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Lee Povey: Finding Joy

Lee Povey Maximize Your Potential Coaching

Episode 43

“I’m like, there’s got to be more to life. What is that? And just found myself getting more drawn to coaching, working with other people, helping other people achieve what they wanted to do.”

A man with incredible taste in trainers, a stellar accent, and a passion for everything he does– what more could you want in a podcast guest? Join Joan this week as she sits down and chats with Lee Povey, CEO of Maximize Your Potential Coaching and co-founder and VP of Empower Marriage and Family Therapy, about his career pathway, how Lee came into cycling, and finding joy in life.

Lee Povey Maximize Your Potential Coaching
Lee Povey – Maximize Your Potential Coaching / Empower Therapy and Coaching


Thanks to B Braun Medical Inc. for sponsoring the Talk of the T-Town Podcast. BBraun is a global leader in infusion therapy and pain management, B Braun develops, manufactures and markets innovative medical products to the healthcare community. They are also strong believers in supporting the quality of life in the communities where their employees work and live.

Transcript

Joan Hanscom:

Welcome to the Talk of the T-Town Podcast, where we discuss all things track cycling. Broadcasting from the Valley Preferred Cycling Center, I’m your host and executive director, Joan Hanscom.

Joan Hanscom:

Welcome to the Talk of the T-Town Podcast. I am your host, Joan Hanscom, and this week, I am thrilled to be joined by a former USA Cycling colleague of mine, and somebody who has excellent taste in trainers, I will say. Excellent choice in footwear. Somebody who knows his way around the velodrome, and somebody who has made a very interesting career path change of recently. Welcome to the podcast, Lee Povey. Lee, you are the CEO of Maximize Your Potential Coaching, and you are co-founder and vice president of Empower Marriage and Family Therapy. But I know you from your time as the ODP track sprint coach.

Joan Hanscom:

So, welcome to the Talk of the T-Town Podcast. I’m very excited to talk to you, because you bring a very high-performance mindset to everything you do, and high performance is very interesting to our listeners. And so, it is very exciting to have you here, to talk about what you’re doing, what you did do, and just stuff in general. Just a general catch up with somebody who is a well-respected member of our community. So, Lee, welcome to the pod.

Lee Povey:

Morning, Joan, or afternoon, as it is for you guys there. Lovely to be on the podcast with you. I’m looking forward to what you’re going to challenge me with, and the questions you’re going to ask me.

Joan Hanscom:

Well, the first question is, what color trainers are you wearing today?

Lee Povey:

Black.

Joan Hanscom:

Black? All right.

Lee Povey:

Just got back from the gym. I’ve gone all black, but I do have, as you know, a vast collection of colorful sneakers, and they’re not going anywhere.

Joan Hanscom:

Well, this summer when you were here for elite nationals, I pointed out you to Maura, who’s also here on the pod, and said that Lee has the best assortment of footwear in the sport of track cycling. So, I did point out your…

Lee Povey:

Should have sent you a picture. Me and Sara went to a wedding a couple of weekends ago, and I got to wear my gold sneakers.

Joan Hanscom:

Gold?

Lee Povey:

Because she was wearing a gold dress, so I wore gold sneakers to match my gold tie and my blue suit.

Joan Hanscom:

So, you’re going to have to send that photo in for the show notes.

Lee Povey:

Okay.

Joan Hanscom:

We’ll use that in the promotional photos, because yes, you have, of people I know, the best taste in footwear.

Lee Povey:

Thank you.

Joan Hanscom:

So, we want to get that out of the way bright and early. Wanted to see what you were sporting on your feet today. I did a lot of research for this. We were colleagues at USA Cycling, but we didn’t really interact. You were not in the office, I was. So, I knew who you were, but I didn’t know a whole lot about you, and I’ve known you here at T-Town mostly as the person who brings a lot of very fast sprint athletes to the track. A lot of athletes who are very high performance-focused athletes. But I didn’t really know a whole lot about you and your background, and so I thought, let’s start there. You are not from here, as the accent gives away, so tell us about your pathway from the UK to America.

Lee Povey:

I really like messing with Americans when they say, “Where are you from?” And I say, “Long Beach,” and I just don’t say anything after that, and leave the pause as long as I can, and watch them kind of try to figure out what’s going on.

Lee Povey:

How did I get here? I was on the national team in the UK as a junior. This was before GB had all the funding and everything, at a point when we were probably the worst nation in the world. I already realized I wasn’t that gifted, so I wasn’t going to be an elite world champion. It wasn’t going to be a career for me, because I didn’t have that setup there, and I wasn’t good enough to make it, despite the setup that they had. So, I ended up going into real estate, worked for a corporate agency six years. Awesome training. Learned about leadership and the skills around that without even realizing I was learning it. Had my real estate business for five years.

Lee Povey:

In the meantime, British cycling has set up something called the Talent Team, which was a talent ID program, and they kept getting me in to do guest stuff for track sprinters, because there wasn’t a lot of track sprint coaching. So, in the southern region, I would go to schools and test kids, and do clinics and stuff like that around track sprinting. And I really enjoyed it, but it was a hobby, a fun thing to do kind of outside my business.

Lee Povey:

And then, I was working with an athlete, Pete Mitchell, who was at the Junior World… Junior European Championships, I think it was 2007. And I was sitting in the stand. He was working with the GB coaches in the middle, and I went with his dad to watch and support him. I’m sitting in the stands, and I thought, I don’t want to go back to my real estate business. And it was that real kind of light bulb moment of, oh, okay. I don’t want to do that anymore. I just don’t enjoy it.

Lee Povey:

So, within six months, I’d sold my business. Incredibly fortunate that that was agreed December 2007, and the property crash happened in the UK in January 2008. So, I was very fortunate. I then created my own cycling coaching business. I had a reputation for working with young athletes and getting them into the GB program. And then, I started working with masters athletes, because as we all know, that’s where the money is, so you want to pay your bills, you need masters athletes. And I enjoyed that. That was great.

Lee Povey:

I came and did, I was coaching a guy on the internet who lived in San Jose, and he invited me to come and do a clinic there, so I came with my coaching partner, David Le Grys. We did a clinic there, and I loved it. Set up the next year to come back and stay for a month. Came back, stayed for a month, thinking, could I live here? Obviously I could. Went back home to the UK. It rained for six weeks in a row, every single day, middle of June into August. I worked at the Olympics 2012. The day the Olympics finished, I found a lawyer, applied for my visa, and I’d moved to America by February the following year.

Joan Hanscom:

All right, so that answers the question. And it also, to me, reveals a bit about your personality, your character, what drives you, and I’d like to poke a little bit on that decision of sitting up in the stands and deciding you didn’t want to go back to real estate. I’m going to read between the lines and say that it was because you enjoyed coaching so much, that you enjoyed the sporting side of it so much, but probably that you were enjoying helping athletes, right? Is that interpreting you correctly, that something about what you were doing was rewarding, you were finding that you were good at it, and that’s when you decided, I want to do this, not go back to real estate? Is that fair?

Lee Povey:

Yeah, that’s a great observation, Joan. I think, as life’s gone on, I’ve tuned in more and more to what really motivates me, and what my purpose in life is. And I fell into real estate. Nobody really in the UK, it’s not as lucrative as it is here in the US. Nobody really sits there and goes, I want to be a real estate agent. It’s what you do if you didn’t go to university, and you’re quite switched off. And I kind of fell into it. I applied for 20 different jobs, and I got three offers from real estate agents. So I’m like, okay, the world is telling me something here.

Lee Povey:

Did it, was good at it, so I kept getting rewarded financially and getting promoted in the company that I was working in, or with my own business, rewarded financially, but there wasn’t the emotional reward that I was looking for. And I had a nice apartment on the seafront of Brighton. I had a nice, flash car, and I thought that was going to be enough, and it wasn’t. And I’m like, there’s got to be more to life. What is that? And just found myself getting more drawn to coaching, working with other people, helping other people achieve what they wanted to do.

Lee Povey:

And I’d also, and this is, we’re going to probably touch on this later, I’d also experienced really bad coaching. So, I wanted to be the answer to really bad coaching. At that time in GB, we were changing from the old school sprint coaching, with lots of volume and training, and lots of road riding, to this new model of concentrate on speed first, get really strong at the gym. So, I wanted to be part of that movement as well, of kind of changing the ethos of the sport. So, both of those things were motivating me to go in a different direction.

Joan Hanscom:

Now, I want to touch on something else, and I think it’s relevant to where we’ll go with this conversation when we talk about where you are today. Bad coaching. For you as a coach, but also as an athlete. What’s bad coaching?

Lee Povey:

Well, that’s a massive thing, and I think it depends, are you talking about [inaudible 00:09:12]? Are we talking about the emotional element, of not holding a space correctly for athletes to be the best version of themselves, empower them, let them grow? You know, that sideline bully that stands there and shouts at athletes, makes them feel smaller and stuff? Or are we just talking bad physiology, like bad technique coaching? And I’ve experienced both, and I wanted to change both.

Lee Povey:

To begin with, it was more the technical, tactical, physiology that I was really interested in, and then it completely switched, much more to the emotional side of it, which is how I’ve ended up doing what I’m doing now, is I learned that I had an ability to connect with people on that level really well. I’d gotten more and more interested in that, and I realized there was other people that were more gifted than me at physiology, and had I stated working at USA Cycling, working with USA Cycling, I would have wanted a physiologist to come in with me and support me on that side of it, and I’m much more interested in the technical, tactical and emotional components of it, so the brain part of it.

Joan Hanscom:

Yeah, I think it’s such an important thing in our sport. Broadly, not just track cycling. But understanding good coaching, from that emotional, mental component of it. A good coach can lift you up, can open up your potential, and bad coaching can be so destructive, and it can be so harmful. And I think that in our sport, that can take on, whether it’s abuse, or it’s just limiting you as an athlete, and not helping you find your full potential. I think it’s just an important thing for people to understand, that what the role of a coach is isn’t just training, right?

Joan Hanscom:

I think so many people get that wrong. I think I need to work with this coach because the training is good. Anybody… any monkey can train you, right? You can go on the Sufferfest, or you can go on Trainer Road, and you can get very fit, right? You can make yourself strong, you can make yourself fast with a canned program, but can you thrive as an athlete? And did think that that’s what you’re touching on, is this ability to work with athletes and help them thrive.

Joan Hanscom:

And to thrive is very different than getting really fit on Zwift, right? It’s a very different thing, and high performance athletes, like your athletes, and like your clientele, too, your client base, too, this is all high performance lifestyle. This is getting all aspects of it right, not just the workout, not just the time in the gym. It’s all aspects of life, and I think that that’s the great frontier for coaches, the good ones, anyway.

Joan Hanscom:

So, I think it’s interesting to talk to you about that and get your perspective on the state of the sport, the state of coaching, the state of good coaching versus bad coaching, and what your observations are.

Lee Povey:

I think there’s… It’s such a broad subject.

Joan Hanscom:

I know. Sorry.

Lee Povey:

Yeah, I’m like, where are we going to go first on that? I think of coaching in a few different ways. So, I think the term gets used too much. There’s people that are facilitators, people that are trainers, and there are people that are coaches. A facilitator is somebody who’s holding space for you to come and do a training session. A trainer is somebody that’s writing what you’re doing in that training session. A coach is somebody who is seeing you as a whole human being, looking at the training you’re doing in the session, giving you feedback on the training you’re doing in the session, and then kind of holding a whole plan for how you as a human being can best perform. And that can sometimes be telling you to go home, because you’re not ready to train today, either emotionally or physically.

Lee Povey:

When we started the ODP program, I was keen to get Ben Sharp in, because I believed, from what I’d seen… I’d only seen a little bit of him, but I pushed for him to come in and do the endurance side with me, because I believe he had the same ethos as me about athletes. And my ethos is, anybody that works with me leaves working with me a better human being, especially when we’re talking about high performance. Because you can have 30, 50 athletes come through a program like that, and if we got two or three that went on to Olympic level and achieved success, that’s a pretty good result.

Lee Povey:

So, if our only marker for success is the results of the athletes, we’re going to end up with a lot of disappointment for us as coaches, and we’re going to be pushing people to achieve our own personal goals. Like, my success is, I’ve got an Olympic gold medalist. Rather than, I view it, my success is, that human being’s come from our program, walked through our program, and comes out of it a more rounded human being with more skills in life as a byproduct of what they’ve done in that training program. And hopefully, a much better athlete, as well.

Joan Hanscom:

Yeah.

Lee Povey:

So, that’s kind of how I see my role as a coach, is to help people be the best human beings they can, and also help them be the best at the sport they’ve chosen to be. I’ve had conversations with athletes that resulted in them choosing to do a different sport, because this sport is not a good sport for them, for example. And they can be really challenging and difficult conversations to have. We have a guardianship as a coach, of the welfare of the people that we’re dealing with, and for me, it’s really important that you put your own ego to one side, and it’s taken me a long time to learn that. I was very driven, myself. I’m like, my guys are going to win everything! And I realized that’s not my place at all. My place is to empower them to be the best versions of themselves. If the result of that is them winning bike races, so be it.

Joan Hanscom:

Yeah. I think that that’s so important, and I think you’ve nailed it, the difference. People have asked me about coaching before, not me to coach them, but just my philosophy on coaching, and I think that, like I said before, anybody can write you a program and make you fast. It’s the other piece of that puzzle that’s so important, and I think that trust and honesty are so important, which is what you’ve touched on. Look, hey, you’re not, this sport is not the thing for you. This pathway, you are more suited for this pathway than this pathway. That type of brutal honesty and assessment is so key and important in a coaching-athlete relationship.

Lee Povey:

Well, I just want to be careful there, Joan, that it’s not led by me in that instance. That’s led by the athlete, and it’s usually them being very unhappy. The sport tends to bring in people that have a lot of natural grit. So, what they keep doing is bumping up against this thing, because that’s what they’ve been told what they should do, like hard work, great work ethic, it’s the person who works the hardest. And they’re bumping up against these things that actually aren’t bringing them joy. And what is life about if we’re not having joy? Like, why are we doing this?

Lee Povey:

And it could be it’s emotionally not good for them. It could be physically it’s not good for them. Their body type doesn’t fit what they’re doing. I’ve encouraged people to go from endurance to sprint, or sprint to endurance, because their body type isn’t for what they’re trying to do. Or it’s just not the right sporting environment for them that they’re in. They might want to go and consider something else.

Lee Povey:

And that’s led by them getting to this point where they’re bumping up against this thing, and they’re not finding joy. It’s not about, for me, not so much about the physicality, because if you’re doing this, and you’re not going to be a world champion, but you love it, you should keep doing this. But if you’re doing this, and you’re not enjoying it, and you think you’re doing it because you’ve been told by parents you’ve got it, or there’s this belief that you can’t fail, that doing something different is failure, that’s where I think that the edge of it is, and it should always be led by the athlete.

Joan Hanscom:

Yeah, I agree with that. You used a word I like: grit. You’ve used that in conversations with me before. Define grit.

Lee Povey:

I’m trying to think of the woman who wrote the book on it. I think her name’s Angela Duckworth. It’s the ability to persevere in difficult times. I’ll give you an example of grit. I have a young athlete, and I’m only coaching two athletes now until the national team program is set up for them to leap into, so I’ve kind of really moved out of this, but there’s two I’m just looking after to help. One of these athletes trains somewhere where it’s constantly over 100 degrees, often training by themselves, had an an issue with, before we sorted it out, with throwing up after almost every effort. Never complained. Went an trained. Threw up five times in 100 and something-plus degrees, with a bit smile on her face.

Lee Povey:

I don’t know how she did it. I would not have been able to do that. Just that amount of perseverance to overcome the obstacles in the way is what sets, for me, really high performance people apart. And you can learn that, and there’s also an intrinsic element that you’re born with. And that’s why not everybody can be a super high performer, which is fine, because not everybody needs to be.

Joan Hanscom:

Right. It’s so interesting. So, you tease that up. You are now coaching just two athletes, and you are now moving into what I guess you could describe as a human behavior and performance coach. You are working with normal people, and helping normal people find joy. Tell us about that. Tell us about that transition, because I think it’s interesting, because again, it just makes me think of you sitting in the stands, figuring out what makes me happy, what I want to go back to, and honing in on what your skill set is, and where you thrive. So, tell us about your transition away from being the ODA… ODP, sorry, ODP track sprint coach, and the CEO of your company, and your vice president of your company, and how that transition worked, and what drove that change.

Lee Povey:

Yeah. Love that question. Thank you, Joan. I was already beginning… Well, let’s not begin. I was already really unhappy in the role. I was in Milton, in Canada, a race that we took a bunch of the ODP athletes to. I think we won every sprint event at the competition. Actually, we didn’t win the kilo. That’s the only one we didn’t win. We won every sprint event but the kilo at the competition.

Lee Povey:

And I was there, and I’m looking at the setup that the Canadians had. They had two full-time sprint coaches, two full-time gym coaches, physios, a team of coaches looking for talent. I was doing that entire role by myself for USA Cycling on the sprint side, and it was part-time. They wouldn’t pay me enough for it to be a full-time role, so I still had my private master cycling coaching business. I was working seven days a week. This is not sustainable.

Lee Povey:

I was in negotiation with them to move into a full-time position as the sprint coach, and the negotiations were not going well. And then COVID hit, and everything got blown up. And I’m sitting there thinking, what do I want to do? Do I want to go back to being a masters coach? Well, I’ve done that for the last 12-13 years, and fulfilling that it was, it didn’t feel like enough of an active service, but as I was moving more into this, I want to help people be better versions of themselves emotionally, or enable them to be better versions of themselves emotionally, what does that look like?

Lee Povey:

I’m looking at the politics, and the division in the politics, and I’m thinking, there’s so much anger in this world, how do I be part of the cure? I don’t want to be a politician. That’s definitely not my skillset. So, I kind of think, I want to be better at creating community and affecting more people. And with sports coaching, the national team, or the ODP team, I was working with 12 athletes. So, I’m thinking, how can I, what can I do that’s going to work with more people, and the people I work with, how are they going to affect more people around them?

Lee Povey:

So, I started a men’s group for myself and some friends, right at the beginning of the pandemic, because people were kind of struggling, we were all stuck at home. Everyone’s freaking out, what’s going on, what’s this going to look like? And it went really well. And I’d been in men’s groups back in the UK for quite a long time. I kind of knew the power of them, and what it’s like for men to sit down and actually understand emotions and talk to each other.

Lee Povey:

And I realized I have a gift for teaching emotional intelligence, especially to men. Because I’m a normal guy. I’m not a hippie with long hair, who’s like, yeah, flower power, man. That’s just not my way. So, I can connect with average men, normal men, better than those kind of guys. And the people doing that kind of men’s coaching, the people going to them are quite emotionally astute anyway, and I was looking for the guys that are a bit like me when I was younger. I got some success, and I’m not happy, and I don’t understand why I’m not happy. And that was what I looking for.

Lee Povey:

So, I started the men’s groups. They went really well, like took off really quickly. And then I started doing one-to-one coaching, both for men and women, and now it seems to be, I’ve kind of fallen into a more high performance role, where I work with startup companies, and I will work with the leaders of startup companies and the executive teams of startup companies, and help them transition from that startup stage into a bigger company, where they’re managing lots of people. And I’ve discovered I really like working on leadership. That’s the bit that particularly excites me, is how we are as leaders. And again, that fits into my purpose of you work with a leader, they infect their entire company. Then we’re able to help hundreds of people, instead of one person.

Joan Hanscom:

Right. It’s fascinating. You used the phrase emotional intelligence. Push on that a little bit.

Lee Povey:

What’s that? What’s that stuff?

Joan Hanscom:

Yeah, what is it? And how do you know when you have it?

Lee Povey:

I don’t know if you ever know that. What I do with the men’s group is, because this is probably the easiest way to explain it, the first week is why are you here? Because people come with all these things that are like, I’ve got this going on with my life, or I don’t understand this, or I’m just unhappy, and we get their story. And the first part of that is a group of men sitting down together in a container where we create safety, so we say, everything shared here is personal to here. We don’t share it with anybody else. There’s no judgment or shame here. Like any of that, I would immediately moderate. If there’s any aggression or anger towards each other, I would moderate that, and if it got bad, you’d get banned from the group.

Lee Povey:

So, we create somewhere where people can communicate and be heard, and lots of people have never been truly heard, where a group of people are sitting there and listening to them, instead of listening to respond to them. So, that’s a new concept for a little people, like get a space where people are just listening to be curious. So, that’s the first part of emotional intelligence, is starting to listen to be curious, rather than listening to have your response, to have your like, I’ve got the answer for you, or let me show you how smart I am, or let me share my experience too. It’s just listening to be curious.

Lee Povey:

Then, the next thing we do is, we work with emotions. So, I work with four emotions: anger, fear, status and joy. And these are the physical responses that we feel that give us information about the world and the experience we’re having. And men and women get a different experience when they’re growing up. Women are encouraged to express those emotions a bit more than men are. I wouldn’t say as much as they should, but certainly more than men. And even with women, there’s some connotations about what they can. Like, they shouldn’t express anger, but they can express sadness and fear.

Lee Povey:

Men are told they definitely can’t express fear and sadness. Don’t be a pussy. Don’t be a wimp. Chin up. All that kind of stuff. Anger is appropriate, but only at certain times, not when it should be healthily expressed. And when you watch young children, they have these big emotional responses, and they’re fast. They cry, and then they stop crying. They laugh, they stop laughing. And they’re processing the world through this emotional experience, and we train ourselves out of it as adults. Yet, that’s what we’re designed to do, to have an emotional response, and then to have a cognitive response to our emotional response.

Lee Povey:

So, the emotion is data, so fear could be telling me there’s something I’m about to do that could be difficult, or that could be challenging, or that I’m unsure of, so I feel fear. Great. I check in with that, it gets me ready to take on that challenge. If I ignore that, it can be crippling, and get to the point I don’t take on any challenges, because the fear is now so crippling, I don’t want to take challenges, but I don’t know why, because I’m not living in the emotion in the moment.

Joan Hanscom:

It’s so interesting. So, full disclosure to our listeners, you and I had a conversation, a session, which I thought was incredibly insightful, and I’m a big believer in all of this type of thing, which is why I work with sports psychologists, which is why I have a coach, which is why I was very interested to talk to you, because I think that even as a female, I have been… especially as a female of a certain age, right? Where we’re the cusp of the first generation of women who are doing things like sports. Like, we’re the Title IX generation, so we’re on that leading edge of women in the workforce, all of these things.

Joan Hanscom:

And so, I’ve always been sort of, again, told to process things, you’re not allowed to do this, you’re not allowed to do that, you’re not allowed to do this, and does it impact your decision-making process? Does it impact how you go to work every day? How does it impact how I manage Maura, who works on my team? And so, I found the conversation that we had to be incredibly insightful for me. I thought it was incredibly helpful for me in the decision-making process.

Joan Hanscom:

And so it’s partially why I wanted to have you on the pod, because I think of our listeners, a handful are high performance athletes, because there are only a handful of high performance athletes. But more broadly speaking, I think what you’re talking about for our listeners… I’m not a high performance athlete. I think I’m a high performance lifestyle person, in terms of work and how I approach work, so I put myself in that high performance bucket, right? I do all the things, check all the boxes to eat right, sleep right, recover, read, stay up on all the management things.

Joan Hanscom:

So, I consider myself a high performance individual, even though I’m not a high performance athlete, and I think we probably have a fair number of listeners who would fall into that category themselves. Yes, they may be a masters athlete or a junior athlete, but in the rest of their lives, they may be high performance people, and I think what you’re saying is fascinating, because when you’re a high performance person, you need to understand the full context of your universe, right? Your why, your mission statement, your is this bringing me joy, or am I just throttling forward because I have to?

Joan Hanscom:

And I think what you’re saying, we’re in a period of time here, because of the pandemic, because of sort of institutional change that happened because of the pandemic, we’re in an interesting point for people to have this moment of introspection, and think about, yes, I’m a high performance person, but am I doing what brings me joy, and is this the opportunity to-

Lee Povey:

Let me stop you there, Joy, because… Joy. Joan. Joy is a really interesting concept in itself. We see joy as being the destination, like I want to be happy. How often do you hear people say, I want to be happy? Happy is not a destination. It’s a state of being in the moment. So, joy is about being really present in the moment. So emotions, they’re not just this thing we feel. They tend to have time scales. Sadness is usually around loss or something in the past. Anger and joy are in the moment, usually, and fear is in the future.

Lee Povey:

And it’s about being present, and it’s very hard for us to be present right now, with there’s the fear, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, of what’s going to happen next? I’m sitting there going, what do I do? I’ve just lost two-thirds of my income. I’ve just negotiated a role that I thought was going to go on until 2028, and now there’s a new high performance director. Everything’s changing. They’ve canceled all the programs. Huge fear in that moment about what was going to come next. So, how do I stay in the moment, to be able to make these thoughtful decisions about what’s going to happen, and find some joy in the midst of the uncertainty?

Joan Hanscom:

Absolutely.

Lee Povey:

How do I keep bringing myself back to the moment and the joy? And it’s the same as we do in coaching athletes. You get back into the process. Somebody comes to you and they say to you, all right, I want to win a gold medal. Great. What are you going to do today that’s going to enable you to win a gold in 10 years time? Because the concept of a gold medal at the Olympics, it’s just a concept. It’s not something tangible that you can… Like, how do I get the gold medal? So, you work on the process, which is what can I do today? And the happiest, for want of a better term, people I see are those that spend a lot of time in the process and enjoying their process, and the outcome is the byproduct of a happy process, not the thing that they get their joy from.

Lee Povey:

I was just listening to a podcast this morning by a guy called Andrew Huberman. He’s a neuroscientist at Stanford University. He has a great podcast, if anybody’s interested. And he was talking about dopamine, and how dopamine is the motivator for us, and if our dopamine levels are really low, we don’t feel very motivated. So, if we’re chasing a lot of shiny objects, out dopamine level gets depleted, and then we don’t have the energy to go and do things. And it’s how we stay in the moment, going back to your grit. Stay in the moment, find some perseverance, but enjoy the perseverance, instead of use the perseverance to beat ourselves up, or instead of using the perseverance as justification to do things that we don’t enjoy anymore.

Joan Hanscom:

Yeah, absolutely.

Lee Povey:

Does that make sense?

Joan Hanscom:

It is 100%, makes sense. And yeah, it’s, I think in a lot of ways, personally it’s what drives me, right? If I love what I’m doing, even if it’s mundane, the process of going to work every day can be mundane, but if I enjoy it, if I enjoy the people I’m with, if I enjoy the mission that I am trying to achieve, it makes every day great. And it can still be every day.

Lee Povey:

And it’s a choice around that.

Joan Hanscom:

Right.

Lee Povey:

You know, you have to choose to do that. So, one of the biggest things that has come out from the study and the work I’m doing, and I’m on lots of coaching courses myself to be a better coach. In this role that I’m taking on, I’m doing a ton of stuff about leadership. It’s about enjoying the process and leaning into the process, and finding those moments for joy. And that takes an effort. It’s a choice.

Joan Hanscom:

Absolutely.

Lee Povey:

So, we get our emotional response, and then lots of people just respond from a reactive place. There’s a concept that I really like called above and below the line. Below the line is your emotive, reactive state to some kind of stimulus, be that anger, be that fear, and then the story that we create around that anger or fear. And then, do I react from that place, and get spiteful, and point back at you, or do I take a breath and go, what is this telling me? What’s the choice I have about how I want to react? And giving yourself a little bit of space and going, I get to choose. As an adult human being, I get to choose the right path and reaction.

Lee Povey:

And it makes a huge difference into the way that we communicate with each other, the way that you show up in the world, the way that I’m communicating with the people I work with, as opposed to having this emotional reaction and then just going, what! And throwing it out. Or storytelling. So, we make up a story about what’s going on for the other person that may or may not be true. We don’t check it, and then we react from the place of the story that we’ve made up. And this person has no idea about the story we’ve made up, and it may or may not be true, but we’re reacting from something we’ve invented in our head, and then making a decision based on that, and that’s where people can, what we would call miscommunication.

Lee Povey:

People aren’t communicating, because they’re not checking in. They’re just writing a script in their head, oh, this person doesn’t like me. They haven’t called me back because they don’t like me. It might just be they’re busy, or they forgot, and it’s nothing to do with you. But you write the script, oh, they’re not calling me back because they don’t like me, and then you send them a crappy message because you think they don’t like you.

Joan Hanscom:

Fascinating. Okay, so… No, no, it’s so fascinating, and you and I go down these rabbit holes, and I love it. So, let’s take a step back though, because I think our conversation sort of started with the premise that I already know what you’re doing, and so for our listeners, we may have gone a little bit fast forward past that, because it’s a super good, I knew it would be, and I’m excited that we’re having it.

Joan Hanscom:

So, let’s take a step back, and just talk nuts and bolts. Pandemic started. You started with this men’s group. You’ve turned this into now a thriving thing. You’re working with startups in particular. What… I just want to, this is the crass commercial part, portion of the podcast. If people want to find out more about you, tell us how they find out more about you right now. And we’ll put this in the show notes, as well.

Lee Povey:

Yeah, so… Thank you. MaximizeYourPotentialCoaching.com is the website. My wife, we didn’t mention her, but she’s a psychotherapist, so advice was her business, and kind of help her with that business, and that’s awesome. She’s like killing it. She saved me. I was like, uh oh, I’ve got no income, and she’s just gone crazy. The pandemic has helped in that, so we’ve been lucky that we’re in a field that the pandemic has actually been really good for. So we got incredibly lucky.

Lee Povey:

I’m on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, Maximize Your Potential Coaching. Really, the best way is just to reach out to me and have a conversation with me. I’m open to having a conversation with anybody about it. I’m not particularly big on social media, because it doesn’t really… it’s not what I do, and it’s not really what my business is about. My business is about people connecting with people, seeing where they’re at, seeing where they want to get to.

Lee Povey:

So, what I do, the easiest way to describe it is, see where you’re at as a human being, so here’s the challenges I’m being presented with as a human being. Here’s my stuff that’s getting in the way. Where do I want to get to? And then I help you cross that bridge to where you want to get to, whatever that is.

Joan Hanscom:

Yes. I like it. And you can see where your history in working with athletes would translate incredibly well to working with CEOs, or with businesspeople, or with leaders in the business community, because it’s the same thing, right?

Lee Povey:

They’re the same people. They are unbelievably motivated. You know, I had a conversation with a leader last week, and he’s talking about how he motivates his team. And he’s talking to me, and he’s going, I don’t get it, Lee. They don’t want to work 20 hours a day, and I don’t know how to motivate these people, and we’ve got these bonuses that I think are really generous, and they don’t want to do the same thing I do, and I want to do a five-minute mile.

Lee Povey:

And I’m like, they’re not motivated the same way that you are. You’re an exceptional high achiever who is completely driven, and now your company’s expanded, you’re going to get people that don’t want to lead, they want to be led. They want clear boundaries. They want clear definitions of what you expect for them. And he thinks everybody’s just going to come to work and be this amazing self-starter, and just guess what he wants them to do, and I’m like, no. They need structure and they need boundaries. Because he thinks that’s not what he wants, he sees the world like that.

Lee Povey:

So, that’s the big part of leadership, is how do you step to where somebody else is, and see the world from their point of view, so empathy, match them to a point you can encourage them and support them and motivate them, or help them be motivated. I don’t really believe you can motivate others, but you can support them in their own motivation. Without projecting what makes you want to do things on them. And that’s the key to it.

Lee Povey:

If we lead everybody like we want to be led, you’re going to end up with a lot of unhappy people, and the higher performer you are, the more kind of single focused you are, the harder it is for you to see that, and the harder it is for you to connect with these people and create this kind of harmonious group of people who are working in the same direction.

Joan Hanscom:

Yes. No, I like it. I mean, again, I lead a small organization here, and I sit back and I think about that. I think about that when I lead my team, and I think about that when I communicate with my team, and I think that that’s incredibly important. Selfishly, I also wish you would do that same thing for coaches in our sport, because I think that that’s a skillset…

Lee Povey:

I mean, funny you should mention that, Joan. Since we’ve last spoken, a friend of mine, a woman called Miriam, runs a company called Athletes Soul, and the purpose of this company… It’s a nonprofit. The purpose of the company is to help athletes transition from sports to the outside world, whatever that may be. Started working with high performers. She’s an excellent [inaudible 00:40:31] herself, ex national team coach, and she was seeing these Olympians that had no idea what to do next, and that became our groove. My life was about this four-year cycle. What comes next? Saw them, saw people struggling, created this company. It’s kind of now moved to any athlete that’s looking to transition on to what’s next.

Lee Povey:

We’ve become friends. We’re developing a company at the moment that’s going to be for sports coaches, and the point of it is going to be to help and support sports coaches emotionally themselves. I know that there was times in my role I didn’t know who to turn to. I didn’t know who to get advice from. I didn’t now who to vent with. It was hard to get that kind of support, and the higher up the coaching tree you go, the harder it is to find it. And also, I didn’t have the skillset I needed. Looking back now, what I’ve learned in the last two years, that would have really helped me as a sports coach.

Lee Povey:

So, we want to provide training and help for sports coaches on their emotional intelligence, seeing where athletes are coming from, and helping them be better coaches. Coaches as in the word coaching, rather than here, here’s your physiology textbook, and this is the muscle types.

Joan Hanscom:

Right. No, I think that there’s a huge gap there in cycling, yes, but probably broadly across all the sports. I mean, if you look at any of the sports that youth play, that adults play, and anyway, it should be play for us, right? Grownups, it’s play. I play bikes. But I think that’s a huge gap. I mean, in my 20 years of racing bikes, I’ve had good coaching and bad coaching, and it’s something where, as a person who wants to see our sport develop, grow, thrive, I think it’s one of those cornerstones of what will help the sport in this country grow, expand, thrive, and so I’m thrilled to hear that that’s something that you’re going to apply this skillset to, because it’s so important.

Joan Hanscom:

There are so many bad coaches. And there’s so many good ones, too. I’m not bashing coaches. But I personally have seen bad coaching. I’ve seen what it can do, so I’m personally thrilled that there is this professional development available, because like you said, everybody can teach you about the latest, we’ll get your athlete on a Whoop, or here’s the latest in strength training, here’s the latest gizmo. But what they’re not really doing is developing the part of the coach that then develops the mind of the athlete. And so, I think that that’s-

Lee Povey:

And we don’t… I say we, so USA Cycling, we don’t attend to that, when we look at the training they offer to coaches. If you’re a track sprint coach, there’s none. If you’re an endurance coach, there’s some. But that emotional component is either very small or nonexistent in it. And actually, that probably has the biggest impact on your ability. So, if we look in the professional work, study after study shows that soft skills are the biggest determinator into how far you’re going to go in your corporate career, and it’s the same for sports coaches. We pick sports coaches very poorly, I think, because often we look at how good they were at the sport.

Joan Hanscom:

Yes!

Lee Povey:

And that seems to be relevant for how they’re going to be as a coach. Completely different skillsets. They bear no resemblance. Even knowing how to do something well doesn’t mean you can communicate it to someone else, and being incredibly determined and single-minded yourself doesn’t mean you’ll be able to be there for somebody else and put them beyond your own ego. So, there’s a completely different skillset from being a great athlete to being a great coach. Some people make it. A lot don’t.

Lee Povey:

You look at most of the world’s leading coaches, and a variety of sports, they either didn’t do the sport, or they were fairly average at it, and had to outthink their rivals and understand the sport better to get to where they got to. I think that was for me. I wasn’t as gifted as my masters racing competitors, so I had to think, how can I get more from me? Which helped me be more analytical about the sport itself, and a student of the sport, which helped me coach.

Lee Povey:

So, I look at it as it’s just another skillset. It’s another leadership and communication skillset that we don’t teach sports coaches. We just assume they know it.

Joan Hanscom:

Right.

Lee Povey:

Yet, we teach leaders in the corporate world all the time. Like, all they’re talking about is leadership training.

Joan Hanscom:

Right.

Lee Povey:

So, I know when I haven’t had that experience, I want to bring that stuff back into sports coaching, because if you look at the effect on human beings, you’ve got your parents, you’ve got your school teachers, and you’ve got sports coaches. And as adults working with children and young people, we have the biggest effect. I can vehemently remember good sports coaches at school, and bad ones, and the effect they had on me and how they made me feel. So, that’s another part of it where we can help these coaches be that other part of creating a better society, because they have so much effect on the people that they work with. You’re such an important role model.

Joan Hanscom:

Absolutely. I think there’s so many examples of where when it’s bad, it’s destructive, and when it’s good, it does, it seeds the whole community with goodness, right? It seeds a whole community with healthy things, as opposed to destructive. And I think it’s amazing that that’s a direction that you’re also looking, because I think it’s so important, particularly now, where coaches who are working with athletes who are just like us, just like the grownups in the pandemic, who are like, well, we’re uncertain, and it’s fear, and it’s still two years later, and we still don’t know. Well, think about somebody like Maura sitting here, who just graduated from college. She spent her last year of college remote, didn’t necessarily get to have the senior year swim stuff… She’s a swimming athlete. She didn’t necessarily get to have the finish to her athletic career that she wanted.

Maura Beuttel:

No, we did.

Joan Hanscom:

But you just… Well, just using you as an example.

Maura Beuttel:

Right.

Joan Hanscom:

But kids today are just as uncertain as the grownups are, but they have coaches now that could help them manage this, just like you’re helping people manage the weirdness with your men’s group, and developing this emotional intelligence. This is a great, scary time for kids who are in school programs and whatever, so if we have better coaches, we’re just better equipping everybody to deal with this. And I think it’s really important, and it’s, again, something that… I’ve been thinking about this podcast with you since we spoke last, which I’ve just been turning it over in my head, like this is a person who has a lot to offer on an important front, particularly where we are right now. So, yeah, I think it’s amazing that that’s a direction you’re going, because I didn’t know you were going in that direction when I brought it up.

Lee Povey:

No, no, it’s really new. And thanks, Joan, I really appreciate that. I’m lucky that I’ve made so many mistakes, because the mistakes I’ve made have led me to here with all of the opportunities I’ve had to do things wrong. I had a really bad habit of going up to people and saying, hey, here’s what you’re doing wrong. It came from a place of like, I want to help you. So, it came from a place of love and a place of heart, where I’m like, hey, I can see you’re doing this thing, and you want to be better, and I want to help you. But my skillset was terrible, so my advice wasn’t received. In fact, it was seen as being belittling, and it was seen as being rude, because I’m coming up and telling you you can’t do something properly.

Lee Povey:

So, it made me have to go and up my skillset, like how do you give feedback to people? There is a skill to giving feedback in such a way that people can receive it, and the very first part of that is, you have to ask if you can give feedback. I’d missed that, all the time, just going and offering my feedback willy nilly, and people are like, who is this dude, telling me that I can’t do it properly? And I’m thinking I’m being helpful, and I’m not, because my clumsy attempt at helping them actually made them feel worse. I wasn’t taking responsibility for the impact that I was having in the way I was delivering the feedback.

Lee Povey:

So then, I had to go and learn how to do it, and this is what led me down this rabbit hole of the corporate world and leadership, and now I want to bring that back. I want to bring that back into sports coaching. I did some clinics earlier in the year on how to give feedback, and the coaches that I presented it to loved it. Presented it to a national team organization. I worked with a coach whose team was at the Olympics, and just hearing them talk about how it changed the way they coach was really exciting for me. Because it just allows you to… As a coach, your knowledge hasn’t changed. You’re telling somebody the same knowledge, but you get much more buy in as to how they receive it. So, there’s this greater harmony between you and the person that you’re working with.

Joan Hanscom:

Yeah. I think that’s incredibly important, particularly as an athlete who’s begged for feedback from coaching in the past, where you want it, and if the coach doesn’t know how to deliver it in a constructive way, then it’s pointless and it doesn’t help either of you. It makes the coach uncomfortable because they’re doing something that they don’t feel comfortable doing, and then it’s delivered to you in a way that either doesn’t help you because you can’t process it, or it’s delivered in a way that is harmful, or it’s delivered in a way that’s just irrelevant, right? Where it doesn’t penetrate, so it doesn’t succeed.

Joan Hanscom:

And so, I think that that ability to give feedback is so important, and can be so powerful, but can often be so destructive, and can really do damage. I mean, I my first, and I consider it a coaching relationship, but it wasn’t. I mean, it was a teacher-student… I was in ballet for a very long time, and ballet has a very fucked up feedback loop, let’s be honest, where the feedback is…

Lee Povey:

For sure.

Joan Hanscom:

The feedback is, you’re not thin enough, I can’t set a teacup in your clavicle.

Lee Povey:

Wow.

Joan Hanscom:

That is not helpful coaching feedback, right?

Lee Povey:

Yeah. Yeah.

Joan Hanscom:

But it’s what my frame of reference for coaching was, because that’s what I, the world that I grew up in. Oh, who has the most bones in their sternum? As the leader of this organization, we’re going to count everybody’s bones in their sternum and see who wins today.

Lee Povey:

How to mess up young people.

Joan Hanscom:

How to mess up young people.

Lee Povey:

Can put a little bit of teaching here, quickly?

Joan Hanscom:

Sure.

Lee Povey:

Around language, because I find language fascinating. So, a big mistake I see when communicating with people is telling them what we don’t want them to do, rather than what we do want them to do. So, you talk about the effectiveness of communicating stuff and giving your feedback as a coach. So many times I’d hear people say, I don’t want you to do this. You can’t not do something. We have to do something. So, it’s much more effective to talk about what you want people to do.

Lee Povey:

And the example from cycling that always comes to mind is, everybody shouting from the sidelines, don’t be at the back, Johnny. Where do you want me to be, then? So instead, you’re talking to your athlete about making sure that after they’ve done, they’ve changed the tracking to the top third of the race, and how to do that. So, you go high, so you can see the whole field, you look for the gap, and you come in with some aggression so that you can get the gap.

Lee Povey:

Don’t be at the back isn’t something I can do. I can’t do that. So, that’s not helping me, because it’s not telling me what I need to do. So, just understanding that, and think about what you want people to do, rather than what you don’t want them to do, is the really effective way of getting people to change their behavior.

Lee Povey:

And then, there’s the other part of the, appreciate the stuff that they’re doing well. Big failing for me as a coach is being so focused on what people need to change, you miss reinforcing what they’re doing well. So then, they hear just a lot of critical feedback, like hey, you need to do this different. Hey, you need to do that different. Instead of, you’re doing this really well, let’s reward you for that, or let’s emphasize what you’re doing really well.

Lee Povey:

And that could be anything. That could be attitude you bring to a training session. That could be being able to hold a really good arm position while you’re doing a hard sprint effort. It can be, hey, I noticed that you’re always the first person here and set up first. Anything can be reinforced, and that also then helps people be able to perform at a higher level.

Joan Hanscom:

So, that’s an excellent, excellent point, I think, for us to almost wrap up on, because you’ve been on, this has been an hour. We’ve already been talking for an hour, which is unbelievable. I feel like we’ve been talking for five minutes, and I could keep going forever and ever. But it’s been an hour, and you have a real job to attend to. Let’s focus in for our listeners. When you are selecting a coach, when you are establishing a coaching relationship, in your mind, Lee Povey, what should somebody be looking for up front when they’re saying, I need a new coach? How do you put them truth this litmus test of, is this a person… From your perspective, anyway. Is this a person that will address my mental, emotional wellbeing as much as the training plan, right? What would your five points of assessment be for a parent looking for a coach, or a master looking for a coach?

Lee Povey:

Okay, so point one, are they curious about me as a human being? On the first of all, are they telling me everything that they’re going to do for me, or are they asking about me? Are they asking about my history? Are they asking about what works for me, what doesn’t work for me? And just curious, rather than trying to tell me. Are they trying to understand me?

Lee Povey:

Are they honest? Are they honest? Are they telling me the feedback that I need to hear, or do they just tell me things to make me feel good about myself? Because there’s a sales element to coaching, unfortunately, where people… We had a coach in the UK that would always give people faster times than they’ve done, and then these athletes have come to a clinic me and my friend Dave run, and we never lied about time. We’d give them their time, and they’re like, well, with this other guy, I was a second faster. And we’re like, no, he’s just lying to you about the time. So, honesty is really important. You can’t improve if they’re not honest. It’s hard for you to.

Lee Povey:

How do their other athletes view them? I would speak to the other athletes, like what’s their relationship like? Is there a good boundary between friendly and professional? Like, is this person able to hold good boundaries, or are they over-friendly? Are they inserting themselves into your life? Especially for female athletes and younger athletes, are they inserting themselves into your life so much that those boundaries are being crossed, or are they good at knowing the difference between we have an interpersonal relationship, and then here’s where that stops?

Lee Povey:

Because a coaching relationship can be really close. I’ve had athletes tell me some really deep things about themselves. Yet, I still maintain the boundary of I am your coach. I’m not your friend. And if we develop a friendship that’s outside of the coaching relationship, these things are different, and how will you hold the boundary about it?

Lee Povey:

Do they know their sport? Like, do they understand their sport? Do they understand the technical element of their sport? I’d ask them to give me some feedback on something. I’d send them a video of me racing and say, can you give me feedback on that? And see how they approach giving you the feedback. Are they able to give feedback? Because if you’re just starting out, if you have somebody that writes a basic training program for you, and who’s a cheerleader, and just, yeah, you’re doing really great, that’s going to get you a very short way. Then you’re going to need somebody that can provide you with actual technical feedback.

Lee Povey:

And then, I would be like, how do I feel about this person? Does this person make me feel good in their company, or does this person make me feel crappy in their company, like I’m not good enough, like I don’t belong? And are they good at separating their own need for me to do well because it looks good from them, from my need for me to do well? That’s one of the things, one little tidbit about coaching, and this is more track-specific: I don’t like seeing coaches giving the rider lots of information just before they’re about to race. You see it on the start line, and they’re like right in their rider’s face, and they’re trying to hype him up, or they’re giving him a load of information. At that point, it’s too late for the rider to absorb what’s going on.

Lee Povey:

The most I would do is, I’d roll the rider up to the line, pat them on the back, and say, go smash this. Or, remember you’re faster. Or one coaching element at most like, be prepared for them, to go from the gut. One thing. If somebody’s giving a lot of technical information, for me, they don’t understand how somebody learns. You do that in the pits when we’re all calm. You get them prepared, you watch the videos, whatever you need to do. Rolling up to the line, the athlete needs to get into their correct state to be able to perform. Just let them do it.

Lee Povey:

And sometimes there’s a performative element, where you see coaches, and it’s almost like they’re showing off for people in the stands. And it’s like, no, my job is to step back. The athlete is the person who’s here to go and show you what they’re capable of. My job is just to hold a space for them to do that, and that is it, whatever they need. And if the athlete particularly wants you to hype them up, then sure, if they’re requesting that. But again, it’s knowing the difference between is it my ego I’m fulfilling at the moment, or am I looking after the best needs of this person that I’m working with?

Joan Hanscom:

Yeah. All right. So, for our listeners, I think you are not going to get better advice on selecting a coach than that, and I also think that that is a lens in which all of us who are in coaching relationships should evaluate that relationship, because it is a relationship, and it should be evaluated on an ongoing basis. Is this working? Are we meeting these measures? Are we following this sort of great roadmap that you just laid out? Because if you’re not, there are questions to be asked, I think.

Joan Hanscom:

And so I think, yes, thank you for stating that so clearly, and I think it’s absolutely important for people to listen to when they think about their coaching relationships, like all of it. The boundaries. The is it my ego, is it you? All of it is so incredibly important when you’re evaluating your coaching relationship or selecting a new one. So, thank you for that.

Lee Povey:

I got all of those things wrong at some point or other, I’m sure. So, it’s not like there’s some perfect way of doing this.

Joan Hanscom:

No, but it’s good to have those things.

Lee Povey:

But if the coach is striving to do that… Now, if the coach is in that great mindset of striving to always make sure they’re addressing those areas, and they’re getting better at them, that’s somebody I would work with. And there’s coaches I’ve come across I think are just awesome, and I’m like, I’d really like to work with them, either as a colleague or as an athlete. And then there’s others that just make me feel icky, or make me feel small around them, like it’s all about them, and I would not want to work with them.

Lee Povey:

And did think it’s important to people to realize, you can change coaches. I don’t think you need to change coaches every five minutes. If you’re not getting what you emotionally want from that relationship, don’t think you have to stay in it. You get to change coaches.

Joan Hanscom:

Yeah. Fascinating. Thank you, Lee. It’s been terrific.

Lee Povey:

Thank you, Joan.

Joan Hanscom:

We’re going to put all of this good stuff in our show notes, and I just have one more thing that came up in our research, and then I’m going to let you go.

Lee Povey:

Oh, dear.

Joan Hanscom:

So, according to one website, Cycling Shorts, you enjoy trashy American TV shows, such as Gossip Girl and How I Met Your Mother. Is this true?

Lee Povey:

Absolutely, 100%. My favorite one at the moment is You on Netflix. I binged the hell out of that this weekend.

Joan Hanscom:

All right.

Lee Povey:

Yeah.

Joan Hanscom:

Okay. See, for our listeners…

Lee Povey:

And even worse, I’m just going to out myself now, even worse, I really like singing talent shows.

Joan Hanscom:

Oh, no.

Lee Povey:

I hate the drama that goes with it. I have to fast forward the story. I don’t care where they come from. I don’t care what’s happened to their parents. I don’t care about any of that. I just like the bit where they sing and they’re really good. I can’t watch the audition shows. I can’t watch the ones that are rubbish and delusional. Like, it angers me. I just want to listen to people that are really good at singing. Like, I really, really like really good singers.

Joan Hanscom:

All right, see? I’m glad I brought this up. So, this is where we’re going to end. Fan of Gossip Girl, fan of How I Met Your Mother, and fan of singing shows. Lee Povey, you have been amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the pod. I hope our listeners take the time to really listen to this one, because there was a lot of good that was discussed in here, a lot of deep thoughts, I think. Yes, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a real joy and an honor to have you on, and yeah, look him up, folks.

Lee Povey:

Thank you, Joan. And yeah, I mean just, if anybody wants to talk about these concepts further, if there’s any coaches out there that want to talk to me about this kind of stuff, message me. I offer a free consultation to anybody that wants to talk about this kind of stuff. So, yeah, reach out to me.

Joan Hanscom:

Fantastic. Thanks, Lee.

Joan Hanscom:

Thank you for listening. This has been the Talk of the T-Town Podcast. I’m your host, Joan Hanscom. Thank you for joining us for this week’s episode. Head over to our website at TheVelodrome.com, where you can check out the show notes and subscribe, so you’ll never miss an episode.