Wade Brown and Ericka Shelton try art-assisted coaching at their Experience-Assisted Onsite.
Create Courageously
This month we’ve been focusing on the empathy to imagination continuum. At our Co-Lab Conference call in March, we had discussion and learning around this theme with a specific focus on crafting Guided Imagining scripts and experiences.
Here are some favorite guided imagining tools from your fellow LSCCs:
Choose Aliveness
In this skill refresh, we give you access to the latest Cultivating Creativity webinar where Megan describes the empathy to innovation continuum and how you can use that with the Life Gallery Exercise to create new options for reflection and moving forward.
You can find a copy of the Life Gallery Exercises here:
Life Gallery - Part 1
Life Gallery - Part 2
Life Gallery - Part 3
(As a reminder, please do not copy any images or content from these presentations without our written permission.)
Matt Thomann (C18), Megan Gilmore, Erica Eyer (C2), Will Smith (C11), and Torri Williams (C16) at the end of a long but fulfilling day co-leading an Appreciative Inquiry Summit.
Discover Purpose
We’ve been working for the past few years on Guided Imagining scripts and recordings developmentally designed to explore and develop life purpose literacy in children. These guided imagining scripts can be used with children, couples, families or adults to explore a range of topics during coaching sessions or as homework in between.
Three meditation recordings are already available on Spotify with more coming soon. And below are a few of our favorites!
A Safe Space by Erica Eyer
My Heart by Erica Eyer
What Are You Packing? by Anthony Eyer
Bravery Tree by Erica Eyer
Diane Hunter (Miami Nation Historic Preservation Officer) and Anthony Eyer (C7) realize that they’re relatives at the Myaamia Ribbonwork workshop.
Develop Potential
A favorite guided imagining tool for the Lark’s Song staff is the Inner Witness! We love it so much, we have now integrated it into our nature-based experience assisted training day for the LSCC program. If you’ve never done the Inner Witness for yourself, take the time to listen to the recording below, take some notes about your experience and process it with a coaching colleague. The script is available for you as well to use with clients as you think it will serve.
Art assisted well-being session with Westminster Preschool staff.
Lead to Serve
Bottomline: According to the Lincoln Center Institute, imagination is the ability to conceive of that which does not yet exist. As professional coaches, we work with clients every day that are seeking new insight and a clear path of action toward something in their life that has not existed yet. Anything that you can do to bring more imagination, more empathy, and more creativity into your sessions will also result in more insight and innovation.
I was listening to my dear friend talk to my daughter on the phone a few weeks ago about the classic story A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. My daughter has now read the book, seen the movie, recounted the story, and is working her way through the graphic novel. And my friend’s question to her was this: “Did you like this story best on a screen, in pictures or in your imagination?” While it was really difficult for her to decide, she ended up landing on the opinion that the story is SO good in all of its forms, but she liked it first and best in her own imagination - and then, she loved seeing how other people imagined it in pictures and on a screen.
What did you imagine your adult-life would be like when you were a child? What kind of person did you imagine you would be? What did you imagine you would spend your time on and love? What do you imagine your present life looks like to others outside of you? What does your present-self imagine you will be like in another 15 years? What kind of person will you be? What will you spend your time on and what will you love?
In a special edition of Time Magazine called The Science of Creativity, Jeffrey Kluger says, “The imagination network, which allows the brain to do previously untried things with the information the executive-attention network has provided […] has a role in planning and daydreaming.”
I take my plans seriously! So I had never considered that when I make one, it’s really just me imagining a best-case scenario and what actions would be needed to possibly arrive there. I think this is really hopeful! As a professional coach, you may be more stylistically prone to action and planning or maybe more to insight and daydreaming, but either way engages our imagination network. Either way, we’re conceiving of things that do not exist yet based on the limited information that we do have. So what if we made multiple plans and what if we dreamed multiple dreams?
Let’s try this month to imagine a new way of preparing for a coaching session, a new way of implementing it, a new tool that feels brave to use, a new question to ask, a new tool to create, a new way of partnering professionally! Let us know what you can imagine - we’d love to dream and plan with you!
Reflection Questions:
What can you imagine would be better?
What’s your plan for moving forward?
If your life were written into a book or put on a screen, who would be the B characters that you’d want to be sure played a part?
Affirmation: I am imaginative and brilliant. I empathize quickly and compassionately with a different point of view. I can craft new ideas and plans with ease and joy.