Success Stories - The power of visualization in coaching
I have been lucky to have experienced some pretty masterful facilitation in my life, both through coaching and outside of it. Many of my most influential facilitation experiences have been through my work as a mentor with Young Women Empowered, an organization based in Seattle that “cultivates the power of diverse young women (those who identify as women or girls or were assigned female at birth) to be creative leaders and courageous changemakers through transformative programs within a collaborative community of belonging.” In the summer of 2017, I participated in Y-WE Create, their creative design camp, as both a mentor and a researcher. Y-WE employs an intergenerational community mentoring model in which mentors participate alongside the youth. One of the lead facilitators led us through an exercise called Oracular Poetry, in which each of us wrote a paragraph about something that was present in our hearts and minds. We then cut out each individual word and put all the words in a Ziploc bag. Everyone was given a Ziploc bag full of words that someone else had written to create a poem out of. The poem I received was made from my words, but oriented by someone else, which brought new meaning and power to them. Ever since participating in that activity, I have been particularly interested in and attuned to activities that give us that kind of view on our own experiences, still very much our own but also somehow a higher vantage point than we are usually able to reach.
As a coach, visualizations can be a powerful way that I support clients. Coaching is client-led, so unlike the Oracular Poetry exercise, I don’t come in with a facilitation plan. I use visualization when the client would benefit from connecting their current experience to the past, present or alternate reality. Because visualization intentionally steps outside of the bounds of our current reality, it can help shake some things loose and allow the client to see themselves from a different perspective. Here are a few examples of how I have used visualization in coaching recently:
In reviewing 360 data in order to create goals, a client told me that they have had a hard time with goals in the past. They set them and have good intentions of doing them, but their already built habits make it challenging to stick to the goals as written. I took that cue and asked if they’d be interested in doing a visualization. After we looked at the patterns in the data, I led them through a visualization where we visited them a year from now. I asked prompting questions about what their life looked like as it related to the patterns we articulated. As they came back into the present, I asked them what they learned from their future self. By removing the barriers of the present, they were able to articulate exactly what they wanted to feel like a year from now and what steps they would need to take today to get there. Their goals look very different from other goals I have supported, but the goals work for them and that’s what’s important.
Close to the end of a coaching engagement, I had a session with a client who, in the previous session, had a major breakthrough in realizing they wanted something different in their career. We left celebratory and upbeat, but they came to the next session with a heaviness about them. When I asked about it, they shared that they were excited about the potential for a new career path, but they had been in their current organization for more than a decade and there was some grief in thinking about leaving. As we moved through the session, they realized that part of that grief was that their dad was so proud of them for starting at this company and their dad has since passed away. I asked them if they would be up for doing a visualization. In this one, I asked them to imagine they were talking to their dad, telling him about the change they were so excited about. Although this conversation will never happen in real life, the impact of moving through it can help move through some grief and feel supported by their family in pursuing this change. By the end of the session, the grief was still there, but in naming it and making it more tangible they were able to start moving through it to start making this change.
In both of these examples, reaching outside the bounds of reality helped my clients connect to themselves in a different way, just as the Oracular Poetry exercise did for me many years ago. As a coach, my role is to support the client discovering solutions and changes they want to make in themselves towards goals they set out. Visualizations are one way that I support my clients to be able to do that. I keep these descriptions of the actual visualization intentionally vague because each is so tailored to the client experience. Part of the special, magical feeling of a coaching space lies in being able to create a space that is uniquely for you as a client. If you’re interested in learning more about coaching or how I use visualizations in my work, I would love to hear from you!
