Learning, engagement and networking are Linda Aspey’s passions, and she has found the perfect way to use them. The chair of BACP’s new Coaching division tells Liz Hall why she is ‘absolutely thrilled’ about her new role
Linda Aspey, chair of the British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy (BACP)’s new Coaching division, is passionate about networking.
“I’m quite brave in asking favours, which I always return, and I always know someone who knows someone. I’m also passionate about learning, especially peer learning, and getting people engaged.”
Months into her new role – the division was formally approved last November – Aspey is already putting these passions to good use: “Getting members talking and supporting each other is a priority.”
Local networking groups are in Scotland, York, London and Oxford, with others planned. BACP has been surprised by the level of interest.
Members were also engaged in shaping BACP Coaching’s first conference last month (17 June) – Aspey recruited a panel of members to select the workshops.
The division currently has 350 members and aims to have 500 by the end of the year. Some 3,000 of its members expressed an interest in coaching in a poll. “There is lots of excitement about the division and BACP staff are saying: ‘I heard you were in the building and I would have loved to have talked to you’.”
Aspey is “absolutely thrilled” about her new role. “I’ve been picked to do my dream job. I am passionate about BACP, have huge respect for the association and I am really privileged to have this role.”
As the largest organisation for counselling and psychotherapy in Europe, with more than 35,000 members, unsurprisingly it has set ways of doing things. These “can be a blessing and a hindrance”, she says.
Coming from a family of entrepreneurs and in business for 21 years, Aspey says it can be frustrating not to “just go off and make things happen. You have to build on what’s there already”.
However, within these constraints “there is support for me to do new things such as the networking, which hasn’t been done for a long time. And I was given free rein over the coaching conference,” she says.
The upside is the massive pool of resources and knowledge.
“While things don’t happen quickly, we are good at developing robust processes and members value that. Ours can be scrutinised and they stand up well.”
BACP has six other divisions, including BACP Healthcare and BACP Workplace. There are well-established organisation-wide frameworks for ethical standards, for example. Its professional conducts process includes a very rigorous five stages for complaints and training for adjudicators.
“In a way, we are trying to create a mirror of what’s elsewhere in BACP and making sure it reflects well in coaching. We very quickly realised we needed coaching experts who are trained in adjudications.”
Aspey also counts the division’s LinkedIn group as an early success. It is the first division to set up such a group – impressive in a community historically concerned about privacy and self-disclosure: “We are quite shy about being online.”
A driving need
Aspey didn’t enjoy school – her interest in her own and others’ learning came later in life. Between 1975 and 1984, she worked in nursing. As a staff nurse, she became disenchanted with how junior nurses were being developed.
“I sent one nurse off to do kids’ temperatures and blood pressure and she was gone for ages. I went to check and she was only on her third patient, doing it all with a book.”
So Aspey developed a training programme for new nurses which involved them being shown something twice, supervised doing it, then doing it alone: “What drove me was the need to help. I could see the terror on the girl’s face.”
Aspey left nursing in search of further opportunities to grow. Between 1984 and 1991, jobs included a medical sales representative, a territory manager for a medical products firm and a recruitment consultant.
Then in 1991 she was made redundant. She seized the opportunity for more learning, studying Client Centred Counselling and Personal Development at City University, and establishing Aspey Associates.
A thinking environment
She provided career management and outplacement services, before expanding into employee counselling and trauma management, soft skills training, management development and, over time, talent management, HR consultancy, executive coaching and training managers in coaching.
Other studies have included a diploma in Counselling (Psychodynamic) at Regent’s College (1994) and an MA in Strategic HR Management at Kingston Business School (2005). She did the latter to get more organisational context:
“I wanted to think about helping organisations think more strategically. In consultancy, it’s all too easy to get sucked into what the client wants rather than adding value and having at least a decent, robust conversation.”
She has also trained over the past three years in Time to Think with Nancy Kline and is licensed as a Time to Think Coach, Facilitator and Consultant.
“I have a bulging toolkit. Then I came across this, which took me right back to the client being in the centre of the room. My mind was whizzing in solution-focused mode. Even if I wasn’t volunteering stuff, I wasn’t attending as much as I could have done [to the client].
“It was a massive challenge and very tough at first. I was sitting on my hands. As a psychodynamic counsellor, I was looking for themes and patterns. With the Thinking Environment, you can’t do that because you can’t listen if you’re looking for links. But once I realised it was the client’s thinking that matters, it was liberating. You have to trust the intelligence of the client – that they will get there.”
For clients “addicted to getting answers and challenges” she sometimes splits the two to three hour session, starting with the Thinking Environment – “meeting people where they are”- then in the second half, sharing models she thinks could be useful.
Coaching vs therapy
The topic of how to manage the relationship with the client, including how much to self-disclose, is a hot one for BACP Coaching. So what are the main differences between coaching and therapy/counselling?
This is the $64bn question, says Aspey: “We have moved on in the debate compared to five to ten years ago. We have been learning a lot from each other. But the downside is that it has made the area greyer and bigger. It’s less possible to give definite answers because they are not so polarised.
“In the past, when coaches started delving into people’s pasts or personal lives, sometimes alarms would go off, but that is changing. Now people willingly talk about the influences in their lives. It might be because society is changing – celebrities seem very keen to share their thoughts,” she suggests.
“Poor practice is poor practice, whatever title you give yourself. If you’re working outside your expertise, if you’re not sensitive to your competence and the context the client brings, if you’ve changed the contract and expectations, it’s a sign you’ve lost the boundary.
“Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. Whatever we start working on, we need to be able to deliver and make a commitment of doing no harm.”
Key to this is supervision.
“There was and still is some resistance from the coaching community as people feel they are being policed. But I’ve always seen it as supporting the coach and client, not as a threat.”
Aspey developed the Association for Coaching (AC)’s coach supervision directory from scratch around three years ago.
A founding member of the AC Accreditation team, she represented the AC on the Ethics Strand of the Coaching Supervision Steering Group (2009).
For Aspey, who has 6,000 one-to-one coaching hours under her belt, the relationship is the key to good coaching and to setting up a successful coaching practice. She puts her own survival in business, in part, down to this focus on networking. “If you genuinely want to help and you have a mutually supportive network, you can survive what is going on.”
These days her training is “for my joy”. She still loves learning. Favourite books include Mary Beth O’Neill’s Executive Coaching with Backbone and Heart; Time to Think by Nancy Kline; William Bridges’ Managing Transitions; A General Theory of Love by Lewis, Amini and Lannon, and Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
She has respect for people like David Clutterbuck: “He makes lots of what we do very credible and spreads the word.” And also for early attachment theory pioneers Melanie Klein, John Bowlby and Freud.
The future
Other BACP Coaching plans include compiling a coach training directory, supporting members undertaking coaching research within the counselling and therapy arena and exploring partnership opportunities.
What does she want for coaching in the future? For it to be kept simple, she says.
“It’s about having a purposeful, meaningful conversation. If we get too tied up in too many models and ROI discussions, we can forget it’s the relationship that matters.”
And what about herself?
She says she would love a smallholding – with some goats and chickens.
www.bacpcoaching.co.uk
Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 4