Coaching Beyond Words

Using Art to Deepen and Enrich Our Conversations

Anna Sheather

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351165983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Industrial & Organizational Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In Coaching Beyond Words: Using Art to Deepen and Enrich Our Conversations, Anna Sheather presents a practical guide for those seeking to incorporate art in their own coaching practice. Complete with case studies and art created by clients, Anna explores how coaching with art connects clients to a deeper level of personal awareness and understanding, which in turn leads to meaningful shifts in personal growth, development and fulfilment.

Anna offers the coach an exciting and transformative way to work with their clients by bridging the gap between art and coaching. She covers how to introduce creative approaches, how to support creativity and how to work with the art produced, opening enriching coaching conversations with clients. Anna combines her personal experiences with research that underpins her practice, exploring the benefits of the interdisciplinary nature of art therapy and neuroscience by looking at the field of hemispherical lateralisation to help understand why coaching with art works so effectively. The book also provides a comprehensive guide of how to prepare an art-based coaching session, including contracting, an overview of types of exercises, key principles and approaches to facilitating the image making process, overcoming barriers with coachees and guidance on managing oneself in the process, including managing boundaries. Coaching Beyond Words is the first book to provide an in-depth look at the importance and practicality in interweaving coaching and art, and it forms a complete guide to context, theory and practice.

Coaching Beyond Words will appeal to coaches in practice as well as any art therapist seeking to expand their practice into coaching. Additionally, it would be of interest to creative professionals looking to incorporate coaching theory.

Chapter 1

Introduction to coaching with art

‘I have found that coaching beyond words through using art is an amazing and fast way to access that deeper, embodied level of self-awareness that often creates those shifts. Even if shifts don’t occur, there always seems to be a greater sense of personal meaning and understanding that unlocks something for that person.’

Anna Sheather

In this book I want to share with you how working with art deepens and enriches our coaching conversations, moving our clients beyond words to a much deeper level of awareness, understanding and personal meaning that can, and often does, create transformational shifts.

I am an executive coach who paints, and through my experiences of working with art in coaching I firmly believe art has an important role in our practice. When I talk about art, I am not talking about creating great masterpieces; I am talking about any image a client creates that has personal meaning to them. This image could be a drawing, a sculpture, a painting, a collage or a mixture. It is about self-expression – externalising, through line, colour, texture and form an image of their interior selves. It is about working intuitively, going with what feels right in the moment, without censorship and judgement.

A client does not need to be able to draw or to consider themselves to be creative to work in this way; they just have to be open to the experience and willing to push themselves a little out of their comfort zone.

Although I am a self-taught artist, there is also no requirement for a coach to be an artist to use this approach. What you do need is to feel confident working in this way and to be really familiar with the materials you are offering your client to work with. It means being comfortable with creativity and being open to your own creative self. In Chapter 5, I look at this in more detail and invite you to explore your own art story. I also talk more about getting started and building confidence in your practice in Chapter 9.

My approach to coaching with art was in one way just happened upon, but has also been the product of quite a lot of research, experience and practice – and I am still learning.

Figure 1.1 An example of a client’s art created in a coaching session

When I say it was just happened upon, I mean it was a moment that came from a conversation with my supervisor. One January a couple of years ago, I came to a supervision session feeling jaded with my coaching. I had been running my executive coaching practice for many years and had noticed that my enthusiasm was waning. One of the main reasons I had left mainstream employment to become self-employed was to enable me to make time for my creative side. Over those years my creative life had grown and I was holding this very separate from me as a coach, even though I knew that I coach at my best when I coach from who I am. I was stuck.

In that session, my supervisor said, ‘the great thing about what we do is we can put our energy where we want to’. It was my aha! moment, and the rest, as they say, is history. I had already started to explore the possibility of using art in my coaching and had been drawn to art therapy, wondering if I needed to retrain. But I knew my passion was with coaching.

In addition to exploring art therapy, I had been, and still am, intrigued by archaeological discoveries that show how human beings have been using art to communicate for many, many thousands of years. I was also fascinated by the right-hemisphere/left-hemisphere ways of seeing the world and, linked to that, I had just started exploring mindfulness and creativity. I was already building the foundations for my practice. This then formed the starting point for my more formal research. How could I integrate art into my coaching practice, including my executive coaching?

My research

My research has taken me down four main avenues, and to help put my approach into context I have summarised these below. Each of these avenues has been further expanded in the chapters that follow.

1 Art and communication. Through my interest in ancient archaeology, I learnt that art is a form of communication that pre-dates written and verbal language and we human beings have used it for tens of thousands of years to communicate our place in the world, our ideas, our feelings and our perceptions. Psychology has also found that using image making allows people to externalise and understand that which otherwise they find difficult and/or impossible to articulate.

2 Art therapy and coaching. Art therapy is a form of psychotherapy that uses art as a powerful means of communication, which has shown me the potential that working with art in coaching can have. It has also provided me with the initial insights into how art can be used in coaching and the benefits it can bring. I have been particularly drawn to Liesl Stevenson’s person-centred approach to art therapy, which has many similarities to coaching. I also engaged an art therapist to work on my own personal development and to experience it from a client’s perspective. This has been invaluable, enabling me to experience the process, how it feels and what happens.

3 Art and the hemispheres of the brain. Following my curiosity with right-hemisphere/left-hemisphere functions, I wanted to see what evidence there was in neuroscience that could explain why an art-based approach is so effective. Art is often seen as ‘fluffy’ and grounding it more scientifically could start to change this perception. I was helped enormously by Ian McGilchrist’s book The Master and His Emissary. Although McGilchrist’s book is about the social, political and philosophical implications of the lateralisation of the brain (the division of the brain into the right and left hemispheres), he starts by looking at the research and discussion around the different functions of the hemispheres. This research started to give me some evidence and clues as to how the right hemisphere could be playing an important role in this type of coaching. Through this work I have also come to understand the importance of both hemispheres of the brain, and how working with art in coaching can bring the hemispheres together. One of the key areas was finding ways to enable the right-hemisphere way of perceiving the world to be communicated. This led me to exploring mindfulness as a means of helping people connect at a deeper level. Through research and attending an eight-week mindfulness course, I learnt how to create a space in a coaching session for a client’s image to emerge. I also found that it doesn’t work for everyone and that other approaches can be very effective in the right circumstances.

4 Art and coaching. The research above was only a starting point and it has been learning through practice and experience that has enabled me to develop my approach. This has not only included coaching with art, but also running workshops and CPD events for other coaches who are interested in integrating art into their own practice. This experience has been invaluable for not only hearing what coaches think about this approach, but also for understanding what stops coaches from working this way. Here, I have been fascinated by how our own perceptions of art and artists, and our confidence in our own creativity, limit what we do. I have been fascinated by how these perceptions arise from our own ‘art stories’. To expand my learning and start some research into how this approach works, I set up coaching case studies where art was the central approach. This also enabled me to test out art-based coaching’s relevance to executive and business coaching as people’s perceptions were starting to box this into an approach for creative or life issues. To do this, I worked with five clients and the case studies include executive, business and life issues as well as creativity issues. This work has deepened my understanding of this approach, reinforced the benefits and outcomes, demonstrated clearly how coaches need to hold an art-based coaching space and shown me that this approach has relevance for all sorts of coaching. I would like to say a big thank you to my clients for allowing me to share their stories in this book, although to maintain confidentiality and respect privacy their names and some of the context has been changed.

Throughout my research and practice, I have been very aware of the boundaries to using art in coaching. This approach has the ability to take clients to hidden places that they may not have expected and either may not be ready for or may not want to go to. It also means that this approach may inadvertently take coaches to spaces they are not skilled to coach in, or are not qualified to coach in. To manage these boundaries, coaches need to use this approach with clear and positive intent, ensuring they are coaching within the contract and coaching guidelines and ethics. I expand on this further in Chapter 6, where I pull together the core principles of coaching with art.

Talking and working with other coaches

Throughout my learning and practice I have been able to talk with coaches from different backgrounds – internal and independent, new and experienced – and I have been really surprised at how many coaches are interested in this area. I have met many coaches who want to develop a creative side to their practice and others who are already using art in their work and want to build on it. I have talked to coaches who take their clients to art galleries, using the art as a starting point for a conversation, some who use picture cards and others who work with collage, dance, music or poetry.

I have also had animated conversations about how transformational coaches have found a session has gone when working with art. However, I also hear coaches limit this approach, stating that they couldn’t work this way in, for example, a client’s office as they may be seen as ‘playing’, with the client perhaps wondering why they are paying them to coach. I have heard statements such as ‘you can’t bring this into the boardroom’ or ‘my clients wouldn’t work this way’.

The word ‘art’ seems to polarise people and cause them to judge themselves. People tend to see art as either something rarefied and elitist, with comments such as ‘I can’t draw’ or ‘I am not at all creative’ or ‘I am not an artist!’, or it is seen as something children do – playing and messing around – and isn’t something that ‘I’ as an adult would do. It seems art is either something of very high value and ‘I’ am excluded, or it is of very low value and not something ‘I’ would do. Interestingly, we are very quick to box it; we are almost fearful of it and are often very dismissive of it. The exception to this is if I am working with coaches who are creative. However, even these coaches can still worry about the perception others have of them if they use art in a coaching session.

Take a moment and pause. . .

What are your thoughts about art?

How might they be shaping your perception of this book? Or about your ability to use art in coaching?

Note them down. Be open and honest with yourself. No one else is going to see them.

I now invite you to hold them with curiosity and without judgement as you continue to read the book.

Next-generation coaching

Whilst talking with coaches, they often start referring to this approach as next-generation or second-generation coaching. It feels as though coaches are looking for something ‘else’ in their coaching practice, something that is deeper, more intuitive and transformational – perhaps wanting to move beyond models and processes.

This may be because one of the most valued outcomes in coaching is when clients have that transformational shift that unlocks change. It is a bit like magic and we don’t always know why or how it happens. I have found that coaching beyond words through using art is an amazing and fast way to access that deeper, embodied level of self-awareness that often creates those shifts. Even if shifts don’t occur, there always seems to be a greater sense of personal meaning and understanding that unlocks something for that person.

Also, I believe that people are increasingly coming to coaching for that shift, that deeper level of awareness that creates lasting personal change, whether it is in their professional or personal lives. Using art can do this powerfully and quietly, as long as the person being coached is open to the process.

I also think we are looking for faster ways of working. There seem to be two main drivers for this. First, we work in a world where there is instant gratification, which inevitably raises expectations around coaching. Second, organisational clients often limit the spend on external coaching and the number of sessions available to employees, whilst at the same time there is an expectation that much will be achieved! One of the benefits I have found using art is that it can unlock core issues very quickly and often much faster than pure verbal coaching. As a result, I have been able to start working with my clients at a deeper and more transformational level earlier in the programme.

Another great benefit is that coaching programmes can be measured more consciously and tangib...