Creative Visualisation

With my guidance, in safety, travel in your imagination down a visualised path into your unconscious mind; meet the beings, see the places and find out what stories are waiting. Bring back words, treasure and the map to go back and revisit when needed. Even if you do not visualise easily, all the senses are used to explore this hidden part of you.

graphic tools

I wasn’t very good at Maths in school. But I have found the Venn Diagram to be very useful in my coaching work! For example, a couple trying to find time together and time for themselves can use this to map both what they enjoy doing together and to give space to the things they must or want to do alone. I also use graphs, pie charts, mindmaps, organigrams and ‘lego’ houses on squared paper. These tools help to organise, prioritse, compare and clarify our thoughts. To think outside, or inside, the box.

Serious play

Let’s pretend your bag is your ‘goal’. Put it at the end of the room. Now play ‘What’s the time Mr. Wolf'.’ At what point does the fear of achieving the goal set in?

“Grab three items from your room - anything will do. Let’s imagine that the woolly hat represents your outward persona. The tea-cup is your mother. What is the pencil? How do these things interact? Let’s explore their status.”

Serious play allows us to connect to the childlike part of ourselves that doesn’t close doors or make quick judgements, but is curious. When we play we bypass the rational as our creative mind finds answers in strange places!

Creative Writing

One of the tasks I often set for clients is writing. You do not have to be ‘good’ at writing, but words are great tools to play with. Everything from building word towers, writing diaries and letters, telling your own story as a film script and mapping the alternative dialogues you might have had. You could write one of your stories in the third person, from another character’s viewpoint or from the perspective of your different selves in time and space. What would future-you write? Ten-year-old you? Automatic writing and non-dominant hand-writing are also portals into the unconscious or unexamined. I have lots of creative thinking and practical tips and tricks to help you find your voice, so let’s see what you can come up with in a playful explorative way!

Artwork

Our right brain maps and creates and looks at the whole picture. Sometimes drawing or painting things can be a useful way into a thorny issue that we are over-thinking. Or a way to imagine and fantasise about the stories we would like to be living. For some clients, accessing difficult childhood memories and working with them feels more acessible through imagery. One of my clients, when trying to find a sense of alignment and her core nature in the face of work challenges, was feeling lost. I asked her to remember when she felt most aligned as a child and she told me feeling free on her bike. It was an orange chopper with a bell. She drew a wonderful picture which we then labelled with all the things the bike represented. This metaphor really helped her to then find a way to apply this playfulness to her serious work quandary.

Perspectives

Sometimes it is useful to look at an issue from different perspectives. I had a client once who felt uneasy about having inherited wealth. When she embodied the issue from her brother’s perspective, trying out a symbolic gesture that represented his mindset, and how easy he felt about his good fortune, she found a way to feel differently about it by seeing it his way. We can also see things from the perspective of ourselves at different times in the past and future, our house, car, job or dog!

Thought Forms

That tight feeling you have in your chest - the one when you think about that person/place/event/experience? Let’s give it a form. What size is it? Where is located in relation to you? What colour, smell, texture, or sound does it have? is it some kind of being? Honing in with precision on amorphous ‘feelings’ can be really helpful with it comes to dealing with them. One of my clients did this with a naysayer part of herself - her thought form was this red whiney negative little imp on her left shoulder. We then worked on ways to befriend him. But we could also dissolve or destroy thought forms. We could have a dialogue with them - the list is endless.

Tarot

Tarot cards offer a rich archetypal symbolism we can tap into during coaching. I don’t use them in a fortune telling way. I use them as a window to your inner workings or as messengers from the story. When we advocate for stories it is useful to have helpers. Sometimes people pull a card at the end of the session and it offers a framework for the narrative they have been exploring. ‘Oh, that man with the sword - he is clearly my Dad'.’ People see all sorts of things in the cards and they constantly surprise me with way they add a strange sprinkle of magic and a wisdom boost.

somatic work

If thinking could release body-held habits and pain, we would have cracked it by now. It is widely researched and agreed these days that many of our negative past experiences are held in the body. We find ourselves having reactions to stress in our bodies. I ask clients to locate their quandary, their grief, their fear in their bodies. We feel into it through guided breathing and visualisation. We name the place where it is stuck. Then the work can begin to release at a body level, bypassing endless rumination. I have noticed that often the area of the body is connected to the issue. Tightness in the throat and an inability to express our needs. Or the heart is constricted when we are stuck in love. Even our hands can both give and take. I still rely on Lousie Hay’s associations between body and disease. the body has so many messages and as a character in our story can hold the key to a way through.

One of my clients tends to live in his head. I do the ‘4 Gateways’ exercise with him, designed by Dr. David Drake. In this, you put your hands on your head to think into the issue. Then on your heart to feel it. Then you move your hands to your stomach - what is the gut instinct? Finally, we place our hands on our hips to ask the body what action, if any, is needed. It’s a useful exercise to see how we are locating a problem and to discover that our body may have an answer in a different place.

working with Triggers

Sometimes a person, a comment, an event, throws us and we are suddenly a child again, or right back in that horrible memory, reliving the old story. Habits are changed incrementally and every time this happens is an opportunity to build a new one. So we need to create a little moment of pause so we can choose a road that leads to the story we want. The hardest bit is catching the moment when we are activated. But when we do, we can slow time down and give ourselves a little breather to think the new thought, alter the posture, say the things differently. Or walk away completely. To play with all our options.

Role play

I am a drama teacher and I love helping those who are so inclined to explore aspects of themselves or the characters they are dealing with in their lives through role play. Taking on the persona of another, or of a part of ourselves we wish to grow or reduce can be both fun and therapeutic.

This amazing creative woman I am working with likes to imagine herself as a super hero with a white cape and shoulder-padded suit. This is how she swoops in to manage her busy life, her young child, her husband. She finds a powerful stance, which I get her to really embody in the session, and in this role, her voice changes, her words are more precise and she finds her power.

Coaching is also a chance to role-play conversations we would like to have, to play with our expression, our words, and our tone. We can rehearse until we feel able to go back out into the world and try it out for real.

Bibliotherapy

Some people love reading. Literature offers a wealth of rich symbolic and narrative material to explore. Maybe you identify with a character and map your own journey against theirs, comparing your choices. Maybe the layered figurative language of a poem reflects your own store of archetypes. I have an Honours degree in English Literature and Drama and I am a trained teacher. I love working with clients with this medium in a way that captures their imagination. Check out this blog post as an example.

2 ladders

This is a narrative coaching exercise where we imagine two ladders at the top of which are two options. Maybe you are trying to decide about staying in your relationship or being single. Maybe you are considering two career choices. Climb up each ladder and see what the weather is like up there. See how you feel as you ascend or descend each rung - listen to your body as you explore the environment of the ladders at the top.

Old Story New Story

Identifying the story we are living can take a bit of digging. But when we do, we sometimes have a lightbulb moment. It can go something like this:

‘A good wife and mother puts her family first. She has to sacrifice her time. She needs to be selfless'.

Whose voice is this, I ask…

‘Aha - this is my grandmother’s story of a good wife and mother!’

It sounds like this is an old story that is not really yours.

‘Yes it does feel like it is not mine. I actually believe that modelling self-care is important for my children.’

So what is your story then? What is the new story?

And we experiment with naming a story that, whilst it may not feel like a lived truth at this moment, is one that feels believable. Such as:

‘There is time for every member of the family to be first. To have time to grow and be important. there is no hierarchy.’

Metaphor

As a poetry teacher I have always loved a metaphor. As a coach, I love noticing the idioms and metaphorical patterns that are threaded, usually unnoticed, through people’s stories. Sometime it is food. Or gardening. Or weather. Once we pick up on and give attention to the metaphors we are using they can offer valuable insights into an unconscious framing. Perhaps food is nourishment, and gardens are the state of our body or family or job. Are we leaving ourselves out in the cold? As soon as we find a rich vein like this it can be brought out into the coaching space and examined in the light. Then we might extend it and put it to use. Talking about a tricky issue in this way, coming at it sideways, is often a playful and surprisingly rich experience.

Meditation

Sometimes called mindfulness, meditaiton is a really useful tool to help calm our minds and reconnect with our inner knowing. I was a Buddhist nun many years ago and am still a regular meditation practitioner. I can teach you the basics and certainly recommend styles and teachers that might suit you if this is of interest.