In this episode, Heidi Brooks and Zoe Chance invite you to step out of the transactional pursuit of influence and into the relational, visceral reality of self-influence through coaching.

Through their conversation, Heidi and Zoe take you on a journey to reframe coaching not as a corrective tool for fixing what is broken, but as an enlivening stance for everyday leadership and human connection. You'll get a sneak peak into the big ideas guiding the upcoming professional coaching certificate at Yale and why the cohort model is an important element of the program. They deconstruct traditional ideas of interpersonal influence, putting them back together as an inside-out process where changing our relationships requires us to first renegotiate our relationship with ourselves.

Ultimately, Heidi and Zoe invite you to take a coaching stance to stretch beyond your comfort zone and expand your capacity to thrive.

Connect with Zoe Chance at zoechance.com and check out her book.
Learn more about the Yale SOM Certificate in Professional Coaching.
New! Turn a challenge you are facing into a "Learning through experience" moment with Heidi Brooks. Leave a voice note and we may bring your voice to the show. Learn more and consider recording a voice note here.

Note:

00:00 - Introduction Heidi opens the show with a short vignette into her day of teaching and invites you to shift the energy with her in real time.

03:20 - Knowing Isn't Enough Zoe shares the vulnerable, embarrassing story of her time with a Mayan shaman in the rainforest. Heidi and Zoe explore the deep friction between having conceptual information and the visceral, embodied reality of an experience.

08:00 - The Trojan Horse of Influence Heidi and Zoe wrestle with traditional, transactional ideas of influence and how Zoe's course often acts as a Trojan horse for personal transformation. The conversation highlights the inside-out approach of becoming someone others naturally want to say yes to.

13:20 - Co-Creating a New Experience: Coaching at Yale The hosts dream in public about their upcoming certificate for professional coaching and the intentional design of a cohort-based experience. They look at how learning to coach in a group setting acts as a micro-society for humanizing the workplace.

18:20 - The Messy Work of Being Coachable Heidi shares a grainy moment from her early days coaching "perfect" executives to surface an inconvenient tension: being coachable requires a person to be influenceable. They invite the audience to ask if they are willing to stretch beyond the safety of their expertise.

25:20 - System 1 "Soup" and The Logic of Commitment The two dive into the intuitive, habitual "emotional soup" of System 1, which Zoe names as the hidden engine of human behavior. Heidi introduces Jim March's framework to ask how leaders can anchor their work in the enlivening "logic of commitment" rather than the transactional "logic of consequence".

36:20 - The Ultimate Challenge: Influencing the Self The conversation lands on the profound realization that the hardest person in the world to influence is the self. Heidi and Zoe explore how adopting a coaching stance helps individuals renegotiate their relationship with themselves and expand their capacity to thrive.

42:20 - A Genuine Invitation The episode concludes with an invitation to the listener to pay attention to their own possible transformations. Heidi shares a new way for the audience to leave a voice note via SpeakPipe so the community can co-create this learning experience together.