Sensemaking in January: 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.
January was the month of gently launching into a new year. With the slower weeks between the holidays, ‘the time between the years’ as we say in German, I enjoyed attending to my pile of want-to-read books and returning to some favourites.
This month: embracing sketchbooks for creative, reflective practice. Asking: What do I want? And how the cultural context enriches our conversations about trauma.
Arts-based & Reflective Coaching: Sketchbook Explorations
The beautiful book Sketchbook Explorations by textile artist Shelley Rhodes is a visual feast and a practical companion.
It took me quite a while to get to grips with the idea of sketchbooks. Like so many people I meet in my programs or coaching, I felt constrained in my sketchbook practice by wanting it to be good. I didn’t just want the page I was working on to be ‘good’, I wanted the entire journal to be beautiful, page after page after page. In addition, I wanted each page to be somehow meaningful. Of course, that was never going to happen, and I ended up with half-finished abandoned sketchbooks and a sense of failure.
I had borrowed Shelley Rhodes book from the library at the start of 2020 and the upside of the never-ending lockdowns was that I was allowed to keep it for nearly a year! I ended up buying my own copy anyway, because I wanted to return to it as a source of inspiration.
Rhodes covers all the basics of sketchbooking: different types of books, different formats, bought and handmade books, basic techniques in mixed media like layering, reusing and reworking, being curious about different materials. She also addresses some typical hurdles: how to start for example, or how to travel with sketchbooks.
Importantly, her book helped me shift my purpose of keeping a sketchbook. I realised that for me it wasn’t about honing artistic skills, collecting landscape sketches or material for an exhibition. I finally understood that my sketchbooks were the container for my process not the final product.
When I was able to let go of the striving for the perfect page, some really beautiful and meaningful pages emerged with ease and sketchbooks became a central element of my arts-based practice.
If I had to find a headline for the type of sketchbooks I keep these days, reflective sketchbooks would capture it best.
Sketchbooks are at the core of my reflective practice. I use them to reflect on action and for action, helping me to learn from the past and reflect forward by imagining new possibilities or alternative choices.
My sketchbooks are a good reminder that good things happen when I don’t try so hard.
Meaning-focused Coaching: What We Want
Charlotte Fox Weber has written ‘a journey through twelve of our deepest desires’. A specific sentence on the back cover made me buy the book: “Sara resents being tied down to anything, but part of her craves stability.”
Well, that described a tension I’m familiar with! Flexibility, variety, change, trying out new things and new places, keep moving, keep imagining AND stability, structure, rhythm. These are of course two different parts of me with their own needs, preferences and intentions, and I love them both deeply.
Reading this book reminded me of the powerful question: What do I want?
As you read this question, I hope it’s not an image of a big eyeroll that emerges for you. I hope you don’t see an impatient version of yourself throwing your hands up, exacerbated and frustrated.
I hope you read the words with a question mark at the end. I hope you see a curious version of yourself, the one that’s really, really interested in what makes you (or someone else) come alive.
I hope it’s the creative, inventive part of you that’s ready to experiment and try things out.
I hope it’s the loving part of you that really cares about what you want, not what you should want, have permission to want or what is a good thing to want.
I’ve started a very large page in my sketchbook, titled What I Want, and I’m curious what I will capture on this page.
Trauma-informed Coaching: the collective nature of trauma
January has also meant we had to get strapped in for more disruption, more extremism, more power grabs, more attacks on our shared humanity. Fortunately, the conversations about trauma are constantly changing and our understanding is deepening. We will need all the knowledge and wisdom we can get!
One thread in that conversation that I welcome is the cultural context of trauma. It broadens our perspective from trauma as a rare and individual experience to the much more accurate view that trauma comes in many shapes, as small t and big T trauma; it’s about the imprint left by the persistent drip-drip of micro-trauma or chronic stress; and trauma exists as collective trauma in societies, communities, and spans generations as intergenerational trauma.
In You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For Dick Schwartz who developed Internal Family Systems (IFS) is writing about the cultural pressure that is being put on our closest relationship, our romantic partner. He shares how the directive of finding your soulmate to make your life (and yourself) complete sets us up for failure in our most intimate relationships. In the context of our “highly mobile, appearance-obsessed, work- and consumption-addicted culture” we end up isolated and feeling empty. We turn to our romantic partners to rescue us or feel so disconnected that communication, trust and truly being in relationship with each other are no longer possible.
Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté capture the importance of cultural context in The Myth of Normal. The book has a rich chapter on ‘The Toxicity of Our Culture’ outlining how trauma is not limited to the experience of personal stressors. They offer thoughts (and evidence!) on how our social fabric is disintegrating, unravelling into communities full of disconnection.
We end up disconnected from our Self, each other, and our natural world.
I have moments when this cultural context feels utterly overwhelming and it’s hard to see where one might begin to make a useful contribution.
But this part of the conversation is so important as it puts into words what we’re all observing, witnessing and experiencing. The chapter in The Myth of Normal about trauma-infused politics is titled: ‘We feel their pain’. They write about “the wounded electing the wounded, the traumatized leading the traumatized.”
How many people right now are left with feeling the pain of their traumatised leaders, whether in government, workplaces or communities.
It took me over a year to work my way through this tome of a book and I’m constantly returning to it, re-reading passages, adding to my scribbles in the margins and making connections to my work. I see the tentacles of toxic culture in my coaching when people struggle to know what they need or want from themselves, their relationships, their work and lives. And I know, there’s a lot we can do about this.
When I feel like throwing my hands up, I remember Deb Dana’s words: “the world becomes safe one nervous system at a time.”
If you are curious about developing your own reflective sketchbook practice, join me for one of the small group programs:
The next one starts on 24th February:
Sensemaking Studio is a series of four-month online programs to cultivate a reflective practice in a small group of 6 like-minded Sense Makers.
Each program can be booked individually or you can create your own longer-term program by joining more than one. In each Studio group, we’ll focus on a specific modality, theme or framework to shape and cultivate a personal and sustainable reflective practice.
Reflecting on Meaning focuses on the exploration of meaning and fulfilment in work and life using The Map of Meaning as a framework.
It doesn't matter whether you have a reflective practice or any knowledge of the Map of Meaning. Reflecting on Meaning is a place to be curious about your personal meaning practice.
The program starts on Monday 24th February and finishes on 19th May 2025.
You will join 4 online live sessions (on Zoom, each session is between 1.5-2 hours long).
In-between our live sessions you'll receive video prompts to deepen your practice with self-paced reflective experiments. During the 4-month program, you also get free access to monthly drop-in studio sessions to experiment with some guidance from me.
This program is for anyone who wants to start or deepen their reflective practice and create the conditions for meaning, success, change, joy, rest, connection… whatever it is you seek more of.