Jeanine Bailey: Hello and welcome listeners to the next episode of the Empower World Coaching and Leadership podcast. And I am here today, not with my wonderful partner, Marie. Instead, I'm here with my wonderful colleague, friend, Sunni Smith. Sunni Smith, I'm so delighted that you are with me on this podcast because as I mentioned earlier, it's been some time that I've been aiming to get you on, so I'm so pleased that you're here, so thank you for being here today.

Sunni Smith: Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. It's a great pleasure.

Jeanine Bailey: And so I've known Sunni Smith now, I think for a number of years. We met initially through Damien Goldvarg's supervision course. So I was supporting Damien on that course and that's how we got to connect. And through that, of course, we've partnered together, we have seen each other through various different networks and of course from time to time we connect one-to-one. And although we haven't met each other in person as yet, I hope that we will one day, Sunni Smith.

Sunni Smith: I hope that we will. It feels like it already. When you just mentioned that, I realised that was true. You know, I attended Converge, the ICF conference, and I saw some people for the first time in the flesh. It was really interesting.

Jeanine Bailey: It is, isn't it? And I think COVID really gave us that opportunity to connect and meet with so many people across the globe. It was, for me, a wonderful time of making some wonderful connections. But yes, now that we can travel, I hope that we can meet at last, face to face.

Sunni Smith: Absolutely.

Jeanine Bailey: So, Sunni Smith, over to you to introduce yourself. I'd love the listeners to hear your incredible experience.

Sunni Smith: Well, one of the things we were talking about, I think before we started the podcast, was the things that life affords you and brings to you. It's never kind of what you always expect, and I feel like my journey has not been particularly linear, you know, but very off on tributaries and circles or things that have... but it all comes together eventually, as you mature and develop, it makes sense. It starts to have continuity and starts to have purpose, even more purpose and direction.

I am first generation here in the US. I have family who is Caribbean from Jamaica. So I was brought up in a household that was very open and we had people at our dinner table from all different countries all the time. So I thought having an accent was normal. My father had an accent, other people had different accents, and it was quite a while before I realised that there was something that was a majority kind of speech pattern, I guess is what I'm saying. And that was good.

I think my parents also were very involved in the civil rights movement, so I got a good foundation in that. I grew up on the East Coast in New York. And we even moved into an all-white neighbourhood on Long Island for a while and experienced a lot of hostility - rocks being thrown through our windows - it was a John Birch kind of area.

Then going to college, I wanted to... I also had a personal experience with having a disability and I studied psychology, got a master's degree in rehabilitation. And then went on to do consulting work and it was there that someone said to me, "I think you should go to law school." I said, "Who, me? No. It's not in the cards." But again, that started to be like a seed that grew and grew, and I eventually went to law school. But a lot of what I did was still in purpose in terms of supporting and helping other people. People who were less fortunate than I, even though my family was not wealthy or rich or anything, but it was instilled in me to always reach back and help others.

And when I actually got a fellowship and came out to the West Coast, I ran into an attorney who was a coach. I said, "I don't understand what you do." And she explained, and I said, "Gee, that feels really familiar. I've been doing that all my life," and that's what led me to coaching. As a matter of fact, you probably don't know, but I was in Damien Goldbarg's very first coaching class that he ever taught.

Jeanine Bailey: Really? No, I did not know.

Sunni Smith: Yeah, so that's some history. And again, here we're full circle. He introduced me to coaching supervision. Absolutely love it, it took my coaching to a whole new level. And, you know, sometimes when you study and you're in a profession, do things over and over and over again, you sort of say, "Is this all there is?" Well, supervision taught me, no, that's not all there is. A one-on-one coaching situation... and here we go, full circle. This year, I contributed to the book The Practice of Coaching Supervision Groups, which is akin, but different, than one-on-one supervision, just like coaching teams is different than coaching groups of leaders who are not coaches.

So you have all these different permutations of coaching and how it can really impact people and organisations and systems and have this kind of ripple effect. I even work with a lot of nonprofits and NGOs. I have a particular programme I've developed called TACT - which stands for Technical Assistance and Coach Training - where I parallel technical training for leaders in NGOs and nonprofits with coaching concepts. And to tell you the truth, the coaching is the glue that makes the technical stuff stick.

So we may present a segment on grant writing and proposal writing and then also talk about, from a coaching concept, what these terms mean and how to express what the nonprofit or the NGO does in a community impact, in a different way than even funders look at it. Or budgeting and your attitudes towards money and how that influences decision making on a management and leadership level.

Jeanine Bailey: Wow, Sunni Smith, thank you, thank you for sharing. That was a nutshell, I guess.

Sunni Smith: A nutshell.

Jeanine Bailey: It was really wonderful to hear what you have shared about your journey, and we did talk about that earlier before we started the podcast - about the journey and coming full circle, coming back home, potentially enriched, enhanced, wiser.

And as you were sharing about your journey, what I really appreciated was, as you say, the depth of coaching - what doors coaching can open, what different pathways, fields that we can go into as a coach. And hearing also your background, given your legal background and working with technical experts and leaders, and hearing how there are all sorts of different combinations of how we can support leaders to step into their brilliance even more, to enhance what they do even more with that relational side. So yes, thank you for sharing all of that, Sunni Smith. And I'm just curious - we said we'd just have an emergent conversation. We would see what comes up. So as I reflect that back to you, I'm wondering: what's popping up for you right now?

Sunni Smith: Oh, probably a number of different things. You touched on the artistic side. I had the opportunity to work and become certified in what's called ABE - arts-based experiential learning. You know, when I was coming up, my mother and her friends thought I would end up being in the arts because I was in dance and theatre, and it's still a very deep and attractive part of me - that kind of expression. And I love film and I love watching film and I'm getting more into writing and things like that.

But when I heard that there was actual data - actual research and experimentation - with the arts and leadership and how executives can become extremely more innovative when they have experiential, meaning really active interaction, in coaching with the arts... I thought this was great. I just also like to deconstruct the normal patterns.

But I've used that theory and approach quite a bit with my coaching groups, especially whether it's coaching a group of attorneys, or when I used it doing a presentation with a coaching school in China. And even though it was my first experience with that deep translation - hearing in one ear someone speaking Chinese and then it being translated to me - I was processing all of this at the same time. But I did an experiential activity with 200 Chinese coaches. Not live, but through Zoom. It was great.

I didn't know whether it would really work or whether it would land in a way that was inspirational for them, but it was. And they had to draw a figure just on a piece of paper. It wasn't anything complicated and you don't have to be an artist to do this. But what it reveals is your approach and your strategy and decision-making about how you will approach something you have not seen before, that is not explained to you, and how you go about discovering a method. It was amazing how many people really did really well. When I say well - with the drawing - the purpose is to duplicate like a Xerox copy of what they see, never seen before. And it worked out really well. I think it revealed to people the differences and that they don't have to be subject matter experts in drawing to do something that's meaningful.

Jeanine Bailey: It's like, wow, that is incredible - 200 people over Zoom.

Sunni Smith: Yes, 3000 miles away.

Jeanine Bailey: You've had an incredible variety of different types of coaching roles, supervision roles, and used various different creative ways to support individuals, teams, groups. I read earlier also about bringing in art with a leadership team that you worked with, and I felt that was a really powerful way to support the leadership team. Would you be happy to share what that was like?

Sunni Smith: Sure, yeah. It was great. I think bridging from the example that I just gave you about the Chinese coaches, this was a legal department at a Fortune 250 company - about 30 people, everyone from risk management to employment attorneys, some of them non-attorneys. And again, this was over Zoom. So I was brought into a retreat on screen.

We were talking about collaboration versus co-creation. And of course, the concept of co-creation was a little different from what people had heard before, and I was working with them to distinguish the elements of each. And we did this drawing exercise the same way. And one of the attorneys had had a 360. At the end, I said, "What did this tell you? What was your experience like?" And he said, "To be honest with you, I didn't follow the instructions. I'm gonna admit that. And after I looked back and I saw everybody else doing it the way you were supposed to do it, I changed it at the end. I remember reading in my 360 that people said I micromanage. It suddenly hit me that maybe I do. That I have to have it my way. And this was a perfect example. It didn't impact anyone but me, but I changed the directions because I wanted it my way." He said that was quite an eye-opener.

Jeanine Bailey: Thank you. I had Batman, my cat, in the background, so I was attempting to not bring him into our podcast, but he somehow has snuck in as I'm mentioning him. And what I was saying was - that is incredible, isn't it? That something that seems like it wouldn't be so powerful was indeed powerful for him. Creating a powerful insight where he becomes at choice as to whether to continue down that route or not, of micromanaging.

Sunni Smith: Yeah, it's very interesting. I think about just the different people that I have had the fortunate opportunity to impact. And I thought about another attorney. I was in a group where I facilitated individuals going through the Holocaust museum, and we had parents of students from a particular school. One was an attorney. And he was talking about how he has a teenager that he can get no real conversation with.

We discussed ways to actually reach people, to be more open to that. So we did a little role-play in front of the audience and I said, "Okay, I'm gonna be you and you have to be your daughter." So he said, "I pick her up from school, I go, 'How was school?' - 'Fine.' 'What did you do?' - 'Nothing.'" You know, like he couldn't get conversation. And I tried something new. I said, as the father, "If you were the teacher, how would you teach that class?" And he looked at me... young people don't ever think that parents or adults bestow to them the wisdom of what should be done. So he said, "Well, I would have taught it outside." I said, "That's a great idea. And how would you get the class to all go outside?" And suddenly there was a conversation happening because the dynamics shifted - not father-daughter, but person-to-person - and it opened up anything. What her idea of what should have been taught and the way it should be taught had legitimacy. It wasn't "You go to school to listen to the teacher because the teacher knows it all."

You know, I teach part-time, and being able to say to students, "I really don't know. I think that's something we could discover or find out," because it's a good point. But I don't know. And we don't know everything. We never will know everything. And I use the Johari window - the things you know you know, the things you know you don't know... but I'm down there at the fourth window. You want to access the things you don't know you don't know. They're in our collective consciousness as a people, as human beings. And again, the human being - not human doing. But we spend more time doing than being. Which is one of the principles and pillars of coaching - to learn how to be rather than just do. You are not all of what you do. There's a part of you that is just being. It's where our humility lies.

Jeanine Bailey: It really does, doesn't it? And I think more than ever, we are being called to come back to our being. The doing is potentially creating what is... the challenges that are happening today - the incredible challenges on so many levels: environmental, mental, resources, biodiversity loss, etc. The doing is potentially ramping those challenges up, whereas I believe, and I know many do, that if we can come back to being, there's less demand on our beautiful planet.

Sunni Smith: Exactly. I was talking to someone and it always comes up for me because I had the fortunate opportunity to train with someone who passed away unfortunately, but taught me the elements of trust - transparency, relationship building, understanding, shared success, and then telling the truth - T R U S T. She said in one of our year-long sessions, "What does it mean to understand someone?" And everyone was using understand to define understanding. And she stopped everyone and said, "It's not that difficult. To understand means to stand under someone else's reality." And this goes to the conflicts, disagreements, polarisation that is occurring all over the world globally.

It struck me so much that I developed an exercise around understanding. When I work with groups, I bring in an umbrella. When someone has a truth they'd like to express, they take the umbrella and stand up and share their truth. Anyone in the group who can understand that person - stand under their reality - comes and stands with them under the umbrella. It doesn't mean you have to adopt that truth. It doesn't mean you have to change your beliefs or your values. It just means you're open enough to stand under that person's reality. Then you go back to your seat and maintain your own reality. But we need more of that understanding - in our conversations, interactions, politically, socially, healthcare-wise. We need it desperately in education.

Jeanine Bailey: I really appreciate you bringing in that beautiful example of how people get to speak their truth. But to somatically cement that, bring that learning in even more - make it even more powerful - that understanding... it really makes it come alive in a way that just talking about it does not.

Sunni Smith: And you can see it. I'm a very visual person. People refer to coaching as woo-woo - "I don't want to get into all of that." And I think we separate ourselves from our being. You mentioned somatics - when I learned how much my body is integrated and talks to me constantly... we have more than one brain. There's an intellectual brain, a heart brain, and a gut brain. That's why people say "Go with your gut" - because there's wisdom and knowledge in your gut. Your body is constantly telling you "This is not comfortable, this is not right, we need something else."

I do a grounding exercise with yawning. People think yawning means you're bored - and it's not necessarily so. Taking in that extra oxygen increases oxytocin, the good hormone, and serotonin. It makes you feel focused. And pets yawn. Babies yawn in utero. It's natural. Combined with a power pose, it can put you mentally in a different state of readiness, focus and attention.

Jeanine Bailey: Yes, thank you for sharing that. I have heard that before and I'd completely forgotten about it, so thank you for bringing it back in. It's interesting - when you talked about focus, your camera was zooming in and out.

Sunni Smith: We learned how to teach it to do that, but I still think... I am definitely supportive of AI in degrees. But human-being contact - I don't think they'll ever duplicate or mimic that. There's still that personal human component that's irreplaceable.

Jeanine Bailey: Yes. It's that part of us that picks up energy and physiology and intuition - things that AI as far as I know cannot do yet. But yes, it's becoming increasingly sophisticated. But I don't think it will ever mimic that at all - certainly the real heart and soul of being with another human being.

Sunni Smith: I think the only thing that would make me believe is if a bot started to cry. Then I'd say, OK, maybe. And I don't think that's going to happen.

Jeanine Bailey: No. Let's hope not. And so, Sunni Smith, I know when we got together before the podcast, we were talking about the book that you contributed to in relation to group supervision, and there was a saying that came up - what was it? Hopefully you remember it. The "meeting of the minds" I think you shared. So as we start to wrap up, maybe there is something from that you'd like to share.

Sunni Smith: Well, that came from a very legal-based concept, but in coaching we have the meeting of the minds and the joining of the hearts. We go a step further than just the intellectual agreement. There is more to it. In our chapter, Co-creating Coherence, it took us a while to come up with that title. But co-creation is so important. That involvement, connection, goes beyond what is agreed to. It is the sensing, the awareness, the inclusion that makes that meeting of the minds so powerful. It is what allows us to check that agreement to make sure we're still on the same page. It is that coherence that allows us to mutually celebrate reaching a goal. Coaching takes things to another level - another depth of understanding and impact. It helps our intention come together with purpose and fulfilment.

Jeanine Bailey: Yeah. I believe that too, Sunni Smith. And we know a coaching conversation is like no other conversation. And I would say supervision is another level again. And who knows - there may be a third level we don't know about yet. But that's where innovation exists.

Sunni Smith: Exactly. And the supervision profession of coaches is still in its infancy. So there's lots more development to come. And I just thank you, Sunni Smith, and everyone involved in the book. I have got it - I haven't started to read it yet. I have forgotten the title.

Sunni Smith: The Practice of Coaching Supervision Groups. And it's on a circles model which I really like - no beginning, no end, it just continues. There are components inside it and outside - applications at the end. Applications to teams, to leaders, to general groups that are not necessarily coaching groups. The book has practical insights for both individuals wanting to become supervisors and those who want to participate. It looks at it from both angles. And it asks a lot of questions - which is what coaching is about - questioning and discovery.

Jeanine Bailey: Yes, absolutely. And I thought my book was somewhere around me, but...

Sunni Smith: I have a copy if you want me to hold it. I keep it on my desk. This is what it looks like. I love this graphic - it moves for me, it has a lot of colour and movement, and it's about the ripple effect of coaching and supervision, how it impacts all of us.

Jeanine Bailey: It's a beautiful metaphor - that image - in terms of coaching, in terms of supervision. And I am really looking forward to diving into it, as most of my supervision work is with groups. I do love group supervision. I love being part of a group being supervised. It feels impactful and draws out the best in everyone.

Sunni Smith: And a bonus for your listeners: through a little past the middle of January, you can still get a 20% discount using the code 25SME. If you use that code on the Routledge site - not Amazon - you can get 20% off the book.

Jeanine Bailey: Fantastic. And that is up until January 2026 for anyone listening.

Sunni Smith: Yes, through around January 19th. You'll see it on the website.

Jeanine Bailey: So, Sunni Smith, as we wrap up, I'm wondering what you might like to share with our listeners about yourself, or anything that comes to mind based on what we've been sharing.

Sunni Smith: Oh, there's so much. I feel like there are not enough hours in a day that I can read and hear and think and be graced by others' perceptions, knowledge, insight and information. But I think when we look to see people... An artist - Robert Irwin - said something like, "To really see someone is to see them without knowing their name." So I can see Jeanine without remembering her name - the name becomes unimportant when you really see someone. It's the person, the full being you begin to see, beyond the label. And we label each other in all kinds of ways.

Jeanine Bailey: Yes we do, and thank you for sharing that. I'm going to walk away from this conversation with the intention of whoever I see, to really see them - to really pay attention and see them beyond their name.

Sunni Smith: Beyond their description, race, gender, ability... if we can let go of those characteristics and biases - and biases can be good too - but to really see people. I think the world would be a better place.

Jeanine Bailey: I so agree. If we can see the heart of the person we're connecting with... and open our hearts to make that connection.

Sunni Smith: That's it.

Jeanine Bailey: That is it, Sunni Smith. And I really appreciate you sharing about your journey. It feels like such a privilege to hear that journey you've been on and coming full circle.

Sunni Smith: Yes, and continuing every day.

Jeanine Bailey: And thank you for sharing your experiences with our audience. I'm trusting that people will be taking away some wonderful things to experiment with, to play with, to try on. And may we all have the courage to just be.

Sunni Smith: Absolutely.

Jeanine Bailey: Thank you so much.

Sunni Smith: Thank you.

Jeanine Bailey: It's been a real privilege to have this conversation with you. And for listeners, we encourage you to find out or connect with Sunni Smith through the links on the webpage, so that again you can reach out if you would like to do so - we encourage that.

Sunni Smith: Absolutely.

Jeanine Bailey: Thanks again, Sunni Smith.