The Figurative Space of Coaching

An examination of coaching clients’ metaphors for their experiences of coaching

David Britten

Outline of today’s presentation

• why metaphor?

• literature

• methodology

• findings and implications

• questions / discussion

Why metaphor?

Metaphor has a poetic ability to illuminate ‘intricate facets of experience which have never before been said.’

Gendlin, 2003, p. 109

The literature

• metaphor in general

• metaphor and coaching

• metaphor and mentoring

• metaphor and therapy

Metaphor in general

‘It is “hard” to “put together” an “everyday” sentence which does not “contain” a “hidden” or “embedded” metaphor.’

Lawley and Tompkins, 2000, p. 11

InterpretativePhenomenological Analysis

An idiographic approach ‘concerned with examining how a participant makes sense of, or seeks meaning in, their experience.’

Smith et al., 209, p. 187

“A psychology of non-interchangeable units.”

Bugental, 1963, p. 564

Diego Velázquez,Las Meninas(1656)

Findings

Eliciting metaphor: a problematic process

Superordinate Themes:

• The need for and purpose of coaching

• The Self (emergent theme: Growth)

• The Coaching Space

The Coaching Space: Marion

It's a bit like that shape like a Yurt shape or something. And it's kind of in that vacuum within the space of that tent that support is created. That's where the space is to feel safe, to feel I can open up and share a lot of ideas, it's a creative space.

More than anything the support is there to be creative rather than be – I feel like nothing I say will be stupid because I feel like I can be quite imaginative and open with my ideas there.

The Coaching Space: Elaine

You position things around to try to come to some kind of connectivity and insight. And then wandering back round again you’re making the connections there's something over there, something over there, something over there.

I just go with whatever feels right and I’m absolutely in the curiously creative space in that moment. When I’m there that's the most powerful creative exploratory exciting space it could possibly be. If I limit it in some way and kind of far too, ‘we've got to do this properly’ then it minimizes its potential.

The Coaching Space: Vicky

exploring those things and taking risks within that controlled environment to explore different ways of approaching things to see what works best.

like a soldier going to Laser Quest if you like before going to war, and kind of practising your different techniques without actually hurting anyone before you go out into the big wide world.

The Coaching Space: Marion

We're in a café, we're having our meeting, and you know I did an exercise where I was kind of like imagining in a Gestalt way that I was in a chair and I was sort of, you know, focusing on something, I can’t remember, something getting angry...I couldn’t believe that even though we were in the café and it was private but it was just sort of how I got into that and I felt we're in this cocoon or the tent where I could do that.

Donald Winnicott: Potential Space and Play

For the infant or child, play takes place in a ‘potential space between subject and object,’ part me and part not-me, where the reality principle is suspended.

A safe space of make-believe is the template for all cultural experience, which ‘begins with creative living first manifested in play.’

Winnicott, 1980, pp. 120, 118.

Elaine:

If I want to stand up and I want to go over there and I want to use that object I'll use that object in whatever way because the meaning is in the whole process of the movement, the picking, the connection, all of that. And the more I play in those ways the more insight I get.

Chronos and Kairos

Chronos is the linear time of the clock; Kairos is

“the coming into being of a new state of things, [which] happens in a moment of awareness. It has its own boundaries, and it escapes or transcends the passage of linear time...It is a subjective parenthesis set off from Chronos.”

Stern, 2004, p.7

Elaine:

I see the rest of my life as just kind of a wiggly line doing what it does. And then there's these kind of rich sparks of both exploration and creativity that happened. And a real sense of dynamism and then I return to my wiggly path with some more insight and imaginings and understanding carrying those forward.

Implications for Research and Practice

Metaphor is a potentially powerful, if problematic, means of facilitating contact with bodily-felt experience.

Scope for further research into the experience of, and metaphors for, non-linear time.

Comparisons between coaching and therapeutic spaces.

The metaphor of the coaching space as useful heuristic.

The interplay of Chronos and Kairos

Tool-kits or toy-boxes?

References

• Bugental, J. F. T. (1963) Humanistic psychology: A new breakthrough. American Psychologist, 18 (9), pp. 563-567.• Gendlin, E. (2003) ‘Beyond Postmodernism: From Concepts Through

Experiencing’. In: Frie, R. (ed.) Understanding Experience: Psychotherapy and Postmodernism. London: Routledge, pp. 100-115• Kozak, A. (1992) The epistemic consequences of pervasive and embodied

metaphor: Applications to psychotherapy. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 12 (2), pp. 137-154.• Lawley, J. and Tompkins, P. (2000) Metaphors in Mind: Transformation

through Symbolic Modelling. London: The Developing Company Press• Smith, J. A., Flowers, P. and Larkin, M. (2009) Interpretative

Phenomenological Analysis: Theory, Method and Research. London: Sage • Stern, D. (2004) The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life.

New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

• Winnicott, D. (1980) Playing and Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin