Coaching, travel and time travel

by Simon Matthews FASLM MHlthSc

CEO Wellcoaches Australia

Artists who are much cleverer than I (which is pretty much all of them) use a technique called “forced perspective” to challenge the perception of the viewer and lay the foundation for seeing an image in a particular way. This same approach is used by photographers and particularly tourist photographers. You might recall seeing photographs of the Eiffel Tower between someone’s fingers or the disc of the setting sun being supported in the palm of a hand or something like that. That’s forced perspective. Something in the far distance is made to look like it’s in the foreground and much smaller than it is in reality. Forced perspective allows us to consider possibilities and imagine situations which are not currently real.

Masterful coaching involves an analogous technique although we wouldn’t call it forced perspective of course. But I would call it an invited perspective. If you’ve ever been a student of physics, or even Star Trek, you’ll be familiar with the four dimensions of space-time – three physical dimensions and one temporal. Excitingly, these are the dimensions in which we can invite our clients to adopt a different perspective of themselves and their lives. Essentially, we can invite them to travel in both space and time in order to appreciate themselves in a different way.

As is always the case in masterful coaching, this is accomplished by the skilled use of inquiry, reflections and affirmations. These are the fundamental tools at the disposal of a coach and a little akin to a builder’s saw, hammer and screwdriver. For the purpose of exploring how we can invite our clients on a journey through space-time, I’m going to focus on the use of inquiry. 

Invitation to travel in space

Regardless of how different our movement through space is, it always allows us a slightly different perspective that we did not have before moving. Test this for yourself right now. Look straight ahead and pay attention to what’s in your peripheral vision - right at the very edge. Note that. Now turn yourself through 1/8 of a revolution and notice what’s now absent from the periphery on one side but has become visible on the other. Sometimes this change can be even more dramatic: this time, stand facing a door frame, with your eye pressed right up to it. Move your head incrementally until you can just see past the frame of the door into the space ahead of you. See how much that tiny movement has so dramatically changed what you can perceive?

Carefully crafted questions and inquiries can invite our clients into the same experience with themselves – of having an awareness of something that was always present but just outside their field of view.

So how can we invite our clients to make this journey and explore themselves in different ways from different locations? This is where all your creativity comes into play and you might be surprised to learn about yourself, as I was about myself, that you really are much more creative than you might give yourself credit for.

Examples of spatially shifted inquiries

·      If you were to stand on top of a tall ladder and look down at yourself in this situation, who else would you see who is able to support you?

·      Picture yourself standing in your own kitchen. Which kitchen device or utensil best represents the skills and capacities that you bring to this situation?

·      If you were to move from the driver’s seat to the passenger seat for a moment, how might that change your perspective of this situation?

·      Imagine someone was supporting you from the other side of the world. They could only send you a message limited to 10 words. What would those 10 words be?

·      If you were to follow your dog/cat/horse around for a day, what clues from them might you pick up that could assist you right now?

·      If your best friend were at this point, in what way would you want to encourage and support them?

__________

If you’re familiar with questioning approaches, you may recognize the similarities between these examples and the “distancing” technique often applied in psychology and pedagogy through Socratic questioning.

Invitation to travel in time

In addition to inviting people to reflect on their situations from a different physical location or perspective, we can also invite them to reflect from a different point in time. I’ve always found these inquiries particularly powerful because they support others to define and consider progress. The feeling or experience that we might be making incremental but significant changes in the direction of a preferred outcome feeds directly into the consolidation of hope, efficacy and optimism – essential to the maintenance of longer term change, as well as being elements of the construct Psychological capital.

When inquiries such as these are made, we are also able to make use of the capacity to both collapse and expand time. This alone often results in a dramatic shift for someone as they appreciate that all situations have a past, present and future. Despite the fact that we may experience a sense that a particular situation in which we find ourselves is unchanging, the manipulation of time in this way through carefully crafted enquiries, often leads to the development of hope in a different future.

Examples of temporally oriented inquiries

·      If I were to meet you in five years from now, what would have been your best learning from this situation?

·      If you managed to move just 10% from your current position by the end of the year, what will look different?

·      Which of your strengths would I have been able to recognize if I had known you two years ago?

·      Picture yourself living the life you want five years from now. Begin to describe it to me.

·      If you could travel in a time machine to a point in your past to locate a strength you’ve used, what point would you travel to? 

·      If you could travel in a time machine and meet yourself 10 years from now, describe the person you would want to see as you open the door.

______

In addition to cultivating the development of change and difference through open inquiry, this perspective also underpins goalsetting and in particular, goals built around the “SMART” principle. When working with a client to develop a goal, we are essentially inviting them to ask themselves the question: “In what ways can I confidently see that my situation will be different in X days?”

Masterful coaching depends heavily on the capacity of the coach to frame deeply curious inquiries which allow novel and unique insight into any given situation. It’s not the only skill, of course, which supports the practice of masterful coaching. But for my money, the ability to create a profound sense of curiosity about what could be, will always remain the spark that ignites the hope of a different future. Inviting someone to reflect from a different place in space and point in time is an extraordinarily powerful way to evoke that curiosity.

Fin