Creative on Purpose Live - Robbie Swale

to be on Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. We will get started for real. We're going to— looks like we had a little bit of a snafu with LinkedIn, but we did it, folks. Once again, defying all expectations, we are live. Welcome to Creative on Purpose Live, insightful conversations with inspiring difference makers to help you live your legacy. I'm your host, Scott Perry, Chief Difference Maker at Creative on Purpose. If you're ready to step into possibility and the difference only you can make, visit creativeonpurpose.com. You can go to that little QR code in the corner there. You'll find insight and inspiration for better living while making a bigger difference. And if you sign up for the 3 30-second mindset shifts, you'll get additional goodness delivered to your inbox every week. Let's meet today's guest, Robbie Swale. Welcome to the broadcast. Please tell our viewers who you are, what you're up to these days and where can they go to learn more about you and the difference you're making?

Yeah, Scott, great to be here. And I love that we're live. Like, I just got this little, like, extra butterflies and it's also this, like, extra energy, you know, that there's people here. It's not just us. Such an interesting thing. Yeah. So I work as mostly as what I usually call a leadership coach, but mixed in with that is some podcasting and Recently, my first book came out. You can find me at RobbieSwale.com. That's the best place, but I'm also on all the social medias. I even joined Instagram recently, although I don't really understand how it works because I'm maybe a little bit too old or something. But you can find me in those places. And the book is on Amazon and all kinds of places. And these days when I think about what do I do, there's kind of 3 parts to it, the work that I love to do. There's a leadership part. So I'm interested in the work I do with leaders and entrepreneurs. Often the question they're coming to me, to our work with, is something like, I want to move to a new level of success, but I feel like to get there, I have to change who I am somehow or compromise who I am or play a game I'm not really interested in playing. And so the work that we do is often how do we be successful whilst not only not compromising who we are, but really being who we are and using those strengths. I'm interested in the craft of coaching. That's where my podcast comes in. It's called The Coach's Journey and some of the work that I do there with a community. I think the craft of coaching just has a really important part to play in the challenges, the opportunities the world has. And then the other, the final part is about creativity. And I think we share lots of both the things that we love about that and also the reason we think it's a really important place to do some work. For me, the question that I get into, because it was the question that I wrestled with and and I've seen with lots of other people is why do we sometimes really want to do something and we kind of on one level know what we want to do, but we don't end up doing it. And sometimes months, even years, even more goes past without us doing those things. And that really is the subject, for example, that's the subject of my book and the series that will follow it. And the book's called How to Start When You're Stuck.

Love it. Well, you've touched on a lot of things that I'd love to unpack, but I'm I'm always interested first just in people's origin stories. So my guess is little 9-year-old Robbie did not wake up one day and say, "You know what I want to do? I want to be a leadership coach when I grow up." I'd love to get a little sense of how you arrived at the work that you're doing now.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. I wonder what— I'd have to— now I'm going to ask. I'm going to see my mum this weekend because my wife's going away and we've got a little baby. So my mum is coming in to be reinforcements for me, uh, looking after Leah, who's 16 months old. I can ask my mum that. What did 9-year-old Robbie want to be? Do you remember? Um, no, I didn't. So the origin story in short form is something like this. I probably had 3, maybe 4 goes at a career before I landed on this. And that was quite stressful because that all happened in about 10 years. It's quite a thing to realize for the second or third time that this isn't it. Um, the first one was one of the things I loved when I was not 9, but by the time I was 12, like, and after that was, was acting. So I had a period where I thought maybe I'll be an actor, and I applied to drama schools, and it was like my main thing that I did between the ages of about 11 and 25 that wasn't, that wasn't work, and sometimes was a bit of work. And then for various reasons, that wasn't it. It felt like the fickle nature of it was a bit of a problem for me, and also the fact that it felt like there were bits of my talents that just weren't going to get used by that. Um, and then I kind of pivoted into trying to do that, trying to use what I loved about the arts and some of the other things that wouldn't have been getting used if I was just an actor. And I worked in kind of leadership in the arts in the UK. I managed two small arts venues and then kind of moved sideways a bit. And that was when I'd realized that that wasn't quite for me either. The reason that wasn't for me, if in short, is like I loved what we were making happen. So I loved that the gigs that were happening in these places that I was running were happening. I didn't really enjoy the work that I had to do, I had to do to make them happen. It was quite draining and certainly not, well, it wasn't getting me up in the morning in the way that I wanted. And then I, you know, there's probably a couple of other bits in there that we don't need to go into before that point, but What happened was, as I then, I then basically did a career change. We know what felt really painful at the time, but really was quite a strategic move around how do I have some work which unlike the, unlike that work in the arts, work which the actual work is what I love, not what we make happen through the work. And that was one of the requirements. Ideally, I wanted it to be like, what do I want? How do I get it so that what I'm interested in learning about in my spare time is what is to do with work? And that, after some messy couple of years and some false starts, I found a coaching training that I wanted to do. I wasn't sure that it would lead to work, but I liked the possibility that it might. And I knew that because for the reasons I said a few minutes ago, those coaching skills, supporting other people, I kind of knew they'd be useful whatever I wanted to do. And so that felt like enough to gamble on some money and quite a lot of time and energy. And then it turned out it was a great match for me. And here we are, 7 or so years later.

Awesome. Well, I'm intrigued that you began a career as an actor because as we were getting on the broadcast, I can't remember the full context of where we collided in Alt MBA or Kimbo, but I know that that's where we first met. But I've remembered your name for quite a while now. And I, because it sounds like an actor's name, or maybe even a musician's name. I always thought like, "Hi, I'm Robbie Swale," would be like a great name for a pop act. So that's, that's really fascinating. You and I both share this love for creativity and coaching. One of the things that I'm very fond of doing is hearing how, how other people define these terms. They're terms that I have thought deeply about, my understanding about them. And I'd love to just, you know, coaching is at an interesting point in that, you know, I spend most of my time in social media and not much time on LinkedIn. And you can't swing a stick without hitting 100 coaches, transformation coaches, leadership coaches, business coaches, executive coaches, coaches, coaches. Um, and it's a difficult place, a noisy place to try to stand out and, um, to carve out a niche. So I would love to hear just like, how do you define coaching generally and how do you articulate your particular brand of coaching or way of coaching?

Yeah. Yeah. You know, like I used to worry about that quite a lot, like the particular first part of that. I mean, the second part of it as well, the first part being how do we define coaching? What I've found over the years is that I've worried about that less and just kind of trusted in the moment that I would come up with some way to talk about it to somebody. And I'm, you know, honestly, if I was meeting somebody, you know, as it, as this used to happen at an event somewhere or something like that, I might give a definition of coaching, but I'd be more likely to tell some stories about the clients that I happen to be working with. But for somebody like you who, knows why that's a kind of easier or more effective way to do it, or can imagine that, I think it is worth trying to define it. And there are lots of ways that I've thought about this over the years. Sometimes one of the things I sometimes say to people— I'm working on a leadership program at the moment, and when I'm telling— they get some coaching as part of that leadership program. And one of the ways I kind of explain it to them is that the coach isn't someone who knows anything about their, you know, their their corner of the world, really. I mean, they do a little bit in this case because the coaches have worked on this program before, but mostly they're an expert in helping the person do their most creative and innovative independent thinking about whatever it is, whatever it is they're focused on. That's what I say to those people in that particular place. I think that misses something a little bit because it's not just about thinking. Really, coaching is about in some ways, often the people that especially come to my coaching, they're really good at thinking. And that's not— that's like part of their problem. Certainly that'd be my case. It's like I can think around any problem more than, you know, more than is definitely more than is healthy for me. And so when I'm receiving coaching and I think when coaching is at its best, it's about more than just thinking. We might say, we might say it's about helping people tap into their inner wisdom more, something like that. And there are lots of ways that it does that. And, and yeah, in terms of the coaching that I do, I mean, I kind of did it at the start of this at the start of this, um, this call, like, what the way I tend to talk about it is more like what I'm interested in, um, you know. And the truth is, I kind of— I decided at the start of my coaching that, uh, trying to define a niche for my work was, was procrastination and resistance, and that a much better way to go about it would be to start doing some work and see what happened. And, you know, coaching mostly works, like for all the noise on LinkedIn, coaching mostly works by referral anyway and word of mouth. Like, that's why the great work happens anyway. If anyone wants to find a coach, like, find someone who you know who's had a great experience with a coach and ask them if they'd recommend that coach to you. And that's a much better way to find it than reading people's websites. And so the way I've tended to think about the work that I do is, yeah, like, who have I done great work with already? And that's in a way where those three things emerged. And mostly if people, if people are really serious about working with me, the best way to find that out is always that we do some work together. And we see if we both get, get lit up by that and have a great intuition about it. And that's a lot, that's a lot of better signal that we'll do great work than any way that I could try and define the best people for me to do work with.

Yeah, I love that you pointed to what I think is of is kind of the old way, and maybe even the outmoded way of coaching, which is, you know, learn how to listen, learn how to ask reflective questions. And I think that's an important part still of coaching, of course. But the most effective coaches that I've worked with are the ones— and what I try to do in my coaching is not just to listen deeply and reflect what I'm hearing, but also to I call it empathetic antagonism. How can I, how can I get under their skin just enough for them to see something that they hadn't seen in a way they can't unsee it? And then how do we build those routines or relationships that will help them step into the potential and possibility that, you know, they now imagine for themselves? And so I love that you talked a little bit about, you know, habits and things like that, because I think that's a very important part of effective coaching, at least, you know, in at this moment in 2022. You also mentioned creativity. And so I'd love to just get your take on, you know, when you think about defining creativity, how do you define creativity?

Yeah, I think mostly when I do it, I have a— I talk about it in a way that is probably borrowed from, or I probably first heard Seth Godin use, like, I think, you know, creating something from nothing. Like putting something in, making something be in the world that, that wasn't there before and wouldn't be there unless you did it. That's, that's pretty much the purest form. And I certainly feel like, you know, yeah, writing a book, that's creativity. So is writing a song, but so starting a business. Um, and, and that's, you know, and the other day I was speaking to somebody on a podcast for web designers, and it's like, it's totally obvious that the blank page faced by a web designer at the start of a project is exactly the same blank page faced by a By an author or a blogger at, you know, at the start of their book or their post, it's like there are so many ways that we, that we do that thing. But yeah, for me, that, that is a great definition. And that's where that, that kind of thing that I get interested in that like, why do we, why do people sometimes really want to do something, say they want to do something maybe for years, you know, that's that, that all those things have that in common. Sometimes as well. And that's even like starting a new habit. All the people who say, I definitely want to go to the gym, and yet it's 3 years later, and despite the gym membership having been paid for that whole time, someone hasn't been going. It's like, well, what's happening there? And isn't that interesting?

Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I love the definition of creativity is just the basic human impulse of making a change worth making happen, you know. And I think You know, it's tragic to me, speaking, you know, with friends and with clients who will in some way reference that they've, you know, that they don't have a creative bone in their body or they've lost their creativity or, you know, and we live in a culture that rewards compliance and conformity and, you know, doing things the usual way. And We lose— I think it's, you know, many people just lose touch with their creative impulse and instinct and intuition rather than, um, you know, that they don't— it's not something that you have or you don't have. Human beings are creative beings. I love that idea of, um, you know, making change happen and leveraging basic human instincts like connection, compassion, collaboration, communication to, to do that. You You referenced, uh, the, at the very beginning talking about, um, the work that you do with clients and, and helping them make change happen, which is part of your craft and creative process. And, um, what I, what I wrote down was, uh, continuity, cuz I think you were, you were talking about how you work with people that, um, Well, your book is about people that feel stuck. So people that are somehow complicit in their own suffering and getting in their own way and not able to see what they don't see and, and, and have a clarity of vision about where they want to go. Um, I'd love to hear you unpack that maybe just a little bit more, maybe like what's your process for helping identify where someone is, helping them see where they want to be and helping them see you know, how they're getting themselves stuck or, you know, what's in their way that maybe they put there in front of them and how you help them begin to lean through that.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like we could do like 5 interviews, 5 30-minute conversations, Scott, on just that and just the beautiful way you've talked about it. And look, there's a way in which, you know, I love that— what did you call it— empathetic antagonism or whatever that was. Like, that's, that's part of it. And actually, that's what I hope that my book does. It's like, because the story of my book, and this is a good example. So again, to go back to what you said about habits or what we said about habits and the importance of those and practice. Practice is a big part of how I, if I was to really guide someone through that process and then some of my shorter engagements. So my longer coaching, if it's one-on-one, tends to be really bespoke. Some of the shorter ones, I bring some more some more structure to that. And often, actually, let me give you that, and then let me say a tiny thing about habits and practice. So in that engagement, there are kind of two ways that I think that I tie into exactly what you're just talking about in terms of a process. So maybe three. So there's— we create a vision of success for the time that we'll be working together, but then we tie that to the arc of someone's life. And actually, I do that these days when, when the people are ready through quite a big question, which is what would make you sad at the end of your life? And then can we turn that, whatever comes out of that answer, into a set of commitments to live into so that we can make sure that never happens? And then the final part is what's the practice that you need? What's the capability that you need to deliver that change? And what's the way you can practice that on a daily or weekly basis? And in a way that goes back to the story of my book, which has a little bit of hopefully empathetic antagonism about it, which is that I wrote it in 12 minutes. I wrote a 12-minute article every week. I started it because I was procrastinating. I felt Pressfield's resistance and I knew it was important to face that down. And I knew in my new business I would have to, you know, be present online. And that made me seriously stressed. We created this crazy little practice where I would write an article on the train, a short train journey, just while the train was moving and then post it. Um, would you— we just proofread it once, post it on LinkedIn, because I thought no one read LinkedIn, and kind of they didn't really. Well, a few people did luckily, and I carried that on and made it in a weekly practice. And then 3 years in, realized that I'd written a book, um, potentially. And in fact, you know, I thought it'd be funny because I could call it I Wrote This Book in 12 Minutes, because that's how long the train journey was. And then I realized actually, because of what I was interested in, which is all this stuff we've been talking about, those 12-minute articles from those 3 years pretty much were about the creative process. And that's the book. And in fact, it's sequels as well, because it's going to become 4 shorter books. And so it's like, that practice for me was absolutely transformational. And it goes back to that thing you said, we think there's like a creative bone. And what I learned was if you just practice, well, first of all, you get a lot better at writing 12-minute articles. And secondly, you know, sometimes you write if you keep writing, if you write enough, you almost can't help but hit absolute gold, even though some of them are quite mediocre. And thirdly, I changed as a person. You know, we could— I could probably talk for hours about what that practice has meant for me as a human, you know, not least of which I now know I'm someone who can stick, you know, make a commitment to a practice and keep it for 5 and a half years now. And that's like, when I think about that at the moment, that's quite an amazing thing because if we know we can keep our promises to ourselves, and actually a lot of things become possible. So that sense of what's not possible, it's like, well, in the end, if I write for 12 minutes a week, even if I only write a couple of words because I have so much resistance and procrastination, if I only write 2 sentences, in the end I'll still have a book if I can keep that going long enough. And almost everything becomes possible in that, in that long, um, that longer time period. Um, so yeah, there's quite a lot in there. It's got some about the process and some about kind of my process, I guess.

Well, and you just reminded me how we first connected. I think it was, you did a presentation at Akimbo Days or whatever it was called.

That's absolutely right. Yeah.

12. Yeah, yeah. Read a book in 12 minutes. And I was— did a workshop there about gratitude. And I remember we connected in a group call with Seth afterwards. So that's—

yeah, that's absolutely, that's absolutely it. Yeah. And that workshop was It was really important for me, that workshop, because it was like, you know, and it was an interesting point in the process because it was— the book was actually done at that point, and this was 2019, autumn 2019. I kind of remember it. Um, and it— the book didn't actually come out for 2 more years, and we could talk about that and whether it was, uh, like wise, smart strategizing and research from my part, or whether it was procrastination and resistance. I think good arguments for both. Um, but when I think about One of the things that kept me going through the procrastination and the struggles and the who am I towards the end of the publication process was remembering that workshop. And there was a little writing group that came out of it. And in the front of my book, there's some of the people who have written testimonials about my work and the 12 Minute Method and all that kind of thing are people from that workshop, some of which I think Karina, for example, might have even— has she been on this show? Karina de Souza?

Yes.

So she was somebody, her book came out before mine and she wrote a very lovely thing about how that 12-minute practice and that workshop was a big part of her stopping, realizing that she could do something like write for 12 minutes, just 12 minutes a day. And if you do that, I guess the lesson for me that feels so obvious when you say it, but I definitely didn't know before all of this, is that if you do something just even just for 12 minutes and you do it often enough, in the end, you end up with something and it can be quite something quite big. That still feels profound to me, even though it is completely self-evident when you stop and think about it.

Well, you pointed to two really important things that have also been true in my trajectory, which is, you know, having a vision for where you want to end up. And, and then establishing a practice of taking a small step into that possibility every single day. And my first book was written in almost exactly the same way in that, um, I exited the Alta MBA in 2016 with a rekindled love for writing that I had done earlier in life and had neglected for a long time. And so I committed to writing. Um, I just said, I'm going to become the master of the 1 to 2 minute read. And I did that for a year. And when I looked back, I saw a theme, and I was— I said, well, if I just put, you know, divide it into 3 pieces and put it all to, you know, put this over here and this over here, I'll have a book and I'll put it up on Amazon. I'll see what happens. And that was the beginning of my journey in writing and publishing on Amazon. And it's been— it's a profound way, you know, whether it's a 12-minute practice or 2-minute practice it's a profound way for me, um, and I'd be interested in your experiences, you know, to, to, um, clarify ideas, to get stuff down so you can zoom out and find the common thread, the theme, um, see a trajectory of, you know, where, where you're going with what you're writing. Um, and I love that you also had this practice of doing it out loud and in public, putting it up on LinkedIn. Because if you publish little, little pieces publicly, you will get, um, some feedback. Sometimes the feedback will be, you know, nobody likes it or nobody cares, um, and that's actually very valuable feedback. And sometimes the feedback, you know, is people— there are certain themes or topics that people are really latching on to, and then, then you can write a book that people are obviously looking for, as opposed to writing a book in secret and then hoping that you're going to put out in the world and people are going to— the right people are going to stumble across it. So it's a profound practice, and I really appreciate that reflection on the process. Karina has been a member of our community at Difference Makers, and I do remember when she published her book and the credit that she gave to you. So that was really profound. There's a piece about something that you said near the very beginning about helping people, um, see that theme, see that, you know, figure out where, what they're becoming. And that's really interesting to me because what I am hearing is, um, a theme common to perhaps both of our work of integrity, helping people feel complete and whole, even as they may change roles at various, you know, throughout, throughout the course of the day, or, you know, maybe even change domains in, you know, what they do for a living. And so just a quick reflection before we get to the last question about, you know, the role of integration or integrity or wholeness that that is baked into the work that you do?

Yeah, I think it's— there's a level on which it's a— how would I put it? Like, the world is a very complex place now more than ever. And I used to think that that was just people moaning. And as time's gone on, I've just kind of seen just how true that is, that the challenges of the world today are just more numerous for us as individuals and for societies and more numerous and complex than they were 100 years ago, 30 years ago. And I think it's almost, I think it's almost a kind of imperative, you know, to deal with that as an individual and as a society. We kind of have to, as individuals certainly, be able to take advantage of everything that we have and the unique mix of, or gifts and experiences and struggles that we've been through.. And if we are not letting ourselves use some of that in on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month basis, we're not only are we missing out, but the world is missing out and the world will be a lot harder to deal with. You know, one of the kind of questions that I love that I learned from an author consultant called Fred Kofman, you know, it's like, is, um, you know, he talks about the, how the outcome isn't always within our control, no matter how much responsibility we take, we can't control the outcome, but we can always control whether we've lived in line with our values. And a way to find out what— how to do that is this great question that I heard Kaufman use, which is, regardless of the outcome, what would you have to do so that regardless of the outcome, you will feel at peace with yourself? And that gives us this amazing— if we then do those things, this amazing freedom from all the anxiety and the stress that we mostly— and I count myself in this— for large swathes of my life, including thankfully lesser on a regular basis now than it used to be, are dealing with. And there's this huge energy drain, right, from worry, from anxiety, from stress. And that, that, that's like a practical example of how if we do manage to integrate the different parts of us, that, that can have a material impact on our life. But I also believe that, you know, really the only— as an individual, almost the only response to the kind of overwhelming complexity of the world is to come back to ourselves and think, what are our unique— what is my unique set of gifts and experiences, and how can I put that to use? And how can I do the work on myself so that I'm as sure as I can be that the way that I'm putting it to use is making things better and not worse? And those two things together, I— again, that's borrowed, that's borrowed from a man called Jordan Hall, basically. But it, like, I haven't heard anyone say better, like why that integration is important. Yeah.

Well, it's, uh, at Creative On Purpose, we call it define the difference only you can make. And then the second part is live your legacy, define the difference only you can make, and then engage in an endeavor that reflects who you are, um, with what you're— and what you're good at, where you belong, um, which is with people who share your values and need your talents to enhance their lives. And I, I, I love that. Reflection. Well, Robby, we're coming to the end of our time together. We always end with one final tip or maxim or quote or idea or exercise from our guests. This broadcast is made for people who, like you, would like to be leaning in and leveling up in an endeavor that matters, reflecting the difference only they can make. If there was just one tip or exercise or idea that you could share with them that would help them take a step, half a shade braver into their potential and into possibility and their endeavor? What would you tell them?

Yeah, well, look, when you'll know this, when you publish a book, even if it's one that's kind of emerged accidentally from a practice, suddenly you see the whole world through the frame of that book. So at the moment, I think a lot about practice And really the one frame, one way to frame that would be who's the person you want to become? That kind of thing you're talking about. How do you live your legacy? What's one way you can practice doing that even for 12 minutes a week? So that's like the kind of answer that comes to mind. But the other thing that came into my mind when you were saying that, when you were talking about a tip, is I had this funny experience with my book, which is that I had a Steven Pressfield quote at the start because I love The War of Art. Made a huge difference to me. And when I was publishing the book, I thought I better check this quote. And I check, I couldn't find it. And I had no idea what it was. Like how, how have I possibly misquoted this? And where could I, where is it? And I read The War of Art pretty much again and Googled loads and couldn't find it. And then I realized that it was actually, I was quoting myself, not Steven Pressfield, that I'd written once about Steven Pressfield and I'd kind of taken something he said and boiled it down to a different, a different sentence. And he says it— he talks about muses and angels in the end of The War of Art. And the way that I changed that— and this is a really important thing to me— that what I'd written that I thought was Pressfield but it turned out was Swale was, um, our inspiration is always around us, um, and it's only when we make a start that we let inspiration in. So that's the other thing. It's like, we don't— don't wait for the inspiration, make the start. Love that.

Beautiful. What a great place to stop. Just a real quick shout out from, I'm guessing, one of your pals, Michael Hubbard, who says everyone has 12 minutes. And I think that is absolutely true. It's— we want to thank everyone for tuning in. Robbie and I really appreciate you lending us your valuable time and attention. We hope today's broadcast motivates you to take a bolder step into possibility, living your legacy. You can learn more about Robbie and the difference that he's making at robbyswale.com. And of course, it's always great to see you as well at creativeonpurpose.com. If you're listening to this as a podcast, please consider leaving a 5-star review. It helps more of the right people find us. And now we encourage you to take the insight and inspiration from this conversation and fly higher in the difference only you can make. Robbie Swale, thanks so much for lending us some of your experience and wisdom today.

Total pleasure, Scott Perry. It's been an absolute pleasure.