What can we learn from how others see the world? This column peers through different lenses, exploring how ideas and perspectives might be woven into coaching and mentoring – Dr Ho Law
Isn’t art just as valid a coaching conversation as words? They both have the same power to transform
As most readers know, coaching is about two people, coach and client, having a conversation. It is a specific kind of communication. Depending on your definition of coaching, it has a meaning, structure and process that facilitate change towards a desirable state (purpose or goal). Transformation is key. It is an essential ingredient in many human activities, as demonstrated in previous articles in this column, be it about writing poems or reporting news. And in art, a paper or canvas is transformed into something meaningful. I always find drawing and painting fascinating as a vehicle to transform. There are plenty of examples of this throughout art’s history, but not many in coaching, though visualisation techniques are mentioned in some literature.
I coached an artist a few years ago. ‘Sarah’ showed me a series of three drawings. The first described a beautiful hand with magical dust (A), the second an empty hand (B) and the third (C) a fist with blood dripping from it to illustrate her sense of anger/despair.
It was a beautiful set of drawings but it had a very sad ending. I said to Sarah, as a spectator, I would have preferred to see the drawings in a different order. We re-arranged them in CBA order instead. We cannot travel back in time but in art we can recreate space in time. The new sequence gave a new meaning.
Stage 1 (here and now) shows one is in despair (drawing C); Stage 2: the empty hand letting go; and Stage 3 the magic, which one can draw on as a source of empowerment.
The transformation is complete, but with a much better (coaching) outcome.
The transformation resonates with the principle of re-authoring in narrative coaching1. Here it is through visual language.
For confidential reasons, I cannot show the client’s drawings, so I shall use my own:
Painting 1 – Butterfly
The foreground of this painting shows a warm butterfly flying against the dark blue universe as its backdrop. To me it sums up my early years of suffering when I first arrived in England – the experience of dislocation of spaces, places and culture.
Painting 2 – Departure
This uses pure abstract colour to express my emotion at the point of departure. Of course there are many points of departure – from Hong Kong to England; from home to alienation; from despair to hopes and dreams. Imagination and metaphors are endless.
Painting 3 – Interaction
The integration of three primary colours shows the fusion of lost and found, love, hopes and dreams.
The above process resonates with Victor Turner’s notion of transformation in anthropology where one migrates through the so-called “liminal space” as a point of departure before one reaches re-integration. The liminal space (though painful) provides new-found possibilities and many points of entry into integration (where hopes and dreams are made). I draw on this as a source of empowerment.
- The notion of liminal space resonates with the new transpersonal coaching psychology training programme that Professor Les Lancaster and I recently developed. For more information visit www.empsy.com/training.htm
- To join our open discussion forum (Narrative Coaching Network) and share your stories, visit www.linkedin.com/e/vgh/2680307
Dr Ho Law can be contacted at ho.law@empsy.com
Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 1