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Hello everyone and welcome to the My Local Marketer podcast. I'm Maria and today I'm speaking with Julie Williams, a coach for leaders and business owners and founder of Coaching Reading. Julie, hello and welcome to the podcast. are you? Yes, really well. Thank you. And thank you for inviting me to your abode today, shall we say? I am loving the background. This is so colorful.

My good, how are you?

speaker-1 (00:23.182)
Thank you. Those are my colours. They always kind of make me feel really energised.

I've just given a very poor introduction for you there, but for our listeners, could you please give a better overview for what you do?

I guess my official title is executive coach. I'm not overly keen on that because I think it doesn't really describe what I do, which tends to be leadership, business and team coaching. I also help clients with culture change in their organizations. I've been doing this for about 10 years. So I retrained at Henley Business School about 10 years ago, set up my coaching business. And in the last year,

I have celebrated my 10 year anniversary. held a big party in Reading with all my coaching clients, which I really enjoyed. It's been great to kind of look back on the last 10 years and what I've achieved and what my clients have achieved. And I've also launched a podcast. So that's the Lighting Fires podcast where I interview my past clients to talk about their coaching experience, what they brought to the coaching, what were their topics, what were the challenges they were facing and

what happened in the coaching or outside of the coaching to help them create change.

speaker-0 (01:41.518)
There were so many things to go into there. But first of all, let's go back to 10 years ago when you started, you were in marketing before, which by itself is fascinating for me. So how did you change from marketing to then wanting to be an executive coach?

I still feel like I carry some of the marketing into the work that I do and I quite often collaborate with organizations to help them develop brands alongside branding agencies. I collaborate with them, but also I kind of now can help with the culture side of things too, which I think are two sides of the same coin. You've got to have the brands and you've got to have the internal culture. They have to match up for the customer experience to be authentic and effective.

I had been in the corporate world for a really long time and had very senior roles. I had traveled a lot for work. I had had amazing opportunities in the marketing world and had really loved it. But I felt like what was really important to me was people, working with people, their potential. I used to really enjoy mentoring people, leading teams, creating teams, creating change within the organizations that I worked in.

And I started just to feel like I wanted more of that in my life. I didn't realise how much more I wanted. I thought, oh, I'll just start out with a certificate in coaching at Henley Business School. And then that turned into a diploma. And then I did the masters. And now actually Henley is supporting my podcast. So I have a really nice relationship with them still.

So yeah, so I feel like there's still a kind of golden thread of marketing and comms in the work that I do because I leaders and aspiring leaders create authentic, guess, own kind of brand in a way of leadership, something that's very real and exciting.

speaker-0 (03:41.132)
think that's a perfect example of what we should all do really because throughout your life or career you find things you should really delve into those areas. So the fact that you've realised, I'm really into the mentoring and helping people part and now you've gone into that, I definitely think that's the right way to do it. Going into audiences, as you said, you do business owners, you do teams as well. How did you land on your audiences? Because

audiences are always a can of worms. It's, I can coach anyone really who has a business, which is such a huge category. So how did you land on exactly which audiences you want to help?

That's a really good question. I was thinking about this recently because when I first started coaching, I thought I would work with women who are returning to work after an maternity leave because I had experienced that very recently myself at the time and I felt it was a kind of gap and I did do some of that work. But then I realized that actually with the qualification I had and my corporate experience, I had so much more that I could offer.

And so I started working with a lot of people who I had interviewed for my master's dissertation. I had interviewed them about team coaching and what makes it effective and how do you create readiness for people to receive team coaching for the investment to be worthwhile. And a lot of the people that I interviewed who had received team coaching from other people,

went on to set up businesses and then they invited me to come and work with them and their teams. So I started doing a lot of work with clients in what's known as the built environment. So transport planners, urban designers, a lot of ecology companies, but also I've always felt very open-minded. So I've worked with a lot of creative agencies because that fits in my marketing background. Other people have approached me from all sorts of different organizations. So I've worked with

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big brands like Scottish and Southern Electric to a small financial recruitment business. I work with the global leader in sound and sound design. So I love the eclectic mix of the work that I do. That's really excites me and keeps me energized because I keep learning about all these different industries and professions. I guess the thing that people have in common, I would say, that

They're usually up to something in a really good way. They want to create change in a really positive way. I guess this comes back to my brand of lighting fires. Like I like to help people light fires in themselves or within their team or their organization, create really positive change.

Looking at an overview of what you do, like I said, you said a wide range of businesses that you work with, then how do you find them to work with? Is it you're putting yourself out there? You've got the connection with any business schools, so they're very natural. What is your marketing?

I would say I've been really lucky that the large majority of my work has come through word of mouth recommendations, probably like 90%. I do get some work through LinkedIn and that's the social media outlet that I focus on because that kind of makes sense for the work that I do. Sometimes it's just friends mentioning me to their friends, clients recommending me to their clients. I'm hoping that the

podcast will enable me to have more, wider impact on starting to do more public speaking, which I'd like to have as more part of my portfolio of work going forward. So yeah, I could probably get better at marketing, but I think if you're really good at what you do and really passionate about it and you love it and you talk about it with passion, then that can excite people and the message can kind of spread.

speaker-0 (07:44.524)
totally agree with everything you've just said. yet those channels that you've identified, also agree that given your audience, they are definitely the best channels. With those wide range of audiences that you mentioned as well, they're up to something, as you said. What are the challenges that you find that they normally face?

I'd say there's a lot of common things. So if we break it down, so one of the main categories of work that I do is one-to-one coaching. People are either in senior roles in big organizations or they might be business owners or leaders in their own organizations. Also within that category, I sometimes get people coming to me looking to change their career or do something new, do something different. I'd say typically people

I'll you say, they're up to something. They have like an idea, they might have a vision of something they want to achieve. They might not quite have the full courage yet to do it. So I think sometimes they're looking for somebody to kind of go on that journey with them, to be a sounding board. Sometimes I don't think they even necessarily realize that they need to build their self-knowledge to understand their strengths, understand their

passions, what's really driving them, their passion, what's going to motivate them to achieve that challenging thing. So I think that's part of the process is building confidence and courage and strength in what they want to do, what they want to go after and why it's exciting for them and why people are going to get behind them. I'd say also some of the topics that come up leading on from that is imposter syndrome is really common.

Other areas, it's often dealing with conflict, dealing with politics within organizations or with stakeholders that they're dealing with. Sometimes it's very tactical, things like that. We might just be set a coaching session and they'll say, well, I need to do either some business planning or some planning to make something happen. I'll just say, we can use this time to do that. We can walk away with a plan. You don't have to set that as your homework. And sometimes that's a really practical, tangible thing that people really...

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want to collaborate and do together. So it's a range of things. Within the teamwork that I do, I think often people come to me and they feel like their team isn't firing on all cylinders, they're not very well coordinated in the work that they're doing. They want people to be more empowered or take more responsibility. But actually with my knowledge and experience of teams, I think actually the problem often is that individuals don't know each other well enough, there's not enough.

trust, they haven't built rapport, so they're not able to have productive conflict which is so important in a team, they might not really have a clear sense of where they're all going together, what they want to achieve together, something that they can only achieve as a team rather than a bunch of individuals. So what people ask me for, they get all those things that they've asked for but they get more, they get this really important

empowered sense of direction and everybody knows each other and trusts each other and can start to have very different conversations.

I love this idea of the journey of discovery because you're absolutely right. think you need to start with yourself first. You need to understand how you operate, what you find difficult, how you can manage that before you can even help anyone else. So this idea of helping yourself and then you can figure out how to deal with conflict, I and stakeholders. When you get into it, there were so many parts in business that you need to navigate and manage. yeah, having someone to help you through that journey is so important.

Do you have a couple of examples for each of those with the business owners and then with the teams?

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Yeah, so I worked with the two business owners who I've worked with them for years actually, and they were struggling with their overheads based on the fact that they had a team working for them. The team, they were great people, but it just wasn't working that well. And the two business owners, they're spending a lot of time coaching and training the members of the team and they were feeling like it just wasn't working.

And just actually in the course of one coaching session, they decided that actually they would let go of the members of their team. And they did it in a kind and grownup way and a supportive way, but it massively cut their overheads overnights by 70%. And that enabled them then to focus on their strengths, which was doing the technical work and they loved doing that and they enjoyed that.

So sometimes I think we assume to grow a business you have to take on more people. There's conventions in business and society and how to grow a business. And I think sometimes it's about challenging those conventions a little bit and having time and space to think about what your strengths are, how you want to play to your strengths and what's right for you. I've also worked with quite a lot of leaders on the topic of imposter syndrome.

So you can actually listen to Lorraine Griffith talk about this Lorraine from Connect Reading on my podcast. So she's one of my past clients and imposter syndrome came up and she talks about this really eloquently in the podcast as do a number of other people because it's a really common thing people feeling that they're maybe not the right person for the job, that they lack the confidence, that they're not going to be able to deliver what's expected of them.

or that they need to be liked by everybody, which just isn't possible. So what we did was actually just work through what were those thoughts that she had in her head that were limiting her, what was holding her back. And sometimes it's simply articulating some of this negative self-talk and saying it out loud or writing it down that you start to realize that actually that's not true. And there's a lot of evidence to say that the opposite is true.

speaker-1 (13:54.336)
you're really capable and you have a whole bunch of examples.

It seems society, you get in a position there for so many years, you just elevate it up. But there are some people in leadership roles that haven't been trained, that maybe aren't the best people to manage a team and be empathetic to other people.

think people come into leadership roles and it's almost like somebody's waved a magic wand and overnight they're expected to know how to lead, but they've never had any training. They haven't necessarily even seen good role models as leaders. And so I think that's how coaching can play a really useful part is provide very personalized leadership, coaching and training at the exact right moment in somebody's career. I've stepped in at points where people have

been newly promoted as leaders or they're aspiring or, you know, they might have been leaders for a while, but they have brand new really big challenge. And I think having somebody to discuss that with, somebody with some leadership experience themselves as well, that I think coaching can also include a bit of mentoring sometimes if that's what you agree at the start of the relationship, because often coaches have a whole wealth of a career behind them. They can...

share some of their stories.

speaker-0 (15:13.518)
Well, that's a really good opportunity then to go into the experience that people have when they come to you. So when they come to you, that's both individuals and groups are different, what is the coaching experience like for people?

So we would start with a chemistry meeting and that I don't charge for that because I think it's really important that both parties figure out if they think they can work together. And the majority of the time we go forward and we do work together but sometimes I might say to somebody, well actually I think you might need some other support and I can signpost people to other things. Through the chemistry meeting we will have developed a set of kind of

maybe up to five or six goals that we're gonna work on through the coaching sessions. We'll do six coaching sessions, usually over kind of five or six month time period. We either meet face to face or online. I've got clients in other countries, Hong Kong for example. So obviously we just do the work online and that works. And usually I would start with a Myers-Briggs personality assessment or a Bellbin team roles assessment to help people get a really big

boost of understanding about their own personality type, but also it's an opportunity to learn about other personality types and how to communicate or work with them more effectively. And then we'll take each of their coaching goals, we'll figure out what great is going to look like so we know when they've achieved them. And I've got a whole like, I feel like Mary Poppins, I've got like this huge toolkit, this metaphorical bag of tricks.

Thanks to my masters and my ongoing training, I have lots and lots of different tools and techniques and I usually would offer people more than one tool or technique to choose from so they feel like they have a choice and they can pick the thing that's gonna work for them. I like to teach the tools and techniques to people as we go so that they're sustainable, they've kind of got them for life basically. And it can be a real range of things. Often I'm a neuro-linguistic program

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practitioners so I can use NLP techniques which often might use visualization or a little bit more creative. Sometimes it's just a back and forth conversation. It depends on the person, what they like and how they like to work. But I think it's really important to keep the lines of communication open. So I like to check that people are getting what they want from the coaching, that we can change tack if we need to. I see it as

journey that we're kind of walking along this road together and so I like to keep in touch with people in between coaching sessions and either offer to hold them to account or give them a bit of boost of motivation to get on with whatever actions they've taken away from the coaching session.

Well that's a good opportunity to mention your podcast, Lighting Fires, because in your podcast, you do interview your clients and you go a little bit into the techniques that you use and what the experience has been like for them. So could you maybe highlight a couple of episodes that you think business owners would benefit from listening to?

really loved the first episode of the first series. So I guess it was a big deal for me, like the first episode going out, but the interviews with Pete Wharton, who runs Wharton Natural Infrastructure Consultancy. It's an ecology consultancy based in the Midlands. And we had done a year's worth of work together, a lot of kind of leadership development. We'd also done a lot of thinking about his team and he actually shares really

personal stories in the interview about things that have been very challenging for him and some of the techniques we used. We used to meet at the Malmaison in Oxford, which you might know as an old prison. And we used to go into the restaurant when it became very quiet, kind of mid-morning. We'd have had a coffee, then emptied out. And so sometimes we would use the space and we did what's called a timeline exercise where we kind of set a goal for, you know, two years from hence, what would you like?

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see in your business what you want to be achieving, what's your vision. And we kind of walked along that physical timeline, like seeing and talking about how he was going to build up to achieving that piece. And after that we finished that exercise. It was really effective actually and there was a picture on the wall that he loves that artist. It was just total coincidence that this artist he loved there was a picture on the wall and it was

really linked to his kind of experience of all the lockdowns and it was quite inspiring for him. So he actually went away and bought the picture and put it in his office. But the funny thing was, that after we finished this timeline walk, we went back into this meeting room that we'd been in, which turns out it was an old prison cell with very thick walls. And we shut the door and we came to the end of our meeting and we were locked deep into this prison cell. So the handle fell off the door.

We had no ability to unlock the door. mean, basically the walls are so thick, nobody would hear you scream. We couldn't go home signal. And just by this amazing stroke of luck, because Pete is a tree surgeon by background, he had something called a leather man, a little kind of toll in his backpack and he was able to unlock the door and get us out of there, thankfully. So yeah, so sometimes funny unexpected things happen.

One of my favorite episodes is the most recent one you've done with Lucy. I don't know if I'm biased because she has a history background as well, but I just found it fascinating. Some of the techniques that you were talking about in that one's what I thought were really interesting. And also social media, which I think is, as we said before, with you doing LinkedIn, it's so fundamental nowadays, but you need to practice. And I think social media is another thing where everyone uses it.

You wouldn't expect to win a 100 meter race against an athlete, a trained athlete, or even get near them. But for some reason we want to go into social media and start doing things straight away. It's like, you know, there are some people that spend hours, days, weeks, years figuring it out. You can't just pop in there and start to get results within a week or two. So that really helped to align me with social media and what I want to do with that in future.

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It's really interesting listening to Lucy talk about that as a social media expert and she is very effective at it. But yeah, the work with Lucy was really interesting because I'm a history graduate, so I have... and also I actually did English and history and I love reading and I love books and she talks about Ophelia and you get into the topics, the tempest, the Shakespeare play.

So we always had really interesting back and forth in our coaching sessions. She was really open to some of the more creative techniques, even though we've only actually met in person once. So she was very open-minded to some of the work that we did even online. And we did something called a constellation, which she discusses in the episode, which is when you need to get a different perspective on the situation, what can be really useful is to clear a table top.

and find some objects that represent people or things in situation. So as a coach, I've actually got my magic box, which is full of like characters, like Lego characters and all sorts of bits and bobs that I can share with clients for them to create these constellations. But the point is, is that sometimes if you can get a kind of helicopter view of a situation, so you can lay this out so you've got

the important people in the situation and you're looking at how they fit with one another, how close are they sitting to each other, what directions are they facing, what else is going on in this situation, who else is involved. So you lay it out as is and you get a really useful perspective, things that you can't necessarily see because you're only just got your own point of view in any scenario. And then you recreate this constellation into a design.

that is how you want it to be. And that then often gives you a sense of, this is what I need to change then. This is who I need to speak to. This is maybe how I need to change my own mindset towards the situation because you just get these incredible learnings and insights.

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Again, as we were saying before, to be a leader is hard work. There's a lot of thought and practice that goes behind the scenes. You don't really think if your manager taking a step back and thinking on their Saturday, you know, arranging objects on a table and thinking how different relationships work and who would work better with who.

It is interesting and I think being a leader can be very lonely. It's lonely at the top. I think as you go up the ranks, your relationships with your colleagues change. You you might have had friendships with people, but then certainly in my experience, I became promoted above people that I was friends with and that meant I had to change my working relationship with people. Also, I think you get less feedback from others as you become more senior.

Sometimes you're operating in your own little bubble. Quite often what business owners or leaders or aspiring leaders really want from me is the time and space to set aside, to ring fence time for them to do the thinking and talk through what's going on for them and their role and what they want to change or what they're struggling with. And I act as a sounding board really, but also

I am empathetic. I've experienced leadership myself, the highs and lows of it, and I think I can relate to what people are experiencing. You know, at my stage in my career and my life, I've had a huge wealth of experience and that helps me gain perspective. So yeah, so I think our leaders do need to make time and space for their own development.

Well, as well as your business, you also created Coaching Reading. Do want to explain what Coaching Reading is and again, why you found it? I think that links nicely and it's just another branch of what you've helped people do.

speaker-1 (25:40.418)
Yes, so about seven years ago, I was on a rainy campsite in Weymouth and I was with a friend and she said to me, what do you want for your business next year, Julie? And I said, well, it's not really for my business, but it's part of my coaching practice. I'd just read about this amazing organization called Coaching York. And in York, there's a group of coaches who come together.

and they built this amazing community for themselves. So the idea was if you could hop on a bike and get into York within like half an hour, you were within the kind of radius of York center and you're a coach, you could become part of this organization and they learn together and they contribute to the community of York by providing coaching to people. And I read about it.

I went and spoke to them. actually happened to go to York soon after and I spoke to one of the founders and I came back really inspired. I was like, right, I want this to happen for Reading because being a coach and working by yourself can be little bit isolating sometimes. I thought I'd love to form a community of coaches, people who are either trained and qualified or passionate about coaching and maybe right at the start of their journey to train and to learn.

And I wanted us to provide pro bono, so free coaching to charity and community leaders in the Reading area. So it's an opportunity, you I've lived in Reading for over 25 years and I love the town and I want to give back. And I know a lot of other coaches feel the same way. So we've been going for six years now. So we do one-to-one coaching programs for charity and community leaders.

We've now provided over 230 hours of these one-to-one coaching sessions. We run maybe around twice a year, we do speed coaching events. So we did one for Black History Month recently where we'll invite people to come to a really lovely venue. We were at Ebon Flow recently. So the venue kind of helps and we have a bunch of coaches turn up and they will run.

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20 minute coaching sessions for people to work on whatever topic is going on for them. And we just get the most fabulous feedback. We typically get on average something like 4.8 out of 5 with the scores that come back because people have such a great experience. We run leadership development programs and we partner with Connect Reading and LVA to find our kind of coaching clients.

As a community, I just, love it. I love the coaches we get together on a monthly basis and we do our ongoing professional development together. We learn new coaching techniques and try them out and practice them on each other. I'm very passionate about it.

speaker-0 (29:03.298)
But that's a really nice example of how people can come together and help the community.

I've never really thought about that. You're right though. Typically we probably would be in competition with each other. But actually what the beauty of it is, is that as we've got to know each other, we've often collaborated on pieces of work. We've then won client work together as well. So, but I see it as a collaboration with the charities we work with. We've helped lots of different charities, everything from Number 5 to Kima Gift Bags, Alana House, Refugee Support Group, Launchpad, Sport in Mind. So,

With some of those organizations, we're starting to develop kind of more medium long-term partnership as well.

I mean, Julie, you make all this sound so easy. 10 years ago, you started your own business. You've got amazing clients. It's all in place. What challenges have you faced along your own business journey? And how have you overcome them or how are you planning to overcome them?

Oh, I face challenges all the time. Yeah, I mean, we all do, don't we? And we all fail at things all the time. We just don't always talk about them. Sometimes my levels of the business that I have, kind of ebb and flow, I might not always be as busy as I'd like to be. It's probably a bit too easy to then do stuff for coaching reading, which is unpaid work. And then I have to tell myself, no Julie, do a bit of business development. Focus on the marketing for your own business. But I find that activity

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creates activity. As soon as you start getting back out there and networking and talking to people, just being curious about what's going on for other people, you find opportunities and that's exciting. I love meeting new people and learning about what they're up to. And I sometimes, if I have gaps, I'll do some pro bono coaching myself. I'll tell you what, the creation of the podcast, I had massive imposter syndrome.

Honestly, I mean, we would talk about this this morning. I'd had the idea and I did a training course in how to do a podcast about three years ago and I was so nervous the first recording that I did that I completely messed it up. I thought it had gone so well that me and Hannah Richards, who's a friend of mine, we were practically high-fiving when I stopped the recording.

After I listened back to it, after seven minutes, I realized that the card and the machine was full and they just hadn't captured probably 40 minutes of conversation and I was mortified and I beat myself up and then I was like, no Julie, just go on YouTube and learn about your equipment. Get really comfortable with the technical side of what you're doing. And that has stood me really good stead because now it doesn't make me feel more confident.

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podcast is really useful for people who are learning to coach because it helps you put yourself in the shoes of the people that you're coaching and what that experience is like for them. So they feel like it's really useful for their students or their alumni to get a bit of insight into the client side of story. So I think I do experience imposter syndrome often. And I also think sometimes you just got to

break down the task into something very small and manageable and just say one step at a time and collaborate with people who will support you or a technical expert.

Well, it just goes to show, I think a couple of things. If you don't ask, you don't get. But also, as we said, we frequently think of the people at the top of their game. The people have been doing something for years and years. You have so much experience and you instantly try and compare yourself to them. We've all started there. We've all forgot to press record at the start of something. We've all had issues with tech at the very start. So you need to just gift yourself for the future. Just do it. Accept there are going to be things at the start and just move on.

And I had a really helpful conversation with one of my peers from my Henley course. His name's Phil Coe and he said to me, Jules, you've got to remember when you were listening to other people's podcasts, their first ever episode was probably pretty crap and it's improved and improved and improved. So by series 10, it's amazing. So just remember that you're going to improve as you go.

helpful. So yes, if you listen to this and something you've been putting off, just get started. Except you may need some tweaks at first, but just think in a year's time, you'll be really thankful to yourself that you did. Do you have a couple of tips for business owners based on your experience who may be struggling with something that you said? Do have any tips for them?

speaker-1 (34:09.101)
I think that conversation we just had is really relatable. I'd also encourage them to think about getting a coach or a mentor. I read a brilliant book years ago called My Personal Boardroom, which I really love. And in this book talks about how as a business owner or somebody in a senior role, you need like a whole bunch of people around you fulfilling different roles, whether that's somebody who you can discuss your ideas with or somebody who...

can introduce you to people in their network or somebody who's really going to challenge your thinking. And that can be a bit difficult, but you need that person. And so it describes these different roles and it encourages you to think about who could be that person for you. And you don't have to formalize it. You might never even tell that person that you think of them as your challenger, or you might have the conversation said, really love you to be part of my business in a way and be on my metaphorical

boardroom or even actually set up an advisory board and formalise it because people love to offer advice and to get involved.

is such good advice. I don't think anyone can do it alone. In fact, you look at the people that have quote unquote made it, they've got people around them. They don't do everything. If anything, they just delegate everything and they're just at the very top.

They flow to their strengths. I work with Ian Guppy from Feel Good Creative who does some of my marketing. I work with Perry Hurley who is my podcast producer and I him as very important members of my team. And if the listeners are interested, I'm starting up a new series of business mastermind groups for bringing business owners together on a regular basis to provide

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kind of sense of community and sounding board, but also to shine a light on each other's businesses and bring knowledge and experience and share ideas. I've run them before, they work brilliantly.

I will be sharing that when you have it formalized so you know dates or anything. Is there anything you want to leave our listeners with today? I mean, there are so many points. Is there something you want to highlight?

I what I always encourage my clients to do is really try and get a sense of what is your purpose. That's a really big question and for some people it's quite untangible. But if it's not about your purpose, it's about what really motivates you. What is the work that you've done over the years that you love doing, that you really enjoy, that you've thrived on and what is it about that that you've loved? Because I think if you can really connect with that,

That is hugely motivating going forward and setting yourself some goals or creating a vision of where you want to go based on those things that you love doing.

Julie, thank you so much for your time today. This has been brilliant and there are so many things in it that I hope people pay attention to and actually go away in action.

speaker-1 (37:07.534)
Thank you, I've really enjoyed it.