Imteaz and Pete Roxburgh discuss the importance of developing meaningful relationships in personal and professional contexts in this podcast. Pete, a life coach, emphasizes the importance of being genuinely invested in your clients and colleagues to achieve the best outcomes.
To build a meaningful relationship, one must share information and feedback. Pete stresses that this goes beyond simply sharing work-related information, but also includes personal information that helps build trust and a deeper connection.
Imteaz shares that the friends he admires the most are willing to give honest feedback and help him improve. He emphasizes that flattery is not helpful and that he values quality advice over empty compliments.
Both Imteaz and Pete stress the importance of following through on commitments. Pete quotes Zig Ziglar: “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” Imteaz adds that committing to something and not following through is worse than not committing at all.
To Pete, the essence of a meaningful relationship is not necessarily friendship, but instead operating beyond a transactional level. He emphasizes finding meaning in life and focusing on the big picture. Stephen Covey’s advice to “start with the end in mind” resonates with Pete and Imteaz.
Ultimately, building a meaningful relationship takes work. Pete encourages people to reach out to him on his website, petecoach.com, to learn more about his approach to life coaching and building meaningful relationships.
Building a meaningful relationship takes trust, honesty, and follow-through. One can build deep and meaningful personal and professional connections by sharing information, providing honest feedback, and committing to follow through.
Connect with Pete Roxburgh on LinkedIn and visit his website to learn more about his work.
Hosted by: Imteaz Ahamed
Podcast Transcript: Imteaz and Pete Roxburgh
Imteaz: Hi, everyone, and welcome to Applied Intelligence. I’m Imti, as our major host.
Imteaz: Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing someone I’ve been working with for quite some time now, I think just over six months. His name is Pete Roxberg; he’s my coach. So
Imteaz: Pete is a personal development and startup coach, working in the field for many, many years. And today we’re gonna have a wonderful conversation about the importance f having a coach in your development. And… what they can unlock for you. So Pete, welcome to the show.
[Pete]: Well, thanks for having me. Great to see you again in Tiazans. Welcome everyone else.
Imteaz: So let’s get into who Pete is and how he got to being a coach. I think becoming a coach is an interesting journey given you don’t necessarily wake up or go to school thinking that you’re going to end up being a professional coach. How did you end up here?
[Pete]: You’re completely right. It is a journey because, you know, when we first met, I gave you the story. And everyone has their story, which is just really an extended elevator pitch. And I don’t know. Maybe we want to go a little bit more into the non-pretty fine version, the actual journey today. Sound good?
Imteaz: Sound good, let’s do it.
[Pete]: Okay, well, you know, you’d said to me previously, what if I broke it, my journey into five chunks, five chapters, if you like, which got me thinking because of course, there’s lots of ways to do it. Chapter one, two, three, four, five, for example. But I really looked at it and thought more about the emotional state that I was in.
[Pete]: It’s probably quite a nice way to look at your life. for anyone. Mine started with this kind of strange mix of anxiety and adventure. As a kid, I was a Peter Pan character. And yeah, I was living in a fantasy world a lot of the time, and I think maybe quite a few of us are. But that kind of swings and roundabouts because it made school very difficult at times. I was also very small. I was like the smallest kid in the go
Imteaz: I’m gonna
[Pete]: class. And I was vegetarian in the like 70s and 80s, which was kind of a bit freaky at the time. And I didn’t like sports. It wasn’t the greatest time in school but got through it mostly by just selling things, hustling, surviving. And I think there’s probably a lot of people that have that of sentiment of surviving school. What about ourself?
Imteaz: To me, school, from a primary school point of view, I went to four different primary schools because my parents and I, you know, we moved around a lot in my younger years. And then, which, you know, meant that every, you know, so often, I would have to learn the skills of making new friends and working out how I was going to fit into the new social clique. In high school, however, I went to one high school.
Imteaz:Which you know, I had to work very hard to get into it was a government It was a selective school for boys, but it was a public school which had to do an entrance exam to get into that school I would say Equipped me in a lot of ways to Really learn how to learn and appreciate learning So, you know every kid goes through bullying, everything goes through social issues and whatnot.
Imteaz: ut overall, my high school experience was very positive in terms of forming who I am today. You have the challenges that everyone has, but the teachers that I had really understood what education was meant to be for.
Imteaz: Right. So my most influential teacher, it was in the 11th; she was my English teacher in the 11th and 12th grades.
Imteaz: And she would typically start the lesson by saying, okay,the first half of the lesson will focus on how you answer the questions in the HSC, so you actually do well and get the marks you need to get into the university course that you wanna get into.
Imteaz: The second half of the lesson will actually learn how to learn and how to critically think. And how to critically analyze the text, how to understand, you know, what a power play is when we’re studying like Shakespeare,et cetera.
Imteaz: Um, and that level of critical thinking is now what I do on a daily basis and has certainly set me apart from, you know, a lot of my peers in terms of critically analyzing situations or, you know, business opportunities, et cetera. So, you know, I loved my schooling time. And I think.
Imteaz: The fact that we don’t necessarily teach logic rhetoric anymore in the school curriculum.
Imteaz: And it’s all about answering tests and exams and route learning stuff and regurgitating stuff is not producing the level of. Level of problem-solving that we need to really maximize what the future entails, given all of the technology that’s coming.
[Pete]: I think you’re absolutely spot on because it’s that thing that in today’s world, probably two of the most important things, being able to communicate, in fact that’s always been the case, and being able to problem solve.
[Pete]: So actually, those are two skills that every kid should have.
Imteaz: for sure. What’s chapter two, Pete?
[Pete]: Yeah. Okay. So chapter two, leave school. And in the UK it’s a little bit different to the US and other places so you can leave at kind of 15 16 years old. I left school,
[Pete]: I’ve gone off the rails, I’ve passed some exams, I failed English, which of course is a… I got
Imteaz: That a D is an English
[Pete]: which is for the
[Pete]: same as failing. Yeah, yeah, it’s a D which is the same as failing because only a C or above counted.
[Pete]: It’s a kind of shock, and we also relocated across the country as a family.
[Pete]: The family then imploded, and it was kind of a rough time, but for me, probably that whole era started by being marked with a lot of despair. I was in a very bad place for a few years then, and it’s kind of slowly… filtered out, but those early years, really bad because everything just seemed pointless, and I was just consumed by kind of darkness.
[Pete]: But kind of the very end of teens, maybe 20 years old or something, there was a little turning point, and that turning point was I was introduced to this kind of world, fantasy world if you like, but in this fantasy world were all these characters that were superheroes, and of course Zig Ziglar, Jim Rowan, Tony Robbins and all these characters were bigger than life, and they were saying you can just do whatever you want to do.
[Pete]: The choice is yours is you can choose to have mediocrity or you can choose to be anything and I was in a bad place, but these people spoke to me, resonated and that was a turning point, a slow turning point, not a rapid pivot, more of a kind of decade long shift.
[Pete]: But I just consumed everything that I could from those people because it was sensible, it was reasoned and it offered something else. It was the promised land and a way out of where my head was. That’s really chapter two.
Imteaz: I’m like, when people speak of, you know, turning points, I always try to understand what was that particular moment. What was the situation that first got you there?
Imteaz: I’ll give you an example. Like I’ve worked for the same company coming up to 15 years, and for the interview, I was actually running late, and I missed the turn onto the street. Um, with the interview was happening, and I don’t like being late.
Imteaz: And I had already gone through so many interviews, um, that I was like, ah, stuff that I’ll just go home. Uh, it’s a group interview anyway. They won’t miss me.
Imteaz: Um, and then the HR lady, uh, she gave me a call as I was driving off. I was like, you know, two, three minutes away. Um, she gave me a call, and she asked me, you know, where are you? And I’m like, uh, I missed the turn.
Imteaz: I’m just driving down Victoria Road. She’s like, oh, I know where you are. Just take a U-turn.
Imteaz: When you see the McDonald’s, take a left, and you’ll be at the office. So had she not called me on that day, I was going home, and I wouldn’t have had the job that I’ve had for the last 15 years. So.
[Pete]: Yeah, sometimes you get those tiny points that you can identify.
Imteaz: Yeah. So do you think there was like one, it doesn’t necessarily have to be one thing that inspired you to go down this path, but was there something that like just clicked when you discovered all of this content that really changed your mind?
[Pete]: Well, it’s funny because I can probably, probably because we know what our memory is like, especially when it’s a long time ago, but I can probably remember the moment.
[Pete]: And one of the things I did, which was probably quite,
[Pete]: I don’t know, rash at the time, was I got married when I was 20—divorced a couple of years later. Neither of us were ready for it. It was just like… But my father-in-law at the time, he gave me this tape. And you know the kind where you get the pencil in there to wind it up, that kind of tape, because of course, a lot of people. In fact, it’s one of those things. If you know what a pencil and a cassette are for, you’re old.
[Pete]: But he gave me this tape. I can’t remember who was on it. I think it could have been Zig
[Pete]: Ziglar or someone quite similar. So it was very motivational. And it was really about putting the work in, and you have to just keep at it and at it and at it. And you can have anything if you want. And that was probably that moment because it was just a completely different world. Putting it in the cassette player in the car, which
[Pete]: I think at the time was like about £150 for the escort. Yeah, probably is now. It’s probably worth
Imteaz: Thank thousands you.
[Pete]: And so, yeah, and actually, through that journey, we have a couple of things.
[Pete]: So I then remember going to some conference in Brighton and seeing some of these speakers in the flesh and feeling the energy in the room.
[Pete]: And to me, it didn’t matter what people thought, because of course, a lot of people think that a lot of this stuff is like a cult.
[Pete]: But the thing is, It’s positive emotions and people feeling better, living better lives. And yes, sometimes they dream about things they might not get, but so do all the people going by the lottery tickets every week. So I’d rather be happy.
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