Gemma Page: Building confidence amidst life's juggling act

TL;DR

• My first guest on the Takeaway, and the first episode on video: Gemma Page CPCC, my wife and a confidence coach.
• Gemma on building a business, and what it's like doing that alongside someone who runs businesses.
• Her week: reconnecting after the summer, and a son who has settled into secondary school.
• What she's been reading on self-esteem and self-efficacy, and why both come down to practice.
• Her relearning about curiosity and play, via Dr. Becky Kennedy and Chris Voss on the same podcast.
• Her Friday takeaway: the one moment in the day when nothing is being asked of you.

Introducing my first guest, Gemma

Two firsts this week. I've video recorded the episode, and I've got a guest.

Given this is supposed to be a behind-the-scenes look at my life and what's going on in it, uncensored and uncut, I thought there was no better guest to have than Gemma Page CPCC , my wife.

Gem and I met at university on the very first day. We didn't get together for some months afterwards, but we were definitely best friends from day one. We've now been together for over 20 years, we have two kids, and we have a dog who spent the entire recording wandering around our feet.

Gemma is a confidence coach. She works with individuals and organisations to help them feel more confident in high-pressure moments, and what a high-pressure moment is for one person or organisation is wildly different to the next. She retrained as a coach during COVID, while I was building 7DOTS and she was looking after the kids and homeschooling with our daughter only six months old. She then had an epiphany that she should be combining her previous life as a drama teacher with the coaching, so she now works on voice, breath and posture alongside coaching the inner critic, self-esteem and core beliefs.

It never fails to amaze me, the impact she has on people's lives and the feedback she gets. I take my hat off to her.

Gemma on building a business

When you train to be a teacher, you're told you can teach anyone. Same with coaching. You're told you can coach anybody, which is also true if the person is willing to be coached. Gemma knows how to do those things. But a huge part of building a business is the marketing and the strategy and all the things behind it, and it didn't even occur to her that it was something she would need to do. That's been a steep learning curve.

People find it hard to stand up and say, this is what I'm good at, and I charge money for it. Putting yourself out there in that way can feel really daunting.

I said at the time that sales is such a difficult skill. A lot of people's perception of sales is that you can just learn it like you're a second-hand car salesperson and then it's really easy. But the point is to do it genuinely, and that's just very different to how you go about life.

Then there's doing all of that alongside someone like me. Challenging, she said, with a laugh. A lot of juggling and a lot of communication. Sometimes we get things really right and it feels like we're winning at life and work and home, and then other times it's a huge imbalance. 7DOTS , which Ed Gossage and I have grown together, is the business that takes priority, and Gemma does her hours between when the children are at school, so fitting everything in around that is where the challenge comes for her.

Earlier on in 7DOTS she was able to take a career break and be at home with the children, which she loved doing. She didn't feel as though work made up her identity. Now the children are older and she's focusing back on her career, so we're having to re-jiggle things and figure it out again.

That made me think. I spent so much time with my identity strongly linked to the business, too much so, and I'm now trying to create more separation and have more of my identity outside of work. For Gemma it's been almost the opposite way around. We don't really talk about this. We should talk about it more.

Gemma's week

• Things have ramped up. We're nearly at the end of September, and the conversations she was having with people and organisations before the summer went completely quiet during August. So this week has been about reconnecting with people, arranging coffees and meetings, and reaching out to new potential clients and organisations.
• Building up case studies, and different ways of promoting her work and the products she's working on.
• Our son has just started secondary school. He doesn't love school. He loves being with people and socialising, but sitting down behind a desk is not his favourite thing to do. She has been really impressed with how he's settled in, and it's only three weeks.
• Because he's happier in the mornings, and our daughter is always quite happy to skip off to school, the mornings haven't felt so emotionally charged. We both feel like we've got a bit more capacity.

That last one is mostly down to her. Gemma carries a lot more of the load around all of it, both the emotional and the logistical side, and I'm super grateful for it. I don't say that enough.

Something Gemma's been thinking about

The difference between self-esteem and self-efficacy. She's been reading around self-esteem, self-efficacy and motivation, and the studies that started in the 1970s. (She could only remember his first name during the recording and asked me to put it in the notes, so here it is: Albert Bandura.)

Self-esteem is how you view yourself and what your self-worth is. Self-efficacy is how you think you can do a particular task. Somebody might say they feel really confident delivering their presentation to two people, but the idea of doing it in front of 100 feels really challenging, and they don't think they can do that yet.

If somebody comes with that kind of self-efficacy, it's more about giving them tools. Breath work, communication, how to present, things they can build evidence with. Where somebody has lower self-esteem, it's more coaching around the inner critic, why that's there and what the blockers are. There's no quick fix, and you can't introduce the tools straight away.

What the two have in common is the idea of practising. If your self-esteem is low, it's really hard work, but you have to practise talking to that inner voice and being kinder to yourself. If it's more that you're not sure you can do the task yet, it's about practising the task.

She's only just started reading around it, and doesn't have the answers yet, but it's already changing how she thinks about the work she does.

A lesson from Gemma's week

Hers was a relearning, which is of course allowed, because there are no rules here.

She was listening to a podcast with Dr. Becky Kennedy, the child psychologist she's always quoting at me, and the guest was Chris Voss who I'm a massive fan of. I couldn't quite picture the two of them on a podcast together, a child psychologist and an FBI hostage negotiator.

The relearning was about leading conversations and connections with curiosity. Even if you don't agree with what somebody is saying, if you can be curious about it, it opens up communication and connection more successfully. The two of them disagreed a few times during the podcast, including on whether a toddler's tantrum is learned behaviour, and they navigated it through curiosity rather than shutting each other down.

The second part was about being playful. Our daughter didn't want to brush her teeth because she was in the middle of playing a game, so Gemma got curious about why, joined in the game, and got her to brush her teeth as part of it.

My reaction to all of that. I think if every human being went into situations with more curiosity and empathy, the world would probably be a much, much better place. We all too often go in with our own perspective and point of view before we seek to understand.

And on the play bit, I actually think there should be more play at work. Appropriate play, obviously. So many businesses and people just sit for eight hours a day behind a screen, hardly moving, and that's just not how we're designed to be. As Gemma said, play evolves as we get older, but there's a seriousness to growing up and being at work, and people lose connection with that part of themselves.

The Friday Takeaway

This week's is Gemma's.

She'd been listening to another of her favourites, Happy Place with Fearne Cotton, with Monty Don as the guest. He was asked what holiday meant to him, and he said a holiday is when there are no demands placed upon him. He'll still garden on holiday, because to him that's a joy and not a demand.

That got her thinking. When you're on holiday with your children, there is no time when there are no demands, because you're with your kids. That's just life when you have children.

So the reason she gets up before them to read, exercise and have a coffee isn't really about the exercise or getting ahead in the day. It's the only time of day she can sit with a hot drink and not have any demands placed on her. Our two are up at six, half six, so that moment is vital to how her day starts.

I love that. We all need a bit more of that, whatever time of day it is.

Mine, for the record, is don't record an episode of this when you've got a cocker spaniel in the room who is obsessed with being really close to you. Mabel didn't leave our side, however cute she is.

One last confession. It's really funny sitting there talking about the Friday Takeaway when it's named after the fact we have a Friday takeaway nearly every Friday. Probably shouldn't admit that. Although as Gemma said, the week is busy, it's all logistics and cooking and clearing up, so the Friday takeaway is a chance to connect and catch up on the week. Which is exactly what this is.

Thank you to Gemma for being my first guest.

Until next week...

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