by David Megginson
What can we learn from how others see the world? This new column peers through different lenses, exploring how ideas and perspectives might be woven into coaching and mentoring.
A poem can invoke strong feelings in its readers – coaching would do well to harness the power of verse.
I thought I would set the series going by sharing snippets of some of my favourite poems, and themes, to show how they can be incorporated into our practice.
Connecting to experience
I have found that some executive clients are disconnected from life in a quite startling way. The US writer William Carlos Williams is a great advocate for the immediate and sensual. His short poem To a Poor Old Woman ends:
Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her.
I have sent this poem to ‘disconnected’ clients and asked them to notice some vivid experiences and share them at our next session.
Loss
A frequent theme in poetry is loss. The biographical poem One Art by Elizabeth Bishop expresses this harrowingly. She raises the stakes from mislaying keys, names, hopes, mementoes, homes and a continent, suggesting that the art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then in the last verse:
– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
In coaching this can be used to explore what would be the biggest loss for the individual.
Habits
Lots of coaches challenge clients to change habits. A poem to highlight this possibility is Philip Larkin’s The Daily Things We Do, which begins:
The daily things we do
For money or for fun
Can disappear like dew
Or harden and live on.
This poem and others by Larkin illustrate the traps of fate, and hint at some redemptive possibility.
Mentoring
Greek poet Constantine Cavafy has written insightfully about mentoring’s founding myth – the Odyssey. In Ithaca he concludes:
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what these Ithacas mean.
Cavafy’s poem helps us differentiate between a journey and an exploration.
Emily Dickinson didn’t give titles to her poems, but one of them is widely known as The Master. It is about a very particular kind of mentor who fumbles at your soul, and slows things down so your breath has time to straighten and then:
Deals – One – imperial – Thunderbolt –
That scalps your naked soul –
This is not a prescription I would offer to all mentors but it is an extreme example of challenge that can remind those of us lurking in the foothills of our profession what it might be like to essay the high mountain passes.
On the subject of training, a poem by Sylvia Plath captures the confronting nature of non-directive listening. In the first half of the poem the voice is a mirror, and reflects. In the second half the voice becomes a lake and engages with a woman who looks into her. It ends:
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in
me an old woman
Rises towards her day after day, like a terrible fish.
Have I used this in my coaching? Would you?
David Megginson is professor emeritus of human resource development in the Coaching and Mentoring Research Unit of Sheffield Business School.
Volume 5, Issue 2