Elaine Patterson and Karyn Prentice share the story of their creative partnership, which has seen them design and deliver a host of successful coaching, writing and coach supervision programmes

 

This is the story of how we brought our deep friendship and soulful creativity together to ‘colour outside the lines’. 

We believe our experiences and the lessons we’ve learnt along the way may inspire other coaches and coaching supervisors to wholeheartedly unleash their creativity and support clients to do likewise, fostering a way of being that blushes with joy and vitality and enables a kind warm-hearted inquiry in the company of like-minded souls about who we may be and how we may show up and engage in the world.

 

Innate creativity 

There are so many opportunities to recognise the presence of creativity in our everyday lives and to feel connected to its expression in little ways – rather than always in broad sweeps – that remind us of one truth: everyone is born creative. And we can miss it without even knowing how much it colours our world. 

Our shared love affair with creativity has informed and shaped what we believe would help others to find, retrieve, and grow the deep desire to be more wholeheartedly and soulfully in touch with their innate creativity, to reclaim that birthright and to throw aside hesitation to be bold, courageous and playful. These simple touchstones have informed all our writing, coaching and coaching supervision practice, retreats, conference presentations, masterclasses and workshops and our flagship retreat programmes: Cultivating and Choreographing the Rich Tapestry of Wholehearted Creativity (‘Tapestry’, for short) and Bridging the Unknown: from Role Work to Soul Calling in Later Life. 

Our premise has always been to create something that we would find inspirational and compelling (and would want to do) and then to offer it to others who might be seeking that too. 

When we launched our one-year Tapestry in 2021 we built it up from the deep friendship that we shared and from the foundations of our own experiences of creativity in our own life, work and writings. 

This EMCC Global Level 5 Practitioner Accredited Diploma programme, which has recently completed its fifth series, has been an affirmation and a confirmation of the deep value and commitment we hold around pursuing the call of our own creativity as a treasure worth the seeking by us and for others. Our own inspired experiences of exploring and using our creativity both alone and together has inspired a new body of work. 

 

What enables creativity: Our lessons from ‘Tapestry’ 

“I am an artist… I am here to live out loud.” 

Emile Zola

 

Six years on, our lessons from designing and hosting Tapestry have confirmed several key factors about what we see as enables creativity that also seem to be universal: 

• Giving yourself permission Permission to play, to make mistakes, to be messy, to try and fail – maybe spectacularly – and try again or differently. Whoever saw a three-year-old child drawing or playing and was concerned that it wasn’t perfect, was like someone else’s work, or a bit messy? Playfulness sits alongside the spiritual, the holy grail of creative endeavour. When we laugh, play and get out of our heads, magic happens. 
• The importance of the work-before-the-work which in our case is a series of warm-up activities for pushing out our boundaries. When we meet our creative side with open, regular practices we oil the wheels of the connection that’s forged and reforged with ourselves and our creativity mindset. We work the stretch, we add new colour and we can feel a refreshed vitality. The part of us that sees with fresh eyes, appreciates the extraordinary in the ordinary, and finds awe in nature, is in cahoots with what our hearts and souls need to find for our own mode of creative expression. 
• Finding your community of supporters We need to find at least one person who encourages us to keep going, especially when we flag. 

 

Beyond Tapestry 

What has been remarkable to us is how our work has our vital relationship at the heart of everything, which is responsible for producing a body of work that is a generous spiral of heartfelt, soulful and creatively reflective work. PattersonPrenticeDesigns grew out of friendship, mutual respect and inspiration. 

We came together initially to talk about the ways reflective practice is critically important for leaders in the world to be their best selves. Our partnership goes back to 2015 – although we have known each other since 2008 through our work with the Coaching Supervision Academy (CSA) International, which culminated in us co-leading the CSA Diploma programme between 2019 and 2022. 

From that kernel of a conversation in 2015, we began an extraordinary partnership of discovery and co-authoring of our signature programmes, co- facilitating coaching supervision groups and all our other work in the world today. This has included a Training Journal Gold award for the Best Coaching and Mentoring Programme that we designed and delivered  for Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust, ‘The Write Place’,  a series born during Covid and which is still going strong, and our two flagship offers, Tapestry and most recently, Bridging the Unknown: From Role Work to Soul Calling in Later Life. We also plan to co-author some books.

We hesitate, writes Karyn, to call “these offers ‘programmes’ because they are so much more than that. At their essence, they are about hosting a vibrant – and at the same time a still – space that invites participants to find and shape their own journey to a different rhythm whether, in the case of Tapestry – the route is to the homeland of their innate creativity and its expression in the world – or through a deep soulful journey to discover what it means to meet and greet the opportunities of self in later life with Role to Soul.” 

Both programmes have arrived in a world in sore need of hope, joy, depth and secular sacredness. As Elaine writes, “It felt that it’s time to throw open the window to an inclusive, kind exploration that is not about the usual measures, or the normal routes of professional development – this is about ‘colouring outside the lines’, trusting that by nourishing our own inner well and internal landscapes our professional practice can exponentially flourish. Creativity is how our soul finds its expression in the world”. 

To be fully human first and foremost is seeking to experience and then to dare to develop a new lexicon for a way of being that is infused with joy and vitality, and which enables a kind, warm-hearted enquiry about who we may be and how we may show up and engage in the world. 

 

Our design process 

What’s rare, and so vital, is to work so fluently without the ego getting in the way of the work so that there’s space for the joint endeavour to grow organically into a life of its own. This seems to have evolved through four phases, which we feel might help others with their design, development, and co-creation: 

 

• Phase 1: Campfire Phase is when initial musings or ideas are thrown around. Here, like with any good campfire, you come together to sit in the light of the warming flames. Sometimes someone picks up an instrument and begins to offer a tune, then another joins in with a different note and instrument. 

Each is riffing off the other to hear more appropriately – to sense into what might be wanting to emerge. Ideas like music swirl and are not overthought or directed. Stay by the fire, have a hot drink and perhaps some marshmallows – and make from rough jottings or sketches! 

 

• Phase 2: Germination Phase is when seeds of ideas are given time – they can be resting and being enriched from the environment. Here, (sometimes called ‘The Clothes Line’), is where ideas are secured on the line as they arrive, each with its own peg. We say germination because the process will happen in good time, when it’s ready. It needs time to form into something more. The confidence to let it be is vital. Respecting that space is a fundamental part of the process. 

 

• Phase 3: Alchemy Phase is where ideas form into new and sometimes  unexpected forms. At this point the piece of work belongs to both parties. This phase signals the time of coming together to play with the new forms and to try them out in different combinations of what’s been worked on separately. Here, something magical happens and something a new is created out of the joined minds, hands and creative souls without ego. 

Both need to love what’s emerging – and if one or the other of us doesn’t love it we think again and can become something that’s refined now from this joint midwifery. 

Then we’re ready to enter the Letting It Fly Phase.

 

• Phase 4: Letting It Fly Phase is about seeing if the new form can stay in the air or needs further refinements – and always a return to the Campfire Phase. 

If this whole experience were on time lapse photography it would be like watching a seed begin to grow beneath the ground, put forth a small green shoot and eventually identify itself as a particular plant that will bloom before it’s returned as seed to the ground. Not all ideas fly but we just add them for mulching in the compost pot in the belief that nothing is ever lost.

It’s a truly organic process and we both deeply honour and respect it. We feel lucky that such a gift is given us to share and that it has resonated well with the people who participate and follow our work who join us in a mutually exciting endeavours of finding what makes their heart sing and how they can come home to themselves. 

This has never been truer than with our current passion about how the 60+ generation makes the most of the last quarter of life in positive and life-fulfilling ways. Many people we’ve met and worked with say retirement isn’t what they seek but rather a reconfiguration of focused energy, not in a career sense but with all the intentionality of giving back and continuing to contribute as a vital presence in their own lives using their wisdom in the service and sanctuary of others and their journey. 

How to truly cross the bridge into a new age where the soul says, at last “You did it … I have been waiting for you …. welcome – and now let’s get ‘busy’ in a different way!” 

We believe that ageism needs facing into in a completely different way. 

So, with the desire to explore this for ourselves and in community with others, and with the same principles of befriending our creative energy and glorious partnership Bridging the Unknown: from Role Work to Soul Calling in Later Life was born. We felt like were being pilgrims in our own lives.

We are also in this phase of our own lives where we want to courageously embrace what it means to live this one precious, creative, compassionate and kind life. And we really want to invite others into this vital inquiry both for themselves and for the wonderful ripple effect that then becomes possible. 

Our work is something that neither of us takes for granted. When it comes down to refining what all our work is about, it comes to a single underpinning word describing something that is needed in abundance everywhere in the world right now: and that word is love.   

 

References

• See our website: www.pattersonprenticedesigns.com for more information 
• Emile Zola, downloaded from GoodReads, on 2 April 2025