Coaching with Creativity in Mind™
I offer 1:1 coaching for people professionals and individuals who support others through their work.
If you’d like to experience positive well-being and happiness in your working life, I could be a great reflective partner for you
Coaching costs £100/hr or £50/hr reduced rate - find out more
What is coaching?
Coaching is a working alliance between two parties: the coach, and the client (or clients).
Both coach and client work together through dialogue, which might be rooted in voice, but could also include nonverbal behaviours (such as body language) or other mediums (such as drawing or sound).
The coach provides both support and challenge to the client, creating a container for the client’s growth. The coach does not take ownership or responsibility away from the client for the preparation, content, or outcomes of the sessions, or the relationship overall.
Typically, the dialogue initially focuses on exploring the client’s current reality, and seeks to identify the client’s aspirations for positive change. The client’s commitment and capacity to take action in service of this change is a key consideration.
As the coaching relationship develops and trust is built between client and coach, space emerges for truly honest disclosures and insights to surface - sometimes for the first time. The client is supported through this process as they increase their self-knowledge, the development of which enables them to take action, or work on behaviour change, that enables positive personal and professional growth.
Coaching is appropriate as an intervention where the client does not have clinically significant levels of distress, or where a therapeutic intervention would be more appropriate. Clients who are in active therapy can still work successfully in a coaching space, but this requires honest disclosure on the part of the client, alongside regular check-ins and strong boundaries from the coach in order to keep both parties safe.
My Philosophy of Coaching
I believe that the client does the work in a coaching relationship, whilst the coach creates a safe environment for disclosure and self-interrogation. When I meet new clients, I often use the metaphor of a ‘ball of wool’ to explain my role as coach: the wool represents the client’s ‘stuff’, and particularly, their tangled up bits of stuckness. I explain that I am never going to take the wool from the client, or do any untangling, but I am simply holding one end of the wool to enable them to use both hands to untangle their thinking.
At its core, I want to support people to experience positive well-being and to be happy in their working lives. My work is underpinned by Positive Psychology (the science and practice of improving well-being), and I apply this ‘lens’ through the practice of Coaching Psychology. An easier way of framing this is that my work can be understood as Positive Psychology Coaching, or an “evidence-based coaching practice informed by the theories and research of positive psychology for the enhancement of resilience, achievement, and well-being” (Green & Palmer, 2018).
I believe that coaching is successful where the client arrives resourced, or is capable of building the resource that will ultimately enable them to do the work required to move them towards their desired change.
In my practice, there are no set number of sessions or specific tools that I use with every individual - I believe in client-led work that is both thoughtful and intuitive, prepared and responsive. I take my work seriously, creating safe and ethical spaces for deeply personal reflection and development. I engage with my clients with care and compassion, and believe they are capable of positive change.
Coaching with Creativity in Mind™?
I subscribe to the notion that ‘who you are is how you coach’ - for me, that includes all parts of my identity: as psychologist, as artist, and as coach.
I believe that creativity stretches beyond art - it is part of me in the same way that I am northern and have curly hair. Creativity informs how I both navigate and understand my day-to-day existence, and therefore cannot be separated from how I arrive and engage in a coaching relationship. I am open to the use of arts-based approaches, but much more interested in the way creativity as a lens can connect us to ourselves and develop our self-insight. An adaptation of Fuster’s work, seeing creativity as a memory of the future™, is central to much of my current thinking.
Similarly, as a psychologist I am interested in the whole person - their thoughts, emotions, perceptions, experiences and memories. The mind represents our consciousness - the part of the self I am interested in working with to build understanding and self-compassion, in turn enabling us to make positive changes that directly benefit our well-being and enhance our relationship to our work.
