever label you like]. I don't really pay too much attention to that sort of

stuff. I actually don't pay too much attention to people's own notions of who they are

either. ‘Cause quite often there's all sorts of stuff around, you know, their current

identity. I kind of really focus on who they want to be rather than who they might think

they are at the moment. Lots and lots of questioning around at, you know, what do you

want and who do you want to be.

Then the specifics of how I work, apart from some of the areas that I do have particular

content expertise, I generally focus on content-free coaching and particularly around

anything to do with personal change work. So this is really about enabling clients to sort

of find their own solutions. I guess the presupposition in there is that they have the

solutions. They just might not know how to find them or how to structure them, or how

to structure their thoughts so their physiology to achieve high performance.

Probably it'd be those three things: approaching everybody as an elite performer from

the outset, not doing anything around labeling them or giving the some sort of sticking

them in a pigeonhole, and then really using processes to enable them to help

themselves and discover high performance for themselves. So that'd be the three main

sort of processes there.

RH: So our connection originally came through Chris Collingwood who I interviewed on

episode 4 of the podcast. Inspiritive NLP, that came into the journey along the road?

IS: Yeah, it did. My journey to NLP was a little bit circuitous I think, a little bit strange.

Quite awhile ago I began leading teams and I had a fairly difficult team to manage at one

point. I've had an internal conflict between a couple of people in the team. I found that

when I was around I could mediate between them and the team would work fairly

harmoniously. As soon as I went away, the wheels have fall off the trolley and things

wouldn't work so well and I realized that this is the problem. I didn't know what I was

doing but I needed some help so I got an Executive Coach. She helped me develop my

leadership skills and a whole range of things again. Another fantastic mentor for me.

I got her in to do some team building and some stuff. On the first of those team building

experiences, one of my staff members asked her what was it that I did? So she asked

me the question," What is it that you do?" I said, "Well I got no idea." It's all largely

unconscious for me. I just do stuff. I had no idea really what I was doing. I was leading


effectively, I was mediating, and soon a whole bunch of things but I didn't know what I

did. So that got me starting to think about well how do I unpack what it is that I do well

so I can coach other people because I don't know. I don't really have a clue. It's largely

unconscious for me.

This executive coach suggested I got to look at NLP which is around its heart has this

notion of modeling. Modeling what people do so that you can you know assimilate new

skills and pass them on. That was the suggestion. I didn't really follow it up for another

year or so and then I was on another leadership course. I was just observing the

facilitator and he did some fantastic work and I asked him afterwards what was all that

because it worked really well. I just seeing the response in the audience. He said, "Oh.

That was all NLP." So this thing NLP had come back at me now, a couple of times, and so

I followed up and that led me into the Grad Cert. with the Inspiritive and some of their

associated trainers.

It felt very natural to me just the focus on excellence and this notion of underlying

processes behind what you do. I just loved it. Straight away it made so much sense. So

much stuff that I'd been doing but really had no idea what I was doing. I was just doing

it. Then I was able to unpack the process really quickly and cleanly and pass them on in

a whole range of different applications.

RH: I'd love to turn to some of the applications and dig into a few stories and some

examples. Just before we do though, I know you've got a keen interest in neuroscience

and the neurology of the why things work. So NLP is not the only five iron in your bag.

There are lots of other tools that you use. Can you walk us through what your basic

approach to neurology is?

IS: Yeah. I must admit I find this quite a difficult field to make sense of. There's lots of great

descriptions out there of the brain, of neurology generally, the way people do things. A

lot of it's really descriptive. There's lots of descriptions and images of the brain and

some sort of chain of thought that leads them into, "Well this bit of the brain lights up

so there must be some relationship, cause and effect between this bit of the brain

lighting up and this behaviour."

When I break it down and I start looking at processes and thinking about high

performance, there's so little in there that I can use in an applied sense. That's part of

my conundrum at the moment is there's a lot of really good work out there. A lot of

stuff that I can start to pick bits and pieces out of. There's also a lot of content models.

What I mean about content models are people describing and stuff in coming up with a

model that's not really a process as such. It's really a description of something that they


believe to be happening. And again this link between the behaviour and the bit of the

brain lighting up is often quite tenuous.

The areas that I'm getting a lot of inspiration for, I guess, the fusion between

neuroscience and the NLP and the practical application is around sort of experiences of

brain games that develop neuroplasticity.

RH: So before we go much further why don't we get a working definition of neuroplasticity?

IS: There's lots to it at the level of neurons and exactly how things work or mold themselves

in the brain. As a concept, I think it's remarkable. The bit that's remarkable is that for so

long the experts have been describing how you’ve got this brain that kind of gets locked

in. Now things are changeable. We all know that kids learn really quickly. They talk

about their brains being plastic and then they used to talk how once you've passed

childhood, whatever definition of that was chosen, then that's it, that's your lot. You

know, and then there's this bit of the brain that does this bit, and there's a bit there that

does that bit. If you got a problem over here, well that means you'll never going to be

able to do the following.

What they used to do through that was they trance people. They’d stick somebody into

a trance which would effectively have them believe that. They go through their whole

lives believing, "Well, I've got this and that's too bad."

Now what they found is that there's all sorts of people with all sorts of parts of their

brain not there, or missing, or you know with a problem, with an injury, but they're still

functional, they can still overcome. The brain's adaptive and it can choose different

pathways and develop stuff. So what they're finding is even old people 80+ still have

neuroplastic response. They're able to exercise the plasticity in the brain to be able to

do new things and they can still learn. You can still have new behaviour. Now the old

adage “you can't teach an old dog new tricks” is just nonsense.

RH: It's just nonsense.

IS: I mean, working definition of neuroplasticity is “you've got choice”. You've got choice all

the way through your life. It just needs targeted intervention and work out the best way

to do it.

RH: Beautiful. And take responsibility for your choice. Sorry for the reversion. You were

talking about brain games before.


IS: In the new code of NLP developed by John Grinder, there's an emphasis on this thing

called state. It's this whole combination of your neurology of thoughts, your physiology,

how your own body is kind of behaving, breathing that sort of stuff. On the underlying

biochemistry how that all relates. What he’s done is he’s been developing this things

called high performance games which have a whole range of principles in behind them.

But when you look now at what's coming out from neuroscience, you see that there's a

lot of experiential or brain training games that have some of the same sort of principles.

Using those, the work of Barbara Arrowsmith, The Woman Who Changed Her Brain, she

describes in there how she developed learning techniques for herself to get over the

sort of neurological impairment that she was born with. When you look at that sort of

approach, that's where I think we've got the most gains to be made into the coaching

arena straight away. So you're starting to think about reprogramming, unconscious

responses, developing neuroplasticity and directly linking it and directly targeting the

experiences that we can create into high performance in certain areas.

That's kind of where my focus is at the moment. I mean I’ve got a broad eclectic mix of

interests right across the field.

RH: Yeah, of course. There's book I just recently read by Dr. Stuart Brown on play and the

terrible importance of play to modes of learning. His thesis being you know people who

have a good, strong solid play history early on learn how to learn much more effectively

than people who grow up in deficient play environments.

I think he's relaying a lot on the work of Jaak Panksepp so the neurology of our learning

system sits on top of the play systems. It strikes me that John Grinder's work on building

games to create peak performance is just right in that pocket. Have you come across

Stuart Brown's work?

IS: No, I haven't. Certainly I endorse that approach to play and discovery using play and

experience as the foundations, I guess, for the high performance and for discovering

new ways of doing things.

So for example you might take, let's say, high performance in a business context, you

might take the training or the learning experience right out of that context into

something completely different. You can train the process outside of the context that

you want to apply it in. It can be just fun, it can be generative, and then you take that

high performance state and send it back into the original context and suddenly you get

emergent new behaviours that lead to creative solutions to what might have been

problems previously. It's very much the sort of thing that we like to do.


RH: Getting them to toy with it. Alright. So, let's talk about how you've applied some of the

work that you've done. I guess the one I'd like to kick off with would be head trauma

and PTSD. Walk us through what coaching looks like in that environment.

IS: I guess with the PTSD for example. I often go down one of two pathways initially and it

really depends on the client. I'll either go straight into some coping skills if they're

severely traumatized. The sort of thing with people might be largely housebound,

having extremely strong physiological response. I might sort of intervene in their state

and give some skills and drills straight away to just enable them to cope. I might do that

just for a short while before starting to move them towards then this other area which is

into the outcomes. It depends. I might go outcomes first or coping skills first. It just

depends. Then I usually work hand in hand and switch between the two. Helping them

achieve goals whatever that might be.

I think for most of the sort of coaching that I do there’s often very similar processes. You

mentioned earlier about this sort of broad range.

Let's take an example of one of the PTSD things. Let's break into the client. Let's say the

client's somebody in a Tactical Response Group. Front line specialist in riots, that kind of

stuff. Let's just make up a caricature. The performance issue that they might have

identified for themselves might be PTSD. Severely traumatized, might be because

they've been in a critical incident where either they were threatened, they were injured

or they've seen death, injury, mayhem, bloodshed. Whatever it was that happened for

them. The performance now might be that they could be housebound or hypervigilant

or just extremely anxious. All sorts of things.

Let's just park that for a minute and take another example. Let's go business. Think of a

business executive maybe, major company. Let's say that their performance issue might

be flushing, getting hot, looking nervous. Physiology changes – breathing stops, get

anxious in a meeting perhaps a board meeting or something like that. They might get

challenged in the meeting. They might find they’ve got concerns, or the meeting might

end in conflict for example. That might be an example of some of the coaching of mine.

Let's take a third example of another person. Let's say an elite athlete. I do a lot of

taekwondo coaching, something like that. Full contact martial arts. Something that head

kicks, it’s fairly out there. They might have a performance issue. Let's just take

something perhaps like turning away at a critical moment. Something simple in a

particular behaviour. They might transfer away backwards and get scored off.


So we've got three different clients: an athlete, a business exec, Tactical Response

Group – riot control sort of person. Three different performance issues: turning away,

flushing facial thing in a business meeting, and PTSD.

My approach then might be, okay, let's be respectful of all of these behaviours. Make a

presupposition that they're there for something. Each of those behaviours is attempting

to do something for the client that's of positive benefit.

Let's take the athlete. They're behaviour might be that they're turning away because

they don't want to get kicked in the head. Fairly straightforward. It's a response that

they've identified so their positive intention is to not get kicked in the head. To retain

their head in one piece might be their outcome if you like.

Say, the business exec. They might not want conflict. They might think that conflict in

the boardroom, have a belief that conflict in the boardroom, is a bad thing and that they

might look bad. Their positive intention for the physiology that they've got is in some

way a response to wanting to avoid conflict, not be threatening and not wanting to

exacerbate a potential conflict situation. They might be adopting some sort of behaviour

that for them might seem like a way of meeting that positive intention.

Let's go to the Tactical Response Group person. Been exposed to carnage, bloodshed,

the positive intention might be to not do it again. Or it might be that they perceive that

there's a risk. Or that they don't want to be exposed to that kind of scene again. It might

be as simple as that.

So we've identified then what positive intentions are for all if these different

behaviours. The process then would be: let them identify their behaviour, let them

identify their positive intention.

Then I would be switching to their outcome. What outcome then would they like?

We go to the athlete. They might want to win and score points. The positive intentions

for their behaviour is self-preservation by not getting their head kicked off. The state

that we need to build then has to at least meet that positive intention. It has to keep

them safe and allow them to score points. Then we’ll start to design a state or a

particular form of play that meets the positive intention for the bit that's not working

and allows them to have their high performance.

Same thing for the business executive. Fairly straightforward stuff. We might say, okay,

well we know what the positive intention is here. Recognizing that it's about not having

conflict or maintaining peace in a positive outcome sense, we might change their


physiology. We might change their breathing. We might show them how to change their

body positioning around the table so that they can influence the meeting but not

exacerbate conflict. So, just some subtle interventions there which would still meet the

positive intention for the flushing. Then when you work through all the stuff at an

unconscious level, particularly the changes in breathing in physiology, you find that the

flushing just stops anyway. Another example.

Then getting back to where we started which is this idea of PTSD. For some people

where the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is actually not that post. It's still current like

where you might want to have something to go back into the original situation. You

really need to spend a lot of time understanding that positive intention. Working out if

in fact they can go back in to such a situation and change protocols, behave differently

and meet that positive intention for safety. And if they can't then you probably looking

at a different sort of decision. Maybe a different career. Or if they can, they go okay. If

they know unconsciously – this is not a rational process, you can't just tell them –

they’ve got to come to the conclusion unconsciously that they're going to be safe. If

they do, generally it’s very quick and very easy to break this synesthesia that's often

underpins this PTSD sort of response. Example might be that they get flashback images

of horrible scene of carnage and they have physiological response to that image. So

does the synesthesia of an image kinesthetic response. That's quite easy to break

providing you've met the positive intention that’s behind it all otherwise you do them

incredible disturbance. As you break the synesthesia, they go back in and they're placing

themselves in harm's way.

You can sort of see how just working with this idea of positive intentions and designing a

state that meets positive intentions, checking in that it does, you're training and working

very much with the unconscious. Very respectfully with whatever behaviour they start

with.

So rather than saying, “Oh. Look your performance is crap. You've got a problem. You

need to just perform differently.” Take a very different approach that say, “Okay. You're

doing something for a good reason in there. Let's respect that, work with it and let's

meet those intentions and find a better way of doing it unless you have what you want

as well.”

That in a nutshell is probably the kind of philosophy or the approach that I might take.

RH: It reminds me very much of my business partner, Jaemin, who talks about how state is

king. We are often pushing people toward behaviour change or in organizations they're

looking for behaviour change, but behaviour is driven out of who that person is and


what they want, and that is driven by what state they're in. He is very much about

helping people into different states. I guess the one example there with the sports guy,

as he prepares for his taekwondo match, you've trained him to adopt a different mental

state, a different mental frame of inference. You've taught him how to come in to the

match within your state. How do you turn this conscious process of developing that new

state into something that's unconscious that just fires?

IS: All of the interventions that I would design are designed to come out from the

unconscious. I don't use a cognitive rationale process to do it. That unconscious

programming is at the heart of high performance. If you have to think to respond or if

you have to structure words or whatever it might be, it's too slow.

RH: How does one work to getting states to collapse? How does one work to cause those

things to become triggered?

IS: What I do is I'll design an experience for them that they get some sort of experience and

then they generalize it. There’s a time in the past where they had a mild challenging

argument, for example. Then we learn a skill and then we will get to practice it. They

might practice it four or five times. Then I might go back to the original context that was

an issue to them and I'll say, “When you came in two weeks ago you said this. Just go

back there now and tell me what happens.” And they go, “Oh. It's all different.”

RH: Beautiful.

IS: What I've done is I've taken them out of context, developed a high performance state,

and used some new skills, new drills. When they come back in they go, "Oh! Things are

different now." Then it surrounds some fine-tuning and bootstrapping and it depends

exactly what their issue is how I design unconscious uptake or learning. So it really

depends.

For collapsing what I call, I guess, collapsing different states into whatever you want to

call it a better state or just a more dynamic state.

Let's say I’ve got an athlete fighting internationally or competing internationally against

another player. They’ve all got slightly different styles. Let's pick half a dozen countries.

You may have a Spanish style, and American style, and an Armenian style. Whatever.

What I might get him to do for example is watch some video of each country or each

performer in their division fighting. But rather than just watch it, I'll get them to be that

opponent. I’ll get to adopt and mirror every behaviour and fight as if they are an

Egyptian. So there might be some skills and drills where they're just copying the play of


the other person. Then we might do that so they'll build a state that would be like the

Egyptian. Then we might do another one and, another one, and another one.

Once they've done all these, what they're doing is their adapting, developing their

flexible dynamic range. Unconsciously they're learning the patterns and behaviours and

processes of their opponents. Not on the conscious level because there's far too much

information. Like there's so much more information than a list of dot points about what

the other player does which would be the conscious rationale analytical way. So just

chuck it straight into the unconscious. Be that person. Be the Egyptian.

Then when they are up there competing against the Egyptian and that first twitch comes

from the opponent from somewhere, the unconscious widens to the neuronal system.

They respond because they know what's coming. Not in a, "Oh, I know what's coming

now. I’d better do this." But their body's trained to respond because they’ve been that

body. They know where the response is coming from. Then out of their unconscious

pops a defense that they've designed through the sorts of exercises and simulations that

I might have had them working with. That's one example.

RH: Beautiful! Beautiful! It brings to mind another question. What would the average length

of time be that you’ve spend with someone processing them through that?

IS: Good question. How big’s a bit of string?

I've been to international competitions and coaching in the back wings. Some coaching

interventions are five minutes. As a technical coach might come and say, “This player's

nervous. Go sort them out,” and I might have five minutes before their competition

kicks off and I've got five minutes to make an intervention that meets their positive

intentions and redesigns their behaviour. Or in the case I've just described, I worked

with one athlete for three years. Over time practicing drills. Working really, really hard. I

should say that she was working really, really hard. It can take years in elite level,

Olympic World Championship level. Or I might only have five minutes to work with

somebody. Or somebody might have some traumatic response and I've only got a few

hours with them. I'll work with what's available and take it from there.

RH: That's good. Staying flexible and obviously if they want to win they want to keep you on

then they going to get the coaching. If they’ve got the outcomes they want and the job’s

done, that's it. I guess one of the key measures, we're starting to work with the military

with PTSD and having conversations with them because psychological interventions are

only sort of one third effective. So they' got a bunch of people for whom the current

tools and techniques aren't working and they're starting to explore coaching. For them


the issue is they're fixed when they're fixed. When they are no longer experiencing

trauma then it's worked. So that might be three weeks, it might be three months, it

might be a year. But when they're done they're done. That's a really flexible approach

and I like it. Because very often you get signed up for a 6-week or an 8-week or a 10-

week program and that just may not be…

IS: Yeah. Absolutely.

One of the things I'm very careful to do is to identify outcomes and expectations right

from the start.

I have an unusual business model and that I offered money-back guarantee. If we don't

get an agreed outcome, they don't have to pay.

If right from the outset they don't really know what their outcome is, then we agree to

engage with that. That's okay I can work with that uncertainty. As long as we're tracking

and have some sort of evidential measures of success.

What I particularly find deeply unrewarding is just having a chat fest each week, where

somebody might have some problem. They might even been paid for it by some

insurance company but that, for me, I just find that very unrewarding.

I need to know what success going to look like here and how we both going to know

that we've got it. It's really the striving as quickly as practical to get there and get those

success measures so the example that you described is absolutely spot on. For some

people it might be three weeks.

A significant breakthrough in their PTSD in three weeks right in synesthesia that they are

able to go to the shops and have a conversation with their partner about what's going

on. Great we've got an outcome. We might work for a few more weeks to get them re-

oriented into some sort of work or return to work. Then in a couple of months they're

back at work and everything's fine.

Other people, maybe it'll take them a year or two to get back on their feet. It depends

how much has gone on. If they've been off work for five years with head injury or ten

years with head injury then it might take a few months of brain training, reprogram,

working out what they want to do for a lot of this people will got this whole identity

around, "Oh, I'm into medical definition." You got to reprogram all that and allow them

to discover, "Well, who do you want to be? I know you've been that now for ten years

but who do you want to be for the next ten years." Building all that in with all the other


stuff can take, yeah, like you say, certainly not something you can usually do in six

weeks flat.

RH: Right. Beautiful. Well we talked just before the interview about an upcoming graduate

diploma in neuro-coaching. A fusion of the best new code NLP and some of the

neuroscience we've been talking about. Where can I go listen as to go for more

information?

IS: That's a good question. I've got a very cunning marketing strategy at the moment. I've

got no website. I've got no marketing and I'm really hard to get hold off. It seems to be

good because I've got quite a lot of work at the moment. I'm a bit too scared to put it up

but in all seriousness I hope to have a website up in the next month or two. By the time

this goes to air you've given me a bit of catalyst to put my website up. That would be

thecoachingspace.com.au. Over the next couple of months I hope to have some

information about that course up there online.

RH: Ian, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a great conversation. I hope I can

interview you again sometime in the future.

IS: Yeah. Yeah. Happy to chat.

RH: I'm looking forward to you joining us next time when we discuss the topic of making

change possible with Allison Cameron from the leader's retreat. Remember to go to the

podcast page on our website for the shown notes from today and I'll be sure and put

links to the organizations, businesses, books and research that Ian mentioned in this

program. Thanks for joining us and we look forward to you joining us next time.

Male Voice: You’ve been listening to the coach mentor podcast. Find us on the website at

www.frazerholmes.com/podcast. Join us next time for another exciting installment of

the coach mentor podcast.

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Transcript COACHING FOR PEAK PERFORMANCE … · Coach Mentor Podcast Transcript – Episode 15: Ian Snape – Coaching for Peak Performance Page 3 of 15 thinking about science and