Katie: 00:01 Hi everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Hustlenomics podcast. I’m your host Katie, and today I am so excited to be talking with Sophie Coulthard. She is a work and life harmony strategist and business consultant. So Sophie, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Sophie: 00:16 Thank you for having me, Katie.
Katie: 00:18 So do you mind diving in a little bit further and telling us more about who you are and what you do?
Sophie: 00:22 Sure, yes. Where to start. So obviously I am from England, I live in London and I work with a variety of different people. So I work with companies and I’ll go in and work with them on their employees, making sure that they have got a good kind of, I like to call it work life harmony rather than work life balance. We can always come back to that if you like. And I also work with individuals as well and I use an assessment which is called the judgment index. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a personality test or anything like that.
Katie: 00:59 Yeah, a little while ago I have.
Sophie: 01:01 Yeah. Mean, most people have, even if they’ve not come across things like Myers Briggs, somebody will have done, I’m sure something on Facebook which says pick this color and it will determine your personality or something like that. It’s probably the best way to describe it, but actually the judgment index doesn’t measure personality. It looks at a variety of things, but predominantly can focus on your wellbeing, stress, how you operate both in the working world and in your own world as well. So it looks at things that can get in the way of people operating at their best, let’s say. So I met with individuals and I work with companies as well on that sort of looking at what their barriers to success are and also highlighting strengths cause a lot of people don’t realize their strengths until they’re on paper in front of them.
Katie: 01:47 Yes, 100%. So I absolutely want to talk about the assessment, but before we get to that, I’d love if we could just go back a little bit and can you tell me more about your background and how you got to this place, if it working with this assessment?
Sophie: 01:59 Yeah, sure. So I was actually working in a bar. I was managing a bar. My Dad discovered the assessment. He was asked to look at it for coaching. He, he’s a coach by his background and he took it and he was amazed and he asked me to take it and it floored me really because it just kind of highlighted that I had all this capacity to do something good, I guess is the simple way of saying it. But there seemed to be a lot that was getting in my way. And at the time I wasn’t in a great relationship. I didn’t really know what I was doing with my life. And it just kind of nailed me, really picked out things that made me say, wow, I need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and I need to do something about this. So my dad started working with it. He brought it over from the u s actually our, our head offices in Tennessee. Then I got involved quite a few years later. So I actually went off and did other jobs. In the meantime, I worked in sales I’ve in marketing and lots of different corporate jobs. And then eventually about three years ago I realized it was time to leave the corporate world out and enjoy my dad and start working with him, which is what I did. And so I’ve been there ever since.
Katie: 03:13 That’s amazing. So did you ever see yourself going into business for yourself and being a business owner?
Sophie: 03:18 As soon as I took the assessment, I knew that I wanted to work with it in some way, but I was really aware that I had pretty much no life experience whatsoever. And I thought, how could I go into companies and talk to them about this sort of powerful scientifically proven assessment when I’ve come from working in a bar. So I just decided to go and get work experience. It was always my attention to come back to it, but I just felt like I needed to have these kind of tools in my pocket really before.
Katie: 03:48 Yeah, absolutely. So you took the assessment yourself, so what was your experience with it for the first time?
Sophie: 03:53 It was kind of a bit of a lightning bolt really. The assessment looks at how you are in work, the way you operate externally, so how you are around people, how you are at getting on and doing the job, how quick you’re problem solving is, what your intuition is like. And then it looks at your self side, which I think is a big difference between a lot of other assessments out there. So it will look at things like your self regard, self criticism, self-confidence, direction. So it will really highlight all of those things. And like plenty of other people at the time. I was in my early twenties didn’t really have any direction, didn’t have great self esteem, you know, didn’t look after myself too well and it just brought it all to the surface and I just couldn’t believe that something that took me 15 minutes gave me not just this information but this information on paper that meant that I could do something about it and be in a different place kind of six months later or a year later. And that’s how I saw that it could help other people as well.
Katie: 04:57 Yep. Wonderful. And so I’ve taken a couple different personality tests and so you get the results and you’re like, oh, that’s interesting. You know, I didn’t maybe realize that about myself, but what about this specific assessment made you kind of go into action? Yeah,
Sophie: 05:09 I think you’re exactly right. When you find out something about your personality, sometimes you’re like, oh, okay, that’s cool. I’m really conscious, Katie. I don’t want to knock personality assessments at all because I am addicted to taking them myself. And they’re always good fun and always a, I like a car journey with my boyfriend and we’ll take these sorts of things and say, Oh, you’re like this. And I’m like, but like are can sometimes be a bit. So what? But also I think if you think about two people that you find pretty incredible, so that could be, I don’t know, someone you work with or your friends or when you think about Ti people like that, they probably don’t have the same personalities. Probably what’s made them incredible in your eyes or successful is the way that they’ve made judgments about things, the way that they value things, their kind of perspective on things. And that tends to be the differentiator that makes somebody successful is that judgment the way they apply their judgment rather than their personality.
Katie: 06:09 Right. Absolutely. So when you took the assessment, what did you learn about yourself that surprised you the most?
Sophie: 06:15 Oh Gosh. I guess how bad things were we to look? I mean we took and when you see all sorts, I, you know, when, when you’re south side stress in your own world that you think you’ve got locked away in a box somewhere, gets put on a piece of paper in front of you, it can be a bit of a shock. So it really highlighted that. But what it also highlighted for me was I had this kind of like work side that was really, really strong. It was showing that I was really intuitive around people that I was really good at kind of thinking outside the box that I could operate at a really quick level. So you know, I can problem solve fast. And I thought, wow, I’m really not applying any of this right now to what I’m doing. Perhaps it’s time to get a new job. And I think that happens to lot of people that, that take it. But I think the biggest thing that happens and with myself and with other people is, wow, I’ve got some great stuff here and I’ve got some stuff that I can work on and then I’ll probably get even more out of life and out of my work as a result.
Katie: 07:18 [Inaudible] It’s just right in front of your face and you can’t avoid it. Right?
Sophie: 07:21 Yeah. I mean some people are really good at being self-reflective and you know, thinking and really looking in the mirror and some of us need a bit more, need a bit of a nudge.
Katie: 07:31 Yes. I think I’m probably one of those people who went to work with your dad. He works with this as well, is that correct?
Sophie: 07:38 He, yeah, he works with all sorts of different groups. He works a lot with the military. He worked so it was so typical in the kind of male, female split. He works with the military, he works with sports people, some corporate businesses, and I work a lot with more women led businesses and women individuals as well and small groups. So I recently worked with a small group of female entrepreneurs and they all knew each other. They were almost part of a mastermind group, which was great because it gave me some research as well. And I always like being able to put things together and, and get some research out of it.
Katie: 08:13 Yes. Speaking of research, I’m so curious about the science and the research behind how this was created. Could you talk about that a little bit?
Sophie: 08:20 Yes, so without the whole history lesson and the creators originally was a man called Dr. Robert Hartman. He died in the 70s but it was actually Nobel prize nominated for this work, which people are always really shocked by because they always think, oh, I’ve never heard of this. You know, you tend to have heard of Myers Briggs or Thomas International and all these kinds of things, and they say, oh, I’ve never heard of this. But yeah, it was, it’s all scientifically backed. It’s got huge mathematical algorithm behind it and there’s a lot of numbers when you train to, to use the results. They look a little bit like an x ray with lots of numbers and things across so you can train to, to use it yourself with people or you take it and find a consultant who work through the results with you.
Katie: 09:02 Oh, that’s so interesting. So you mentioned earlier work, life balance and work life harmony. So I’ve talked to a lot of different people and everybody has a different opinion on work life balance and what that means and how they make it work. So what is your perspective on that and kind of the difference between balance and harmony?
Sophie: 09:21 It’s a hot topic, kissing it. I think everybody’s talking about work life balance at the moment. I think whether they’re individuals working for themselves or you’re in a more corporate, you know, standard structure. I think the problem with the word balance is that it implies they have to be equal. And I think, I don’t know about you, I think of weighing scales. Whereas for me the word harmony, and I’ve heard other words since I sort of coined this word, this phrase, work life harmony. Well, I d I didn’t invent it obviously, but it’s a phrase that I use. And since then I’ve heard other ones that I like as well, like work life rhythm, work-life flow, and I think it’s thinking about it like that because we’ll all go through phases and if, if anybody kind of works in a more creative industry as well or you work for yourself, you’ll have busy periods where work is the priority and it does take, you know, the lion’s share of, of your attention. And then you might have quieter periods where actually you can put a bit more into your, your life, your personal side of things. So I think I prefer the word harmony because it implies that you can find your own harmony and that that can change depending on what’s going on in your life.
Katie: 10:31 Yeah, I liked that. I liked the idea of it evolving and always changing because anybody who stays the same or if it stays the same, it’s never going to work and it’s not probably healthy for you or your business. So I liked that a lot. I like that perspective. And it kind of in my mind is associated a lot with burnout, which goodness gracious is everybody’s fear. And it happens probably a couple of times in everybody’s life if you’re a business owner. So can you talk a little bit about burnout and how this assessment or how work life harmony helps you avoid that?
Sophie: 11:02 Yeah, and I think one thing to be clear about is that you don’t have to take the assessment to sit back and think about some of these things for yourself and kind of do a bit of self assessing. But one of the things that the assessment really measures is somebodies energy level and it can lead to burnout when it’s very poor. So when I, when I talk about energy, it’s kind of how full that battery is. It’s about whether you are coming to work or whatever you do for work full of beans or whether you are actually, that water level is sort of starting to rise and you’re starting to, you know, drown I guess in it. And it’s very closely interlinked with stress. And normally when people are overwhelmed, when you have a lot going on, that’s when your energy level starts to kind of Sapp really.
Sophie: 11:46 And it can be due to the environment around you. It can be precious that you put onto yourself. And it’s something that we really have found in the last 15 when we look at results over the last 15 years, this score, this energy score is getting worse. So it’s, it’s declined. People don’t have as much energy as they did 15 years ago and we could have a whole conversation about whether things like our mobile phones are to blame and the Internet. And I definitely think being so connected all the time, the fact that we don’t switch off for emails, you know, we could reply to email it to in the morning if we wanted. Ti doesn’t help. But I think it’s also that we are, we’re having to do more with work as well. So where is becoming everything? You’re always on the go, you’re always thinking about it and so therefore you’re not taking a lot of time out for yourself quite a lot.
Sophie: 12:34 And I don’t know if a lot of your listeners work for themselves. And when you do and you’re thinking about all different aspects of your business, which I do a lot, you know, marketing, finances, Admin, you know, it can all start to pile up and start to drain your energy. So the main problem that we find when people have stress or when they lack energy is that it can affect a few different areas. And the things that we find it affects really his problem solving ability. So actually your ability to kind of get things done slows right down. And think about that when you’re under pressure or when you’re under stress, when you lack energy, you do tend to work slower, you know, and you just think, oh, I would have done this in 10 minutes if I was feeling fresh and, and up for it.
Sophie: 13:19 It can affect your intuition, which is your ability to kind of sense things. And that can be really important if you work with other people. You know, if you think about when you’re stressed, you tend to get very tunnel vision. When you lack energy, when you’re heading towards burnout, that tunnel vision kicks in and you won’t notice things as easily as you do and it can also affect the ability to think, kind of strategically think outside the box, which very much leads to creative thinking and people being more innovative. So when you’ve got lots of energy you will naturally be more innovative. You have that energy reserve to think about things and be creative and work fast. So it’s really key. So it’s not good obviously that people’s energy levels are kind of coming down and it’s definitely something that people can have a think about and think, right, actually do I start the day thinking I’ve got to get up for this or am I coming into work full of beans and kind of weighing up really.
Katie: 14:15 Okay. That’s really interesting. Do you have any exercises or questions that people can ask themselves to learn how to be self reflective?
Sophie: 14:22 Yeah, I think there’s lots of good coaching exercises that people can do. I mean you can just very easily Google a we live life coaching exercise and which is why you sort of draw a wheel on a piece of paper and then you take it into segments and you then put different areas of your life on into those segments and think about what would a 10 out of 10 be and where am I now. So for example, you could take, I don’t know, you could take finances and you could then have a think about finances. You could take things like creativity if that’s a big part of what you do and assess where you are now and kind of try and sort of pick out where the gaps are. That’s a good exercise to do. One thing that I always talk about that really tends to put it into perspective for people, which takes a bit of imagination if that’s okay Katie, cause I’m going to describe something that is a lot easier to draw.
Sophie: 15:14 I quite often talk to people about imagining a wedding cake. So a two tier wedding cake. You expect the bottom tier to be nice and fat too or you know, well structured so that it can support the top tier that sat on it. So if you imagine that the bottom tier is your self side, so how you reflect internally, how you look after yourself, what energy you put back into yourself. And then imagine the top tier is everything that’s external. So other people work, how you go about your kind of day to day externally. Now really what we won is that bottom tier to be a good solid tier to support the top because really your wellbeing, how you look after yourself is the foundation from which you operate from. So if you’ve got a nice solid foundation of self, if you are pretty self confident, if you are quite self assured, you’re not too tough on yourself, you look after yourself, you probably have quite a good solid foundation.
Sophie: 16:13 That bottom tier will be nice and healthy and then actually you get more out of the top tier as a result. But what we find and, and it’s a really tough statistic, but actually 93% of people are the other way round. So don’t tip the wedding cake over. Just shrink that bottom tier so that it’s actually thinner than the top tier. And so then if you think about that and what effect that might have on a wedding cake, then that wedding cakes can be quite wobbly and potentially could tip over. So I hope that brings it to life for you on why a lot of us, you know, we’re, we’re ambitious, we’re thinking how can I improve in work and how can I do this, that and achieve this, that and the other for 93% of people that efforts should be going into themselves rather than into the kind of external factors.
Katie: 17:05 Absolutely. So when you talk about like improving that bottom tier, it’s like self care, things like that, right? Am I on the right track?
Sophie: 17:12 Yeah. One of the things we find really tough when we talk about self regard where we work with athletes, they’ll turn around and they’ll have quite a poor score for self regard and they’ll say, what are you talking about? You know, I’m in the gym every day and I eat this and eat that. We try to look at it a bit more holistically at what you do. That is for you that self care, you know rather than the, obviously gym, food et Cetera can make a big difference. But what are you actually doing for yourself? I think with a lot of people in creative industries, the problem is that their, what was once a hobby and a passion and an interest then becomes the job. So then what? What is the passion and interest that’s outside of the job and it’s about thinking of things like that. What can you do that will fulfill you outside of work?
Katie: 17:56 Okay, that’s super interesting. So just to have like a real life example, if you don’t mind sharing, is there something that you do personally to kind of add into that self layer?
Sophie: 18:05 I can give you something that I did last weekend. So I’m about to move house and we’re having a huge clear out of last furniture. You know, where you think, right? Let’s get rid of everything. And I’ve got a couple of chairs which I bought from a charity shop. I think they used to belong in a school staff room. They’re big, sturdy wooden chairs with big cushions on them. I’m in a really horrible fabric. And for about two years I’ve been saying that I would get the chairs recovered, but it was so expensive and I thought, Oh, I only paid 20 pounds for these chairs. I’m not going to pay hundreds of pounds to get them recovered. Finally decided to do it myself. And I bought the fabric and I spent time on youtube looking at how to do it. And I, I’ve literally sat down for the past two weeks, probably for an hour or a couple of hours in an evening and just sat to myself just happily making something, you know, bringing a new lease of life into a piece of furniture.
Sophie: 19:03 And it sounds really strange, but it’s finding a passion for something that helps you to switch off, relax. But what you’ll find is that your mind will naturally start to wander and you may end up thinking about work and that’s okay because your brain’s just going to operate at a more relaxed pace and there’s tons of science behind this that you actually, by taking time to do restorative activities, you naturally come up with good ideas for what an example would be if you’re trying to think of the name of an actor in a film and you can’t think of it, you can’t think of it, and then two hours later it pops into your head when you’re doing something completely different. It’s nice. Your brain is the way that your brain works. So I find, yeah, even doing things like that, sewing these chairs has given me a lot of pleasure. It could be anything. It could be the gym, it could be doing something like walking a dog or a bit. It’s finding something that just takes you away really gives you a different enjoyment.
Katie: 19:57 That makes a lot of sense. And tell me if I’m on the right track. But it’s kind of giving you like a sense of accomplishment that’s outside of work that’s not associated with making money or climbing the ladder or anything like that. It’s just accomplishing something that you wanted to do for yourself
Sophie: 20:11 Because we tend to do a lot for everyone else and actually how much do we do for art? Just for ourselves.
Katie: 20:17 Yeah. Not as much as we should. Yeah. And so I saw that you offer a mini course. Do you mind talking about that a little bit? And is that something that people can do alongside the assessment or before the assessment? Can you dive into [inaudible]?
Sophie: 20:31 Yeah, so I’m conscious that not everybody has a budget to take these sorts of assessments, but they want to get a better understanding. And actually what I was talking about earlier, the wheel of life, and I built a mini core switches a wheel that I actually take you through the different spokes of the wheel, the different segments. And I’m using things that are measured in the judgment index. So using things that we measure. But asking people to self reflect on these different things. So I’ll describe what to do, how to fill it in. And it just gives people some different areas of their life to have a think about, kind of write themselves and then have a look if there’s anything particular that they want to address. So it’s completely free. Anybody can can do that and hopefully just give them some way to start to think about.
Katie: 21:21 And I saw one of the parts of the wheel is goals and that’s one thing that I would kind of love to discuss cause goal setting. It’s different for everybody but some people seem to be a lot more successful and I’m sure that it’s woven in to, you know, the assessment in what comes out of it. But have you found a strategic way of setting goals that works for people that you would mind sharing with the listeners?
Sophie: 21:45 Yes. And actually the, it’s funny that you said that because we did a piece of research on about 1200 people that were classed as high performers in their field and they were all come from all sorts of different sectors and backgrounds. Some were salespeople, some were kind of, you know, like insurance salespeople, all sorts. And what we found is that these high performers were really good at setting goals. They had a real kind of positive outlook on goals, but what a lot of them had a, can’t remember the exact percentage of my head for somebody that works with lots of numbers, I can’t remember numbers very well, is that many of them had this leaning where they would take on too much. They almost set themselves super goals. It was kind of built into them where they would almost be going for these great big goals all the time.
Sophie: 22:31 And then the pattern that fell out of that is that they were also tended to be very kind of independent thinkers. And that quite often means that they didn’t like to ask for help. So when you have people who set themselves really high goals don’t like to ask for help can often be quite self critical as well, so that will, that will have really high standards. Then we found that it would hit that energy that I talked about earlier and could quite often lead people to burn out. If you think about it, lazy people don’t get burnt out. The Lazy Person In your office is having a great time of life, so it was really interesting that that little pattern we see time and time again of people who have, who do set themselves high goals that do have high standards that do really want to achieve and then that can quite often lead to burn out.
Sophie: 23:18 So it’s something to watch out for. As far as goal setting, one of the things that we recommend is something called a grow model. I don’t know if I have that anywhere. I’ll be able to send, the reason why it’s called the grow model is because you have the goal. You then have the reality of where you are right now and it’s important to weigh that up. You know, if you say you want to, I don’t know, run a marathon, but right now your legs in crutches, then is that realistic? Is that a realistic goal? I’m say it’s good to look at your reality and then it’s good to assess all of your different options. So literally throw a million options onto the piece of paper of how you can achieve that goal. Absolutely. Anything that you can think of. And then what you need to do is have a look at actually what you’re going to do.
Sophie: 24:03 So whittle it down to the things that are going to get you there. And probably the most important thing is to look at the well, which is what will you do but also will power. And I think willpower is everything. If you get to that stage, and if I said to you, okay Katie, are you going to go for this goal now? How much do you want it? And you said to me 60% then your neck, that’s 40% sabotage. So I think if you’re going to set yourself goals, they need to be realistic. You need to have weighed up all your options. You need to work out exactly what you will do. And you also need to assess your willpower as well.
Katie: 24:35 I would love if you could share with the listeners how they can find you and how they can take the assessment or learn more about the assessment and all everything that you’re doing.
Sophie: 24:45 Okay, sure. So best place to find out more about me is Sofi. Cool thought.co. Dot. UK. You can get the mini course on there as well, which get, can really start getting you thinking about things like your energy, self-criticism, et Cetera, and the goal setting. And then I’m also really heavy on Instagram. I know you are as well, Katie. I love Instagram, so you can find me on there too.
