Sensemaking in May: my monthly reflections
In my monthly reflections, I share how the 4 qualities that inform my coaching and courses – arts-based, trauma-informed, reflective and meaning-focused – are showing up in my work and life.
This month: how arts-based processes engage all our neural networks, embracing the tensions of meaningful living, leaning into compassion, not knowing and client wisdom, and the value of process notes in reflective practice.
Arts-based Coaching: Which brain networks get to work when we coach with creativity
I regularly come across two types of coaching that involve creativity and both can be referred to as creative coaching:
Coaching for creativity which aims to support people in creative professions, like visual or performing artists or writers.
Coaching which invites your creativity and creative part to explore new possibilities, gain new insights and create change.
My work is more anchored in the latter, the creative coaching that invites your creative part and uses arts-based processes to explore your inner world and derive insights that can be channelled into goal-oriented processes and actions that support change or growth.
Using arts-based processes in coaching with me is not a must and will always be tailored to my clients’ preferences for modalities or materials. But I love working this way and I value that there’s an evidence-based and scientific foundation for why this way of coaching is so effective.
When we engage in creative activities, our brain switches between two key networks:
The network that helps with imagination, self-reflection, and generating new ideas;
The network that helps us focus, organise thoughts, and make decisions.
This network switch is managed by the Salience Network, which acts as a moderator, deciding when to shift and which information to pass on between networks.
If we harvest this balance of imagination and control in our reflective practice and in coaching by turning to arts-based processes, we create genuinely illuminating, spontaneous, and surprising insight which can then feed into a goal and action-directed process.
Meaning-focused Coaching: Embracing the tensions of meaningful living
In May, I wrapped up the first group of my new program Reflecting on Meaning.
I know already that this 4-month journey with a small group of super-curious and engaged Sense Makers will be a big highlight for me in 2025. There were the joy and surprise of noticing new pathways to meaning and creating meaning opportunities. There was the energy of making some changes to life, to see and feel that things can shift. There were also moments of sadness and sorrow when looking at our maps of meaning revealed areas where we felt a little stuck or lost.
We used frameworks like the Map of Meaning® as scaffolds for our reflective explorations and left plenty of open space to ensure the program could yield to the different intentions and needs people brought to it.
Something that became apparent in our experiments with the Map of Meaning was how useful it is to acknowledge the tensions of meaningful living. Typically, tensions sound like something we best get rid of. And when it comes to tight shoulders this might be true.
But in coaching and therapeutic work, tensions, polarities, dualities show up often and can’t always be resolved.
For me, understanding the underlying tension is still the fastest way to plot ways out of feeling stuck. That’s not necessarily a quick fix. But it offers a distinct trailhead to start the process of change and something I can keep my gaze on as I muddle through the rough terrain of liminal space, like the horizon or an obvious landmark.
Trauma-informed Coaching: leaning into compassion, not knowing and client wisdom
May is also the month in which I started this year’s main focus for my professional development: STAIR level 2 with Jules Taylor Shore. It’s a method that offers therapists and coaches who work experientially a systematic way of integrating different tools, processes and methods.
Every now and then, you come across something that seems to be made for you. The STAIR method is one such thing for me. It integrates neuroscience without being academic or geeky. It appreciates the value of structuring and planning without becoming rigid or leaving intuition behind. It encourages compassion, reflections about power, being at peace with not knowing. And it also emphasises that the client and their system know more about their inner world than any coach or therapist could ever know.
It’s such a refreshing and caring approach in times when we’re sold the ‘winning formular’ at every corner.
Reflective Coaching: Using process notes
A small yet powerful aspect of arts-based reflection are process notes.
They’re simply tiny notes we take during the process of arts-based reflection whether that involves making marks, drawing, collage, letting paint puddles run across the paper or exploring different textures and materials.
They help us catch small shifts in our emotions, physical sensations or thoughts that pop into our minds. They help us notice whether we like or dislike something, whether something’s missing or too busy, or what an element or colour reminds us of.
They can look like this:
Process notes are one of the tools we practice in my reflective group programs.
I keep reminding remind myself how useful and supportive simple processes are when it comes to building a reflective practice.