Sensemaking in August: my monthly reflections
I’m starting a new thing here on the blog…
I call it my monthly reflections where 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.
Each monthly edition includes four vignettes of what I’m doing, learning, experiencing, reading, and making in my life and practice.
Reflective Coaching: The Tiny Practice
In August, I’ve revived a much-loved format for reflection: the tiny practice.
Tiny practice means I’m taking a small-ish journal and dedicate it entirely to one reflective process with the intention to work in it daily.
I call this my tiny practice because it’s not only small in size it also comes with minimal complexity. I simply keep doing the same thing each day. No decisions to be made other than showing up.
I tend to feel drawn to this type of practice when there’s lots going on in life that needs digesting.
Usually these are times when I (and it may be the same for you) need to take care of how I manage my energy, because big life things take up a lot of processing power.
I know from experience that it’s easy for any reflective practice to grind to a halt at this point.
Not enough time or sleep.
Too frazzled to decide what would be most useful right now.
Shorter attention span and staying focused becomes harder.
Too tempted to distract myself or avoid the hard stuff.
I also know from experience that my steering through such times is less steady and skilful when I let my reflective practice slide during turbulent times.
This month, I chose found poetry as my process – it has never let me down!
It is in and of itself a very reduced and quick process. I only need some words from magazines (or from old books, printed out emails, anything with words that can be cut up). And it can easily be done at the desk, kitchen table, on the sofa, in bed, while travelling…
My tiny practice looks like this: I create a poem on one page of the journal and add some reflective writing on the opposite page. Limiting myself to one page of journaling stops me from getting into ruminating or going round in circles.
Working in a journal creates a timeline. Each day I’m doing my practice ends up in a double spread combining a poem with my own journaling. Over time, I can see how my thoughts or emotions are shifting. I can see the ups and downs we naturally experience when we go through tough stuff. And sooner or later, I realise that I’m indeed working my way through and I’m coming out the other side.
It’s easy to forget that difficult times will end and that we can indeed cope.
A journal like this is a great reminder that I coped. Which in turn strengthens resilience.
Arts-based Coaching: how artmaking can enrich reflective writing
With my focus on the tiny practice, I didn’t do lot of other arts-based things.
What I have recently introduced to my tiny practice are tiny depictions that sit alongside my found poems. Without going into personal details, what I am noticing is that my journaling has shifted. Before I added these tiny artworks, I wrote more about facts and what was happening. Since I’ve started making little drawings or mini collages, each journal entry has started with ‘I feel….’
I’m reminded of James Pennebaker’s research on expressive writing which showed that writing has a healing effect when we go beyond writing about what happened and what was said, done or not done.
Writing heals when we capture how we felt and give voice to our deep emotional experiencing.
Let’s see whether the sentence starter ‘I feel…’ continues in my journaling. Now that I’ve made it conscious, I may have broken the spell these little artworks had over me…
Meaning-focused Coaching: the true Self and the adapted Self
In meaning-focused coaching I often use the Map of Meaning®. This framework shows that one way to create meaningful experiences is to stand strong in your integrity and be aligned with your true self.
Based on this I got into exploring the antidote to the true self: the adapted self.
When we live from an adapted self, external forces or messages determine our choices and actions more than our inner voice, intuition, gut feeling, self-trust or own values.
We are more driven by what would please or appease others.
We assign more weight to others’ opinions, expertise or expectations at the expense of our own.
We might expect that someone who lives from a strong true self will be steadier in their behaviour than someone whose behaviours are strongly driven by their adapted self and therefore more exposed to changing external influences.
So, this quote by psychoanalyst Harry Guntrip intrigued me:
“The more possible it is to predict consistently what a human being will do, the less of a real person he has become.”
Predictability seems to be no guarantee for integrity or authenticity. Maybe that’s why I dislike the (capitalist) idea that everyone needs to have their personal brand. Brands are assets that get managed with great consistency to create strong associations, i.e. shortcuts in the brain why we should buy this particular thing without considering anything else (let alone considering not to buy anything at all).
Humans aren’t brands. Humans are messy, evolving, beautiful creatures. Even if we are firmly grounded in our true self, we will have to manage value conflicts, make trade-offs between different moral principles and the reality of living a life in our current systems. All these choices are very context dependant.
Be you with all the unpredictability, changes of mind and heart and humanness you offer us.
Trauma-informed Coaching: when to show up from your adapted or true self
Having an adapted self is a normal part of being human. (You can read more about the adapted self in the previous vignette about meaning-focused coaching.)
There are many situations and circumstances, when living from our adapted self is skilful and appropriate. It helps us navigate rules and norms that are necessary to live respectfully in societies and communities and consider our impact on others.
In trauma-informed coaching we get curious about this part, our adapted self.
We get curious about how well we know it.
We explore which experiences shaped our adapted self. Were these experiences early in life? Did they overwhelming us? What support did we get at the time?
We wonder whether we notice from which part we’re operating, and which situations or people bring our adapted self to the fore.
Living from our adapted self isn’t only about hiding our true self, it’s also a way of protecting it. Sometimes in life and in this world, being able to protect our core and essence is important.
But we want to be able to choose when we show up as our adapted versus our true self and how we can skilfully shift between them.