What’s in a creative thinking coach?

What does it mean to be a creative thinking coach? What does it mean to be a leadership coach with an enquiring creative arts background?

My background is 30 years mainly in the creative industries wearing multiple roles from curating, project management, director of organisations, editor on the environment of the workplace for creative freelancers, leading initiatives in development and change for creative professionals and consulting and advise on the field of jobs and opportunities. I’m also a sFedi qualified business adviser. And also an artist. And a mum. What a mix.

So what comes out of this cross over, this unique positioning on the crossroads of creative, of business, of leadership development, of project management?

I have found three useful points that, in combination, create a unique foundation from which to coach and support individuals and teams.

The first is the art practice itself, which is based on enquiry. I don’t paint pretty pictures. On the contrary I present ‘un-pretty’ ideas that query, reflect and mirror cultural values and sometimes unflattering real life. An example is State of the World Overwhelm – a pre-pandemic work made in 2019 looking at our desperation of the global socio-economic state.

 This work explores values – our inherent values, our individual values, our cultural values, our socio-economic values. This ‘enquiring mind’ reveals truths about the human condition. This inquisitive approach – this background of enquiry is a springboard to coaching - its a natural step that allows me  as a creative thinker to come from a different space than your usual executive or life coach – an extended periphery of awareness.

So exploration in the human condition comes through the language of coaching, as it does the language of art. It’s an exploratory space, an exploratory conversation. The difference is the subject, the client and the focus on development and positive solution.

But the conversation and the exploration remains the same and are values based. It’s a positioning of self within – and without - different contexts. An examination of the laws and rules and structures we live by, we live within, we protest against, we are scripted by, we reveal and expose.

The second contribution to the uniqueness of this positioning the academic training that is art school To train in the arts, to have spent foundation years and degree years studying and exploring and researching and making and ultimately asking WHY? – and then to take this teaching, this learning, this creative approach to other parts of life – is a phenomenon. It equips you with an ability to see things sideways, to think sideways, to imagine sideways, longways and upside down ways. It’s not your usual education and it’s certainly not something you can pick up on a webinar or quick course – it is a foundational and embedded way of being.

As a visual arts student you are taught to question everything – and I mean everything. So this approach becomes second nature within any conversation. It’s an exploration – an unpicking of concepts and theories. It’s a natural tendency to think around and behind ideas and to approach an issue with a different take. It’s the visual mapping that is created through the conversation – the landscape that emerges, the imagery inside the imagination, that is transformed and transferred and responded, bounced back through verbal exposition.

The third wonderful gift a creative thinker has in her kit bag, is the ability to converse and communicate with other visual, lefty right brained beings (weirdos) with ease and effortlessness. To engage with a diverse range of thinking beings comes naturally because the capacity to think sideways has already been stretched and there is less likelihood of shock.

So the creative background provides an entire skillset - creative thinkers often refer to themselves as being creative problem solvers, but that phrase doesn’t quite touch on the vast realm of approach from this foundation.

If you’d like to know more about this, have a discusison, do a podcast, then get in touch!