The Power Of Evidence-Based Research And Positive Psychology In Training With Sally Heady

What initially interested me about your background is your pivot from a legal career into what you do now. What made you want to transition and how has your path evolved since then? 

I trained to be a lawyer, and I completed my training contract in a City firm in London, and honestly it was a chaotic start to my legal career. The firm I joined had financial struggles due to the 2008 recession so within the first six months of my training contract, my firm was taken over by a much bigger firm with a more corporate culture.

That first year as a trainee solicitor was not the one I had expected and was quite a baptism of fire. I witnessed a massive redundancy process, longstanding relationships and alliances falling apart, plenty of in-fighting and power struggles,as well as plenty of unprofessional behaviour from Partners. Whilst it was a very stressful and unsettling time, it was also fascinating to see how some people dealt with challenges constructively and how others seemed to completely fall apart under the pressure of it all.

I then moved to Manchester when I qualified and I worked in house for a few years. But I think I had the niggle very early on that probably a legal career wasn't going to be for me long term. I'd always been interested in people and how the mind works. My chaotic experiences as a trainee and working in a demanding legal job taught me that things like talent, intelligence, job titles and experience didn’t make people immune from limiting emotional patterns like low self-esteem, anxiety, imposter-syndrome and being reactive under stress. It had made me curious about the difference between people who could navigate challenges with their sanity and sense of humour and those who couldn’t. 

I thought I would explore therapy and coaching and I spoke to different people about what the course to take and I went on to retrain, transitioning into a part time solicitor and part time therapist and coach. 

When I had my son in 2016, that's when I took the plunge and left my legal career completely. In those early days I started as a generalist and helped people with a wide range of issues.

Over the last decade or so, I’ve honed my 1-1 practice to focus on helping people who struggle with low-confidence, imposter syndrome, anxiety and burn-out. My clients come to me because they know these emotional patterns are holding them back from reaching their potential. By ‘potential’ that might mean potential happiness and fulfilment or it might mean having them perform at their highest level.

I also work with people to help them gain clarity on what would bring them a truly fulfilling career, whether that’s by doing their current work differently or whether they want to pivot to something new, just as I did.

In the last 5 years my work has naturally evolved to delivering training within organisations on topics like imposter syndrome, stress management, boundary setting and confident communication. I think there’s a greater recognition of the value of coaching in the workplace these and the need to work in a deeper way to create powerful change and to bridge the gap between learning concepts and implementing behavioural change.

To stick with your legal background a bit more, you’ve mentioned you noticed similar things, but I wonder, did you take any sort of best practices from your legal career that transitioned helpfully into what you do now? 

Did you see any particular modalities or things that you think helps you be a better coach at this point?

I think there are overlaps, like an ability to think about complex problems in a structured, logical way. I think my legal training also helped me hone my ability to zoom into the detail and then pull back and consider the big picture of what my client is working towards.

Also, a legal career is client focused and you take client care seriously. That very much translated across into the care that I offer my clients. Although it's a different kind of relationship, professionalism is still at the heart of it. I can see this reassures prospective clients, because they know they are in a safe pair of hands. Unfortunately that’s not something you can take for granted in the world of therapists and coaches. 

Being a good lawyer also depends on your ability to build relationships, strengthen relationships and to read people. As a lawyer you help your client resolve their legal situation, but you have to be able to gauge “what does this person really want?”  on a practical level and not just accept their surface level response.

My ability to read people, build rapport quickly and get to the heart of their issue quickly has hugely helped me in my coaching and training and I know my legal career also helped me hone that skill.

Obviously there are challenges when trying to show the value of what you do with certain organisations.  Have there been any specific challenges, whether it's budget or proving value? How do you approach that?

In all honesty, the training that I do has come about from people either being my client and seeing the value in the work that I've done with them, or seeing the blogs on my website and suggesting  my work to their organisation.  I’ve also gained training work through speaking at events, when an attendee liked my message and saw the benefit of what that could bring to their teams or colleagues.

My former career as a solicitor has helped open doors for me as organisations know I have lived experience of some of the kinds of challenges they face. The fact that I’ve been coaching individuals for 11 years now on the kinds of issues that cause people to go off sick or stop them from progressing also shows that I am very familiar with the common stories and blocks that hold people back and how to overcome them.

I'm not really in the business of convincing anyone that the training I offer has value. The organisations I work with know that it’s going to help people work at their best if they are more confident, more relaxed, more engaged, less reactive and communicate more effectively. They tend to be organisations that are more open to having training that addresses emotional patterns, difficult conversations and go a step beyond intellectual concepts.

Former clients who have experienced the benefits of my work help spread the word of what I do, either by recommending me to their contacts or by giving positive testimonials and case studies. I’ve received really positive reviews from training clients both in terms of the ‘usefulness’ of what I teach but also that I’m considered a warm, open trainer who keeps things engaging. As that feedback has grown, more opportunities have come my way, so it’s been a natural evolution rather than me cold-pitching to companies.

Could you give some examples of when you’ve worked with a client or delivered a workshop and seen specific results? What does that change look like?

Last year I spent 3 months delivering a life coaching course to a group of service users at The George House Trust as part of their ‘Skilling Up’ project. This was delivered through a combination of group and 1-1 sessions. The outcomes of those sessions were designed to increase confidence and help service users find employment or volunteering opportunities. It was rewarding to see from the written feedback how delegates scored themselves as feeling more confident at the end of each session and it was a wonderful opportunity to see their confidence grow over that longer timeframe, which I don’t always get to see. 

Several delegates received excellent job offers during our time together which was a great, specific measure of the success of the programme. It was really joyful to see how the delegates’ self-belief grew as they began to realise what was possible with the right support.

The time I spent at George House Trust was the most rewarding training experience I’ve encountered in my career so far. The people I worked with were wonderful and the longer timeframes involved meant I could see the internal shifts they gained and how they translated that into positive action.

I've also delivered  many workshops on how to tame the inner critic to different organisations. The feedback from those sessions is always heartening and delegates always comment on how relieved they feel that they’re not alone and that they have a practical way of feeling better. Practical and useful are words that repeatedly come up in feedback because I want to help delegates go beyond understanding their problem to feeling a positive difference for themselves.

What are your thoughts on the importance of evidence-based research in training, and how do you blend that into what you do?

In any training room I walk into, there will be a certain number of sceptics. I’m happy for the sceptics to be there because they often ask the best questions. I don’t try to convince a sceptic and I always invite delegates to take what’s useful and to leave what isn’t. Equally, making reference to research with a strong evidence base tends to help sceptics relax and have more buy-in to the session. 

We live in a world of misinformation, which is made worse by social media. Any one can make a claim on social media and, worryingly, it can just be accepted as truth. I weave in research studies and name my sources in my materials because it’s important for the credibility of coaching, psychology and personal development. Having a legal background has probably also had a role in guiding me towards evidence based practices.

I often offer nuggets from different fields. Positive psychology is a great resource, I find, because they have robust, strong studies that underpin the interventions they recommend as well.

For example, one of my favourite tools for increasing optimism is an exercise called the three gifts exercise (or “3 Good Things”) that has a strong evidence base from Martin Seligman’s research. It was shown that for people who stuck to that exercise consistently for six to eight weeks, the positive impact on mood could be as powerful as Prozac. So I think to have research examples that give something tangible to hook onto gives people enough buy-in to take it seriously and give it a chance.

How can organisations measure the impact of this kind of work? Are there particular metrics you recommend?

It depends what they want to change. I think a good measure, if it was training on mental health, anxiety or low mood would be the GAD-7 or PHQ-9 questionnaire. It gives a useful barometer of where people are. It gives a clear sense of scoring and tracking progress over time.

The challenge I have is that I'm often tailoring what I do to different organisations that have very different needs. Sometimes I work for law firms and they'll have different metrics to students at university.

Broadly speaking, to have a score, a scale of one to ten or measuring satisfaction with whatever outcomes you're focused on is important. It’s also important to have a way of scoring outcomes within a month or six weeks after the training. But it has to go deeper than asking the question of whether learners feel differently. The questions should be about how confident they feel in their ability to weave whatever we’ve learned into their working day. I want to focus on how delegates can create their own change in their life and work in the long term, not just to feel better or more in control during a training.

Something that I always do with whoever I'm working with is that I recommend they each delegate take away one thing that they're going to commit to. This idea of the one marginal gain, the one small step that if they commit to that they could see exponential change over time.

And I have various ways that I weave in accountability for taking action at the end of sessions. So it's always interesting to check in a month or a couple of months afterwards, and to ask and to see how people are getting on with that. Results are often mixed and a lot of people forget.

And therein lies the challenge of any training, particularly when people are busy and stressed. How can you help them remember even just that one thing that can so easily go to one side?

What are your thoughts around AI in training? Do you use it?

I'm not going to pretend that I know much. I don't use it a great deal. I think it can be really useful for taking existing ideas and if you want to shift the tone or simplify. AI can be a real time saver and to make suggestions suggestions if you’re stuck on something.

I enjoy the creative process that goes into collaborating with an organisation and to think about what a specific group of people need and to work it out myself. I do have fears around AI taking over the reins too much. Particularly because of what I've learned about the brain, if you don't use it, you lose it. So I'm wary of outsourcing what I consider to be my creativity too much.

That said, if I was doing more of this work, then I can see it would be a valuable tool for saving time and energy and creating materials. If you were looking to scale and streamline your processes, I could see how AI would be useful.

Do you find one aspect of your work more rewarding than another?

I enjoy variety. Having one-to-one work and also working with a group gives me that. I think as time goes on that I’m going to be working with groups and with companies more frequently, although I always intend to keep a certain number of one-to-one clients. I like the intimacy and depth you can enjoy in a one-to-one coaching relationship, which can be profound.

But what I'm increasingly seeing the value of, particularly in a world which in my opinion is feeling more disconnected, is the power of the group. I'm enjoying more and more seeing that yes, I'm there to facilitate and teach new ideas, but I find it powerful and moving to see how people in a group can surprise you and surprise each other with the support and incredible wisdom that they give each other.

In terms of positive change in a bigger picture sense, that's where I see my work going. My focus is about empowering other people to take what I've taught and to run with it. It's always heartening for me to see that after a session, you'll see maybe two or three discussing how they'll keep each other accountable. That's brilliant. They've got their own sense of community and that relationship is going to be long lasting. And if you can have that accountability with a friend or colleague at work, then that's going to be powerful for your lasting change

Are there any other trends you’re seeing that interest you?

I’m increasingly seeing a recognition of the importance around psychological safety, inclusion, and the importance of relationships and how traditional models of leadership are being transformed. I’m interested in that because law is a very traditional top down model, and for many law firms that's still the case. They are still locked into that kind of model of leadership.

More and more organisations are seeing the value and the merit of a greater sense of working together and all the voices being heard and people feeling safe and able to raise their concerns and address them.

People working on their own stuff is important, but also zooming out and thinking about the culture of an organisation, how workplaces can create thriving, productive teams in ways that may have historically been termed the fluffy stuff. I'm here to argue in favour of the fluffy stuff because it makes a difference.

How do you see yourself evolving as a trainer?

There's so many modalities and schools of thought I’d love to explore. At the moment I’m in a phase of life with two young children and there is a lot to juggle so some of those training courses will need to wait. I love learning so it’s hard to rein myself in.

I continue to be interested in the field of positive psychology and the research they're doing there, particularly around leadership as well. I'm also interested in body-based practices. It will be fascinating to see how open organisations would be in terms of bringing that in, but in my experience there's a lot more wisdom to be unlocked  beyond the purely intellectual.

So much of our thinking is impacted by a nervous system, and I know there's just so much more to be discovered in that world. As a recovering overthinker. I think it's always invaluable to have tools to get you out of your head and to be more present, particularly in a world that is so distracted.