Are traditional approaches to coaching, and their rational solutions, the only answer? What if the shift needs to happen at a deeper level? Katherine Long reveals how metaphors have the power to transform both coach and client
A favourite cinematic scene of mine is from Il Postino1, where Mario, the poor, lovelorn postman, sits on a pebbly beach with his would-be mentor, Pablo Neruda, the famous Chilean poet, who is temporarily exiled on Mario’s island. Mario is overwhelmed by Pablo’s charisma, his popularity with women, and his ability to express himself so powerfully through poetry.
The scene on the beach is interesting because for once it is the poet who is overwhelmed when Mario hesitantly asks him if perhaps the world, with its sea, sky, rain and clouds, might be a metaphor for something else. The poet is silenced for a moment, promises to reflect on the question, and jumps into the sea for a swim.
Metaphors, symbols and imagery take us outside purely rational, neo-cortical processes. They help us connect to our emotions and felt sensations – indeed the full array of information from our mind-body-soul system. They unlock a treasure trove of meaning, which is often undervalued, yet always present.
What are we missing?
As coaches, we should consider what we miss if we are not supporting clients to explore their own metaphors or symbolic imagery.
What’s striking about many traditional coaching approaches is their emphasis on the cerebral and analytical. While these techniques support new insights, they can inadvertently funnel both coach and client into ‘rational’ solutions.
We’ve all experienced points of ‘stuckness’ in our clients. How will another session make for lasting change, if the real shift needs to happen at a different level?
Deeper seams
The coach may be far more useful to their client if they help them surface the deeper seams of the body’s intelligence. Metaphor provides a powerful route to this.
The idea that metaphor plays a role in human transformation has existed in different guises for millennia – through theatre, parable and myth.
Jung championed its place in the psychological domain, and dedicated a lifetime to working with dreams and symbols to achieve individuation – integration of one’s own personality.
More recently, neuroscience is helping us understand that while our neo-cortex “traffics in logic and reason”2 the limbic brain is “expressive and intuitive”.
The bridge between the two is enhanced by our capacity to make use of symbol. A poem “begins with a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with”.3
Enhancing your skills
There are a range of methodologies for working with metaphor in the talking therapies that have translated into the coaching realm. Some, like Clean Language, explore the client’s use of language (“and what kind of muddle is that muddle?”) as a way in. Somatic approaches, such as Focusing, help the client connect with felt sensations, which may be articulated in imagery (“I can feel a swirling murkiness in the pit of my stomach. It sort of reminds me of a nebula; it feels quite creative”).
While training in these kinds of approaches can add real value in enhancing the skills needed in working with metaphor, core principles can support any coach to make better use of what is always present in the conversation and within the client. I use a personal passion for foraging as an analogy – there’s ‘free food’ all around us so shouldn’t we learn to make more use of it? n
l Katherine Long is director of qualifications at The OCM (www.theocm.co.uk) delivering a range of accredited coaching and supervision qualification programmes, and runs her private coaching and supervision practice: www.katherinelong.co.uk
How to use metaphors in coaching
How should we prepare ourselves, and what should we be mindful of when using metaphors?
- Become comfortable with working with metaphor for yourself, eg, ask your supervisor to help you explore your practice through metaphor. This helps put you in your client’s shoes
- Learn to recognise opportunities for working with metaphor – often a ‘gear shift’ in the conversation is required – but there are a number of ways in (see figure, page 41)
- Be comfortable playing with metaphor. It doesn’t have to be serious. (“I can see you’ve looked at this from lots of angles – I wonder if you’d be OK to play around with the different images or metaphors that might help you see this challenge in a different way?”)
- Respect the safety of your client. Metaphor can bring up strong emotions. As with any powerful approach, it needs to be a gentle process
- Support your client in experiencing their metaphor as clearly as possible by inviting them to describe it, and their relation to it, but trust your client to let you know when they are ready to do this
- Be at ease with the inner processes of change and don’t push for results. Often, the act of revealing a powerful metaphor is enough for a shift to occur. You are working with slow, deep processes, not speedy neo-cortical ones
- Don’t insist on returning to the metaphor in future sessions unless the client wants to. It may no longer be relevant or helpful
- Don’t add your own nuances and interpretations. You might feel you can relate to the client’s metaphor, but remember, it’s theirs, not yours
- As with any coaching approach, avoid seeing metaphor as a magic bullet. Build your awareness of when it’s helpful, and unhelpful
Case study: Just say ‘no’
Emma holds a senior position in a global manufacturing company. She was moving into a new role and wanted to discuss the challenges she anticipated relating to time management
In the course of the conversation it became clear that her difficulty in saying ‘no’ to others meant she was having to finish her own work at home in the evenings. She had tried to tackle this perennial challenge on several occasions. I asked if we could take a different approach, and invited her to get in touch with what it felt like to keep responding to everyone else’s demands.
She described, and we explored, the following:
Feeling like an ugly, dark lump of metal that just sticks to magnets and then drops off when they don’t want her any more. But that within the lump of metal is a much larger, lighter silver sphere that doesn’t get stuck to the magnets but floats above them.
It felt clear during the process that Emma had surfaced a powerful and emotive image. Rather than taking it further in our session, I encouraged Emma to reflect on it in the following weeks.
Evidence of a shift came a few months later from a colleague Emma sees occasionally, who remarked on the transformation in her – mirroring almost exactly the words that had surfaced in our session: Emma seemed so much more “floaty and light” in her new role. She has been more consciously holding the image in her head. Another colleague recently told her, “You can see you love your job – it sparkles out of you!”
Case study: a mental block
Rachel is a civil servant in a county council that has had recent cutbacks. She presented a number of challenges relating to uncertainly around her career – a lack of confidence, fear of giving presentations and a block on moving forward
I asked permission to focus our conversation on the ‘block’, inviting her to describe where it felt in relation to her body (lying about a foot in front of her), its size (two feet wide) texture and colour (smooth, hard, beige).
I sensed her engagement with the image, yet noticed that she wanted to return to some of the details of her current situation, which she seemed to position (by the way she gestured her hands) on one or other end of the block. I felt intuitively that there was something about the position of the block that might be important, and asked her to consider what would happen if the block was stood on its end rather than lying across her.
In hindsight, this was a risky strategy as I was potentially manipulating her imagery. However, her body language and visual expression changed instantly and she started to describe with enthusiasm what a change she felt when she moved the position of the block, and how it might then start to act as a support to other things that could “climb up it”.
We never once explored the meaning of the block or tried to analyse what it could be. Over the next few months, Rachel emailed me updates on the changes, and it was clear her confidence and performance were improving, with some tangible proofs of success. She felt the block was gradually diminishing in size, and in her last email she described that it had dissolved “to the size of a boiled sweet”.
References
- 1 Il Postino (1994), Michael Radford (dir), Miramax
- 2 T Lewis, F Amini and R Lannon, A General Theory of Love, New York: Random House, 2000
- 3 R Frost, Collected Poems, Prose and Plays, New York: The Library of America, 1995
Metaphors, symbols and imagery take us outside purely rational, neo-cortical processes. They help us connect to our emotions and felt sensations
Coaching at Work, Volume 7, Issue 1