Art in coaching has an ability to create transformational shifts in perception, understanding and meaning. Coaching with art enables our clients to access a deeper level of awareness. An awareness that may be unconscious to them and may be really difficult to articulate.
Author: Anna Sheather
Executive Coaching Case Study: Sam – exploring her feelings of ‘otherness’
When Sam and I met for her second coaching session, Sam wanted to focus on her feeling of ‘otherness’. This feeling came out very strongly in Sam’s first session when Sam was exploring where she saw herself in the organis
Executive Coaching Case Study: managing change
Sam had recently joined a professional organisation as a director to help bring about change and introduce best practice.
Our Story Telling Brain
The wonderful thing about our left brain is that it helps us to know the world around us by analysing, categorising and labeling that which we encounter. Its has an important role in helping us to maintain a consistent and stable world.
Mindful doodling – a moment of calm in the helter skelter world we live in!
This wonderful exercise can be as long or as short as you like and is great way to take a pause in this helter skelter world we live and work in. The picture at the bottom is one of my doodles I did with a biro.
Using the language of art
When working with art in coaching, I find that most of the images created by coachees are abstract pieces of work where the colour, textures, mediums and marks made become the language that allows the hidden to come through.
Emerging themes
One of the great benefits of working with art is that hidden themes can start to emerge, adding richness and depth to coaching conversations. In this example, the heart motif became a recurring image in this person's work and had significant meaning for them. Emerging themes arise over time and through a number of images.
A brief history of art & communication
Art and communication is nothing new. 100,000 years ago human beings came out of Africa, spreading across the whole world, taking with them this amazingly complex brain that we all share today. A brain that drove us then and drives us now to communicate, explore and be creative.
What’s your art story?
Whenever we think of art we have an instinctive reaction to it. If we don’t see ourselves as artistic or creative we tend to think of it as something elitist or as something that children do. For many of us it is not something that has a place in our everyday worl
Art and coaching today
I spend a lot of time talking to coaches to find out how art is used in coaching today and have discovered that that a lot of coaches use art in their practice although may not recognise it as such.