Sensemaking in October: 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.
October was the month when, after some buffering in September, I inched back into my own creative & reflective practice. It was also a month of learning and professional development.
Arts-based Coaching: Go with the Flow
Following my September stuckness, I felt drawn to using watercolour in my own creative and reflective practice. Watercolour isn’t my go-to medium. I’m more of a mixed media or collage person. Naturally, I got curious about this.
As a trained art therapist, I know that fluid media like watercolour is likely to elicit emotional responses, whereas media that provide more structure or solidity tend to elicit more cognitive responses.
My love for collage, a much more structured and controllable medium, certainly emphasises my cognitive parts which I welcome and appreciate for their structured thinking, analytical abilities, attention to detail and capacity to hold complexity and uncertainty. I know that these parts can sometimes outshine other parts of me. I saw the pull towards playing with fluid media as a need to go more right-brain and invite the imaginative, playful parts into my personal inquiries.
With that in mind, I decided to add more non-dominant hand artmaking.
There’s some evidence that using our non-dominant hand is a way of accessing the right hemisphere of the brain.
This applies to both right- and left-handed people, in case you were wondering.
If you feel stuck and would like to push past your thinking brain to access new and emergent knowing, try using your non-dominant hand – this also works for writing and journaling. I feel a period of left- and right-handed dialogue writing coming on for me. (Lucia Capacchione, PH.D. offers gentle and skilful guidance on this as part of her inner child work.)
Reflective Coaching: “The times are urgent; let us slow down.”
“The times are urgent; let us slow down.”
I was preparing the October session for this year’s Sensemaking Studio on inviting slowness into our reflective process as I stumbled upon Bayo Akomolafe’s essay A Slower Urgency.
Often in reflective practice, we feel drawn to reflect on something that’s not working: an unresolved situation, a tricky relationship, a challenge, difficulty, messy life moment or full-blown crisis. This is normal and ok. If these topics arise in our reflective practice, it’s because they require our attention.
The trouble is that we may develop a sense of urgency when reflecting on crises; whether that’s the polycrisis we’re facing in the world or all the smaller (and possibly bigger) fires in our own lives.
This sense of urgency is more than our way of thinking about the fires in our lives; it’s truly a felt sense of urgency, it sets up camp our bodies.
Language matters, it sends important signals to our brain to activate specific responses in us.
As Bayo Akomolafe writes, “the figure of crisis calls on panic, hasty reactions, bleeping lines and tick-tocking sounds. It is when the slow rise of mercury through thin tubes reaches a point of alarming resolution; an inflection point. The modern figuration of crisis has enrolled reactionary platforms, where the urgency of a situation is the sole argument for sidestepping complexity and ‘doing something’ now.”
As long as we run on the fumes of urgency, underlying panic and pervasive time poverty our brain, specifically the Salience Network, will apply a tight filter on what it lets through to our thinking brain.
This tight filter is essential to avoid overwhelm as our thinking brain’s capacity for handling information is much lower than what the lower brain can process.
When we bring our sense or urgency and nervous system activation into our reflective practice, we tend to be limited to obvious thoughts and stick with old narratives. We’re less likely to go beyond predictable ideas of what to do about our issue at hand or elicit emergent knowing, the aha-moments we yearn for.
Slowing down is not only about mindfulness and staying in the here and now;
Slowing down is actually a very effective way of telling our brain that we have capacity for more now, that the time is right for an aha-moment.
My current representation of my Map of Meaning through collage.
Meaning-focused coaching: Why am I here?
What I notice in my meaning-focused coaching is reflecting on meaning typically leads to this rather existential question: Why am I here?
We can look at it from two perspectives:
Why am I HERE?
We focus on the place where we are: the family we are a part of, the friendship group we belong to, the companies we work for, the world we inhabit.
We evaluate the contributions we make to a certain field, an organisation, or community.
We try to capture the impact we can make in this particular area and how we leave somewhere or something in a different shape or state than we found it. The term ‘legacy’ often comes up – what do I leave behind once I’m gone?
The other way of looking at this question is to emphasise the word ‘I’:
Why am I here?
What did I create and accomplish? What talents did I bring to these challenges? Which of my strengths (and weaknesses) showed up? Which ideas did I develop, what solutions did I come up with?
Using the Map of Meaning® as a framework for meaning making we could say that these two questions play out on the Self – Others axis of the Map.
Self is about our autonomy and authenticity; Others looks at our need to be in relationship and experience connection.
And if the question ‘Why am I here’ seems a bit much, just include that little word Viktor Frankl encouraged us to add: Why am I here today?
Trauma-informed coaching: Let’s drop the ‘rugged individualism’ in leadership
Attending the Annual Conference of Internal Family Systems was inspiring in many ways. Rebecca Ching’s talk about trauma-informed leadership practices resonated strongly – not surprising, given I’ve spent two decades in the corporate world and have my own experience of working with (or largely for?) leaders, striving to become a leader, being a leader (with successes and failures), and simply working in the hierarchical system of corporate leadership.
Ching’s talk explored imposter experience, resistance, self-sabotage, upper limit, resilience, and the inner critic through the lenses of trauma-informed practice and parts work.
What has long been a rub for me is how we typically talk about these experiences in mainstream media, in some business circles and on social media: so often, we use labelling and judging language.
Let’s take ‘upper limit’ as an example: of course, we all meet an ‘upper limit’ at certain points in our lives, an internal ceiling where we suddenly seem to stumble on our path towards accomplishing something that’s big and matters to us.
But why call it ‘the upper limit problem’? Why ask us to ‘fix our upper limit’ or ‘overcome this common psychological hiccup’? (Who writes these headlines??)
Rather than getting curious about the part that reduces our ability to focus, makes us resist, stumble or procrastinate we try to push aside and through. Instead of welcoming the inner critic and ask how we might ease its worries, we scold it into submission.
It’s noticeable that how we speak about these experiences comes from looking at the world and leadership through a very individualistic lens.
Rebecca Solnit, always on point, says: "That’s another part of our rugged individualism and hero culture, the idea that all problems are personal and they’re all soluble by personal responsibility.”
We risk missing the relational aspect of all these experiences and also the protective intentions of parts that bring out these behaviours, thoughts and feelings in us. We discard the underlying power-over dynamic and systemic oppression that have contributed to and keep shaping these experiences.
It was affirming to engage with a community ready to look at typical leadership terms differently. It gives me such hope that we’re about to reach a critical mass in fields like coaching and leadership to have different conversations about these experiences and find different ways of being with them.