Using music, poetry and art to enrich your coaching approach.
Serafina Steer – “Disco compilation”
“Of course my scanty life philosophy,
as you suspected all along
Is actually based on lines from songs but they are with me
When you are gone, I shall put on my disco compilation CD
From an old friend and let the music wrap its long arms around me.”
Serafina Steer – Disco Compilation (Official Video)
There are books on how metaphor and storytelling and narrative can be used to unlock people’s understanding. It can be a useful way to telescope out and gain a greater overview of where someone is at. Words and symbols and images can be used to help people articulate what it is that they mean (or, just as valuably, what they don’t mean). Poetry, art and music are also all useful prompts to help us identify the things that resonate for us, stuff that has become pivotal or axiomatic and that helps us shape the filters that we view the world through.
Consciously, or unconsciously we bring all aspects of ourselves into our coaching practice.
Our life philosophy (from the Serafina Steer lyric) is a grab bag of things that we’ve picked up over the years. From time to time it’s important to take stock of some of that folk knowledge and sift it for the underpinning things that we’ve found useful or valuable and also to try and pick it apart to find the stuff that might be valuable for others.
Along those lines I have recently found myself returning regularly to Kay Ryan’s impressive and impressively short poem “We’re building the ship as we sail it”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=188&issue=3&page=21
I’d come across Kay Ryan a couple of times, but her sparse poetry had kind of bounced off the surface until Frank Skinner took a deep dive into this one on his poetry podcast (highly recommended).
I think it resonated because I was listening to it when the office was in the middle of doing a bit of a review into its mentoring offering, and it provided that pithy reminder that the sleek hull of the vessel that we end up in, often isn’t reflective of the jerry rigged raft that we lashed together in turbulent times in the past.
It’s also quite a beautiful (or at least, I find it to be so) acknowledgement that that process towards things being more gracious, rarely leaves no mark.
I’ve brought this to mind, in coaching, when helping people to telescope outwards, if they’re comparing themselves unfavourably with friends or colleagues. It’s often in the toughest times that we all learn and grow the most, and it’s handy to ask those exemplars about their journey (and their scars) and, if we’re asked, to reflect upon the stormy seas that made us what we are (rather than to pretend that we’ve always intrinsically been great at stuff).
Frank Skinner’s podcast
https://hellorayo.co.uk/podcasts/frank-skinner-poetry-podcast/id-2145390/
On the art front there’s a well worn anecdote about Picasso’s response to being asked to draw a quick sketch:
in the 1984 book “What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School” by Mark H. McCormack
It always reminds me of the story about the woman who approached Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, “That will be $10,000.”
“But you did that in thirty seconds,” the astonished woman replied.
“No,” Picasso said. “It has taken me forty years to do that.”
There’s some debate as to whether this was a reformulation of a story about Whistler, but at core it provides a nifty way to help coachees re-evaluate the things that they find simple (and give it it’s due value), or maybe to help them contextualise the time that it has taken them to gain those skills (where they are feeling impatient with others).
So, to loop back around to Serafina – it’s always worthwhile taking some time to sift through your life philosophies and work out which things have become useful, maybe even totemic, to you. At the very worst it’s a neat piece of self-reflection that could help you pick through how things are going in your supervision sessions. But it also might be the key that helps a coach, or coachee, or colleague unlock their own situation.
And the really magic thing about songs or poetry or art is the space that it leaves. The space that the person reading/listening/looking fills in with their own experience and story, to make it work for them.