Hello and welcome to a new episode of The Art Engager podcast.
Today I'm chatting with Beth Clare McManus, a coaching psychologist,
artist and researcher based in the UK.
But before our chat, if you haven't already, do go back and listen to the
last episode with Jessica Hartshorn about engaging visitors through drawing.
And do also listen to my two recent solo episodes created to celebrate the
launch of my book, The Art Engager.
Episode 136 explores what questioning practices are, why I created
them, and how they can help you to create engaging museum experiences.
And episode 137 does a deep dive on one of the key questioning practices
from my book, The Universal.
So listen in to discover how the Universal came about and how you can use
it with art and objects in the museum.
And please help me to spread the word about my book.
You can do this in a number of ways.
You can give a rating or write a short review of The Art Engager on Amazon,
Goodreads or your favourite book platform.
You can also post a photo or video on social media with The
Art Engager in its new home.
And don't forget to tag me in.
So back to today's guest, Beth Clare McManus.
So Beth's work as a coach and supervisor aims to support people to be happy and
well in their professional practice.
In this episode, Beth shares her background in organizational and
coaching psychology and how her core values of authenticity, fairness
and integrity shape her work.
She also talks about how she rediscovered her creativity later in life and how it
now plays a key role in her coaching.
We explore the unique potential of museum and gallery spaces for coaching and how
the space itself can become part of the coaching process, creating a softer,
more reflective environment for clients.
We explore the ethical considerations of coaching in public spaces, such as
confidentiality and managing emotional responses, and compare how coaching
clients and coaches in supervision respond differently to these spaces.
If you're looking to explore innovative ways of using museum spaces for coaching,
or enhance your understanding of how public spaces can foster reflection
and growth, this episode is for you.
Hi Beth, and welcome to The Art Engager podcast.
Hi Claire, nice to be here with
you.
So Beth, can you tell our listeners who you are and what you do?
Yes, so I am Beth Clare McManus.
I live in the UK in Manchester and I am a coaching psychologist, artist
and experimenter, I suppose is why I'm here talking to you, thinking
about my practice as a whole.
Usually through the medium of academic research, but also a bit of
experimental practice in there as well.
And can you tell us a little bit about the values that inform and guide your work?
Yeah, I think this is a really interesting question because I think I
have a really strong sense of what my personal values are, and it's only when
I was considering are these the same values that drive my work that I think
there's definitely crossover because I'm a self employed one person band.
And the, there is a whole thing there about who I am is how I work
and how I coach and how I research.
But I think there's some slight differences.
I think my personal values are typically around authenticity and
fairness and integrity, and I would say they definitely show up in my work.
But actually, and I don't know if you would call this a value it's a, oh I think
it is a value and it's a core strength of mine, but love is really the driving force
of my work in a way that probably, as a person, it's less explicit or intentional.
So that's love for my work, love for my profession, but most importantly love
for other people and their experience.
I'm very driven as a whole, my background is actually I came to coaching psychology
through organizational psychology.
And the kind of heart of my work is trying to make work better for people or
enable people to have happy working lives.
So I would say love is the value in my work that is more
intentional and explicit.
I think it's my biggest strength, so it's part of me but I wouldn't say
that I lead with an intention of love in my, day to day existence, but it's
definitely an intentional part of my work.
And I was taking a look at your website before we started the recording,
this morning, and I was struck by something you said about You bring
the person you are to how you coach.
You're a very creative person and you bring a lot of creativity
and you're interested in arts based approaches to coaching.
So can you tell us a little bit about that?
yeah, I definitely subscribe to the notion of, if I think
specifically about my coaching work, who you are is how you coach.
And also increasingly noticing that I think some of who you
are is who you coach, that might seem obvious just to some people.
I've been a late arrival at that revelation noticing that the people
who want to work with me, want to work with me because of who I am and
that informing my practice, but also that there are threads of commonality
with the people I'm working with that draw them to me in the first place.
So there's a really interesting exploration that, you know, for another
day there around our identity, our sense of self, and then the work that we do
and who that leads us to working with.
But in terms of that creative identity piece, creativity is something that
it's something I was very connected to as a young person and then as, as
typically happens for lots of people school and the kind of regimented art
education space took my creativity away and also teenage shame and ego
and wanting to be cool and not wanting to be in a choir anymore or play the
violin anymore and all of those other parts of my kind of creative expression.
But yeah, I did GCSE art and really struggled with kind of replicating
other people's work and other people's style of work and equated, I think,
my creative self with art very firmly.
And as I've got older, into my 30s I reconnected with drawing.
I started doing some illustration and found that actually it was
there all along, this ability to express myself creatively.
And so over the last few years, I've been really sitting with that and trying
to figure out what does that mean.
And for me, creativity is such an innate part of me that it's there even
when I'm not drawing or embroidering or making ceramics or whatever kind
of arts based exploration I'm doing.
It's in the way that I think, it's in the way that I talk,
it's in the way that I show up.
It's in the way that I listen, it's in the way that I interpret information.
It's yeah it's moving that sensation of creativity as something you do
to being a quality about how we are and how we show up in the world.
So it's probably quite a long winded way of saying that.
Often when people come to me to work with me, if the creativity is the draw,
there's a bit of an assumption that means we're going to be doing loads
of experimental, arts based things, and that isn't necessarily the case.
Most of the work that I do is like this, like a dialogue, like a conversation
between two people, but the creativity is kind of part of the process.
It's in the room with us, if you like, because it's in me and it's also outside
of me and everywhere without getting too existential, but Yeah, it's a
part of my work as well as part of me.
And following on from that interest in exploring your creativity has led
you into your work, exploring the potential and you also use the word
the 'edges', which I really love the edges and potential of using creativity
and arts based coaching approaches.
And that is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you on this podcast,
because you have in experimenting with using museum and gallery spaces for
coaching and coaching supervision.
And I'd love you to tell our listeners how you first became interested
in using these spaces, these very particular environments for coaching.
Yeah, it's a great question to ponder.
How did I arrive here?
Because it feels like I've now done it and doing it and writing about it.
So it's been nice to revisit what was it particularly that took me there.
I think there's a kind of an environmental or contextual element which is that
when I first started inviting people to join me in gallery spaces it was
just coming off the back of lockdown and so where everything had moved
online and there was a real draw for people to want to do things in person.
The idea of replacing someone's home backdrop, and all of it's for those
who share it, some people obviously blur their backgrounds or put
other backgrounds on, that's okay.
But for those who share a little slice of their home, to move from that into,
bookable meeting rooms that are typically very sterile, white boxes with, really
uncomfortable chairs and a kind of probably oversized table that feels
like it's getting in between you and the person that you're trying to work with.
And there are other spaces available to book, I'm exaggerating there, but it
just didn't feel like the right thing.
So I think when I was thinking about, well, if I was to move back to, or
move some of my practice back to being in person what does that look like?
What's the potential there?
And I, a lot of the ideas that I have in my work are typically things that
originate in my own practice, my own reflective practice particularly.
So Introducing arts based approaches to coaching is not my idea at all.
But in my practice, my arts based approaches have originated
in things that I do for myself.
So illustration emerged when I was 30 as a means of reflecting.
It was a way of processing what was happening to me and
what I'd been doing in the day.
And similarly, I have always, even in the years where I've described not
having a connection to creativity at all, like intentionally have gone to
gallery spaces, usually on my own, as a really restorative space of kind of
calm potential to think things through.
So when I'm feeling a bit stuck or a bit lost or a bit overwhelmed,
I just need a bit of a reset.
I need a bit of a pause, a bit of a slowing down.
Then gallery spaces have been a really beautiful space.
and I should say at this point, because I'm very conscious that I'm saying
galleries, I believe that collectively in the cultural sector we talk about
museums, but I'm not from that world.
And so for me, there is a real distinction between art galleries and museum spaces.
Although they are museums containing different types of collections.
For me, Art galleries, specifically, are.
The spaces that I have used and therefore I don't think that's the edge of the
opportunity, but it's the edge of what I've been experimenting with so far.
So yeah, because I'd been drawn there in my own reflection, it
felt like a really nice space.
There's also a part about it being accessible about it being free.
I invited everyone that I work with to make a donation to the space as a thank
you and I hold membership, so I'm a friend of the galleries that I worked
in, that felt really important that although it's a free space that doesn't
mean I'm extracting from it, I'm working in that space, I'm really using it to
its full potential in lots of ways, there is an exchange, but it is free.
Like you could take someone there and not incur a cost, which kind
of increases the accessibility.
And also I think people are really drawn to things like coaching with
cards or other things that they can look at and interact with.
So it just felt like, well, let's again, like, you've drawn
out that word about 'edges'.
Like I always like to think about potential as having edges and I
always like to push against them.
I don't want to go past.
I always want to find like, what is the limit of my practice?
What is the limit of the possibility here?
And yeah, they just felt like spaces that offered a lot of potential.
And the one other thing to add, the other space that I was really drawn to and still
haven't done anything in I was interested in doing some coaching in a library.
because I think that the social convention of the space is also interesting.
So in art galleries you can be quite anonymous, you can wander
around, you can talk, you can converse, you can return to things.
In libraries there's not as much movement and there's also a sense
of stillness, silence and other different qualities in that space.
So it's not that you can't have a conversation and I'm not suggesting that
we would be having a full blown, full volume dialogue while everyone else is
trying to study or read or Whatever other brilliant activities are happening in the
library, but I was interested in, well, what if you had part of your coaching
session, maybe outside the library, and then you sat in silence together for 20
minutes, half an hour, in the library.
Almost used that as a bit of a pause.
And you might be sat looking at each other a bit Marina Abramovich, just holding eye
contact and then moved back outside to see, like, what's happened in that time.
And there's something about the pause, for sure, but there's also something
about what is the space lending to the person, to the client, to the
coach, to the coaching in that.
space.
So that's definitely a more at the edges of practice that I may or may not return
to, but I was having a similar idea and art galleries just felt a bit less a bit
less of a hard sell to potential clients.
Yeah, that's super interesting as well, because museum professionals,
when we, Think about the way people behave in museums and art galleries and
how they might modify their behavior.
So in particular spaces if the environment is perhaps quite imposing
or very impressive, or this huge architecture, people modify their
behavior in response to that.
So similar to being in a library, you suddenly hear people
talking outside in full voice.
And then when they enter the space.
their behaviour changes and they start whispering.
So Is it the space itself that's interesting for you, or is it,
the things within the space?
I think it's both.
I think that the objects within the space.
are easier perhaps to connect with for people.
And that's almost when I talk about the kind of library idea being a hard
sell, this feels like it's an easy sell because people are used to or may have
experimented with cards with photographs or imagery, like digital imagery, things
like that in their coaching work before.
So you'd need to ask some of the people who came, but my understanding from
some of our conversations is that, yeah, there'll be lots of nice paintings
and sculptures and, things for me to look at and maybe one or two of those
will provide me with some inspiration.
And typically, there are objects within the gallery space that people
interact with and find meaning from.
For me as a practitioner and the person experimenting, if you like,
with my practice in this way.
The space is almost more interesting to me than the objects within it, how we move
around it, what it might be able to offer.
And I talk a little bit in my book chapter about this, about when I'm
coaching, I typically use a metaphor of giving the client arriving with
a ball of wool or string, whichever feels more comfortable for them.
And that does feel important somehow to say it doesn't have to be wool.
I don't know why, could be wool, could be string, but
basically the idea of a thread.
And for some people that's incredibly tangled and knotty, for other
people it might be a bit looser, but there might be one or two big
knots hanging around in there.
And I use the metaphor, or the analogy of I'm just holding one end of that
thread so that they can more easily untangle everything that's there.
And I think when I'm working in the, when I've been working in the art galleries, I
would say that I'm just pinning the end of that thread to the wall for a little bit.
I'm letting the space do the work that I would be doing as
coach, so I'm letting the space.
space holds the person and their question or their stuckness, the thing
that they're thinking about, is being held by the whole gallery rather than
by one person that they're speaking to.
So I know that might be a little abstract, but for me the space is more
interesting in the same way that I think I could pick that I could pick
that conversation up and drop it in the library, or drop it in a historical
museum, or drop it in a public park, or wherever, and it would be different
because of the space that we're in.
So the space itself for me is a big part of the process in working in this way.
If the space becomes the coach what is the coach's role within the conversation?
for me, in all coaching the coach should be, the least
important person in the equation.
And so way that it shows up for me when I'm inviting the space
to be coach and doing so really intentionally by leaving the space.
It's about actually the space creating softness.
there's less intensity for me.
When I am the vessel of coaching, I think that it's quite an intense dialogue,
I'm holding presence, attention, an intention of kindness and love towards
somebody whilst also listening to them deeply and really seeing them.
seeking to understand and help them to understand what's happening for them.
When I leave the space, and the way that I would do this is that typically we
will spend 10 or 15 minutes in one part of the gallery, usually sitting down, to
get to what would be a typical coaching session intention or question So I'd
say one sentence, one question, that kind of thing, we get there together.
And I leave the gallery, if it's raining, which it is typically in
Manchester, I go in the gift shop.
But sometimes I do go and stand outside for 10 15 minutes.
My intention in that moment is to release some of that intensity, almost.
diffuse the essence of coaching into the walls of the gallery so that
there's so much more freedom for the client in terms of their thinking,
because they're not in an intense, Scrutinized interpreted conversation.
Like I often use that phrase for coaching is like you're trying to help someone
interpret what's going on for them and make it simpler to understand what
their choices are, what they might want to do about what's happening for them.
Yeah, so the space becomes a really spacious playground for the person
to, and when I say to move around in, sometimes people don't, sometimes
people stay exactly where we had the conversation and they don't move.
And it's fascinating to me how differently people respond in this
space, but, the potential to move is there, the choice to stay is a choice.
So me leaving and allowing the whole building to be the coach gives them
freedom of Their visual sense is receiving different stimulation than my face.
So that can only be a good thing, I think, in terms of helping them think through
their challenge or their stuckness.
Yeah, it's something we think about in museum education as well,
that the invisible facilitator.
So you're with a group, you may be with a group of people, whether it's
a small group or a large group of people, and, It's almost as though
you're seamlessly guiding the process.
You want to be able to make the process participant centered, and you want
to give as much agency to the people who are in that group as possible,
so that they can use the space for whatever the goals of the session are.
there's a really interesting point in the book chapter when you talk about
you're about to leave the client and you can see that there's a group of
school children that have entered the gallery space where you've left them.
And a moment flashes through your mind.
You think, should I go back and, interact with them, tell them to go somewhere else.
Could you talk us through your thinking at that point?
I thought that was super interesting.
Yeah.
Obviously these are public spaces, which means that they are not private.
you're not there in isolation and also you have no control whatsoever
over who else is in the space.
So it's something that, I spent a lot of time thinking about different scenarios.
And actually I found it more helpful to just be responsive in the moment,
to notice what was going on in the space and to think about it.
I guess the prior thoughtfulness meant that I didn't panic at any
point in any of these experimental pilot sessions, if you like.
But the instructions that I leave the client with when we've finished our
initial dialogue and I'm going to leave the building, and leave them to it.
And part of leaving, as well, is that I think people behave differently
when they think they're being watched or they think they're being judged,
now I need to be absolutely crystal clear to the person, like if you.
sit on your phone for the next 10 minutes.
I wouldn't know.
I hope that you don't.
I hope that you do, use this time as it's intended as part of the coaching process.
But if you want to go and chat to that bloke over there, or lie on the floor,
or whatever you want to do is up to you.
And if you choose to tell me what you did, that's also up to you.
I never ask, I never invite that question of, right, so tell me what
you've been doing while I've been gone.
So there's a real handing over of responsibility for the session to
the client on what they want to do.
And the example that you referenced from the chapter I usually start in one space
and then walk the client to a second space and the invitation there is, I'm going to
leave you in this space, I'm going to meet you back at the entrance to this space in
15 minutes, but if you want to stay here or go somewhere else that's up to you.
And so I'd left this client in a room and the thought process behind that
bit is usually It was an adjacent space to where we are that isn't too busy.
there's no correlation between their content and the space, and then this
gaggle of very exuberant Schoolchildren as I was walking down the corridor away from
where I just left the client were coming.
And I did have a second of, 'Oh, have I made it explicit enough that,
you don't need to stay in a space?
And also some of my own stuff, which was would be my worst nightmare if I was in
that space now, and doing some reflection.
I'd want to leave.
I think I'd also had a bit of an incident, with one of my previous clients in the
gallery space where a school teacher with some young school children came
into the room where we were having our initial conversation and was pretty
much shouting down my ear at one point, so we had to get up and relocate.
So I think I was hyper conscious of how disruptive this might be.
Ultimately, my belief is that the coaching belongs to the client, the session belongs
to them, and that I was really secure in my contracting with them around, you
go where you want to go, you can stay here, you can move around, you can do
nothing, you can leave if you want, I mean you'll see me outside, it's your space.
So I stopped in my tracks and just thought, actually,
I've been really explicit.
Also, who am I to say, maybe the sound of 30, Excited, noisy children is a
really good stimulus for some thinking.
It turns out it wasn't, and they left, they went somewhere else.
But who am I to judge that I wouldn't want that?
I would find that too distracting and disruptive, therefore I must rescue.
Like, no, the person has complete agency, and in that piece around the
space as coach, part of the space is noisy children in one of the rooms.
You can choose whether you are interested in what that might generate
for you, or you can move away from it.
And I'd be curious even about the choice to move away.
What does that tell you?
Because it's not quite as simple, I don't think, as, well, I needed a quieter space.
I think that's part of it, but also, well, all the decisions that you made in that
10, 15 minutes when you were alone in the space, and the space was serving as, you
as a container for you, as coach for you.
Those choices are as interesting to me as the thoughts that they generate.
So In your writing and also in in your practice, you feel that there's something
particularly unique about these spaces.
What are some of the potentials for using museum and gallery spaces as
opposed to perhaps other public spaces?
So
I think that the objects are definitely part of it for lots of the clients.
They might land on a particular painting or piece of work or
artist who really, speaks to them.
And obviously some exhibitions are temporary, so this isn't always the
case, but the idea that for some, for a period of time, you can revisit that
object or painting or space within the gallery is a really important part of
this, that again takes it outside of me being the coach in that space that I've
supported someone to do some thinking and then an object or part of the space
has furthered that thinking and the person can then return to keep doing that
thinking in that space if it's helpful.
So to give an example, one of the spaces that I left, I think I might mention
this in the chapter, but one of the spaces that I left somebody in was loads
of kind of Dutch old masters paintings.
And when I came back to meet them, they were coming down from upstairs
where there was a Derek Jarman exhibition, which was a very different
vibe, very different artwork.
And there was lots of noise and other things going on upstairs.
And when I spoke to them about it, they said, Oh, I've just felt like When in
that first room, I was being really judged by the eyes of the past, and I
needed a fresh perspective, and they'd gone upstairs and actually it was
quite a simplistic painting, and they'd done a sketch of it in their notebook.
It was just lines with different colours, and so they didn't necessarily need to
revisit The objects, because they had a picture of it in their mind's eye
and they'd done a representation of it.
But the fact that they could go back there and definitely some people have returned
to revisit some of these things that have prompted new thinking for them to
see What other potential is here for me?
What else is going on?
So the space isn't, although it does change.
And you could go one day then go the following week.
And actually the space is completely different.
But again.
I think there's so much potential for reflection in that around if you notice
that there's sadness about something being gone well like what was it that was
there before that was really speaking to you and that sense of loss is intriguing
and also what's there in its place and what response are you having to that and
does that offer you something different you know we're not always in control of
everything that happens in our life so the changeable Nature of the space is also
something in parallel, like it's a really interesting point of exploration, I think.
And aside from The objects within the space, the collections, the artworks,
the things that we know can give people insights on our programs that
we facilitate as museum educators as well, people making connections they
hadn't even dreamed of with artworks, spending a huge amount of time looking
and discovering new details in artworks that perhaps they thought they knew
really well, all of this we know.
But what about the building itself?
What about Have people remarked to you that the space itself was enlightening,
that being in that environment was conducive to new thoughts, new thinking?
Yeah, there was a few people who, some people were drawn to the
opportunity because they are regular art gallery and museum visitors, right?
So it's part of something that they already do and therefore it's a space
where they feel really comfortable and they're oh, well, I go there
anyway, so I'm intrigued to see.
There were other people who, like, one person said to me, I haven't set foot
in an art gallery in like 15 years.
And they worked over the road from the gallery that we were in, like
literally walk, like two minutes walking distance from the gallery.
And I think their reflection as part of their process was like, I don't
know why I don't come here because it's enabled me to be really calm.
And The coaching process itself and the coaching dialogue is
facilitating part of that, sure.
But the idea that they'd come feeling so cluttered and overwhelmed with what was
happening for them, and that just being in a beautiful, building, surrounded
by beautiful objects, and also the kind of transience of other visitors coming
in and out but not ever joining you, like not necessarily sitting with you
or conversing with you, that there's a comfort factor of other people being
around but doing their own thing.
I think it's maybe what people are trying to replicate in like shared
workspaces I don't think it works in that environment because we're all too
busy on calls and, engaging with our own very important admin and various other
things in that space, whereas I think in the gallery, the ambience of other
people being around is really comforting.
So you feel, or I'll speak for myself rather than projecting this onto
everybody, I feel less alone but solitary in a gallery space when I visit on my own.
Like it's very much a solo endeavor but there is a comfort factor of other
people being around and yeah, certainly people spoke about I think it's easier
for those who hadn't been in a gallery space for a long time to connect with
the space, those who, weren't typically in those spaces, were more aware of what
the space was giving to them, as well as what the things within it were offering.
Yeah, I think that idea of being in a calm, relatively quiet, space,
and it's like there's a muted nature to how people are and how
people are conversing in that space.
Even in the cafe, like I notice in the cafe the museum, there's a different
energy, it's livelier, but it's still not at the kind of crescendo of other
cafes and places of meeting for people.
I think there's a quality of calm and that muted nature that I think really lends
itself well to thinking and reflection.
And bearing all of that in mind and you mentioning there that, You'd had someone
who worked opposite a gallery but hadn't been in there for a number of years.
I was wondering about some of the ethical considerations that people
should think about before taking coaching practice into a museum space.
we talk about quite often as museum professionals the threshold fear that
a lot of people have crossing over into the space, into a museum, whether that
might be a barrier for some to stifle their creativity rather than open it
up, and how you might work through that.
What other considerations do we need to think about?
Yeah, something that felt really important was that I met my clients
outside and we walked into the space together and, That wasn't necessarily,
I wouldn't have known the terminology or even really probably given much
thought to that kind of threshold fear.
But it did feel important to enter the space together.
particularly because I want to give the client full agency to use
the space how they would like to.
So I would always have one or two spaces in mind that might be suitable
where I thought, It's reasonably quiet, there's a, there's somewhere to sit.
But I would still invite the client as part of that, do you want to just go into
the first room and find somewhere to sit?
Are you feeling drawn to going upstairs?
Like where would you like to start this conversation?
And so I think there's something in there about really firmly locating the space
as belonging to the client and the agency and choices belonging to the client from
even before you set foot in the building,
But, from that first step in itself, right, we're going to go, I have some
spaces that are probably suitable.
I've got a couple in mind.
I've probably been the day before, the week before to
scope out where we might go.
And if we get disrupted, where we might move to, like what's
a secondary or third space.
But that feels really important to allow the clients to have ownership of where
they go and how they are in the space.
Obviously, as we've mentioned, there's other people to consider.
So there's a huge ethical consideration if you're having a coaching or other kind
of supportive conversation, there's a huge piece to consider around confidentiality.
And my view on that is that I contract around that, that other people might
be around, that they might be sitting very near us or moving very near
us, and therefore it's up to the client, their kind of comfort factor.
of what they want to share when.
But however, as coach, there is an unspoken power imbalance.
Like I'm there as the professional supporting the person, therefore
I don't lose accountability.
So even if the client was kind of midstream, have they noticed that
someone has sat behind them on the bench?
Are they aware that there's people around, like, because when we're in our
own thoughts, we can get lost in them.
So I still retain a level of accountability.
And so there are times where I've had to check in or gently interrupt
to say, 'I just want to check.
We've got a few people have joined us.
Are you happy to proceed here?
Would you like to move to a different space?
Or do you want to just wait for a minute?'
So almost that piece of yes, other people are going to be around and
yes, You can trust that the client will choose when it doesn't feel okay.
But I've had interruptions from other people whilst I'm in conversation.
And I think it would be easy to get into a mindset of, well we're clearly having
a private conversation, like why are you leaning over me trying to take a
photograph of the thing behind me when there's a big space behind me where
you could stand and not be in my face.
However, we're in a public building and other people are having conversations,
so how would somebody else know this is a confidential, like we're doing
it in a public space, it's open to everyone, so all of that stuff is
really important, and I think working in coaching full stop can surface emotions
and it can surface our subconscious.
Working with creative and arts based stimulation can accelerate that process.
So I've had coaching where.
I've said something and I've been caught by surprise by it.
I didn't know that I was holding that in my subconscious.
So the coach had no chance whatsoever of feeling prepared for the kind of
acknowledgement that I made, which actually was something that I then
said, right, actually that feels really important, but I think I need
to take that to a therapeutic space.
So working in this way, even without all of the complexity of being in a
public space, can accelerate or really surface things that people don't
know they're holding, or maybe don't want to surface, like our emotional
experience can sometimes be suppressed.
There's that piece as well, which is so important to contract.
I always say in any of my coaching coaching sessions,
emotions are incredibly welcome.
They're data for us.
They're telling us that something is important.
But when an emotion, a strong emotion arises, and it might be upset and
crying, it could be anger, it could be intense joy, it could be anything.
It's my job to check in with the client, like, do you want to stay
in this emotion and explore it?
Do you want to just be in this emotion for a couple of minutes in silence and just be
in it and then we can see where you are?
Do you want to stop the session completely?
And that was always an option for, well, for any coaching client to be
fair, but in these gallery sessions, it was always an option that we stopped.
We could get five minutes in and be like, actually, I feel really uncomfortable.
There's too many people around, Like, it would be just as valid for me to
know, actually, some people really cannot work in this space in this
way, or it's too exposing, they're too vulnerable, things are surfacing for them.
Almost the purpose of doing that has to be for the client's benefit, and
the moment that it stops being for the client's benefit, it finishes.
I think there's all of those bits that are wrapped up in working in a public space,
but also one that has so much creative stimulus, because That is a gateway.
It's like an express train sometimes, not for everybody, but it can be.
And that potential, again, is the thing that we need to be
thoughtful about and prepared for.
Yeah.
And I think preparedness is so important here.
Preparedness on the part of the coach.
And yes, as you say, trying to scope out the space, but preparing the coachee
so that they know what to expect and that they're able to have that agency.
But also thinking about perhaps when this might be introduced
into a coaching relationship and when that might be appropriate,
it's interesting because people that I've spoken to about
this, tend to hold that view.
All of the people that I worked with in galleries in order to understand the
potential and the edge of that process and to write my chapter in the case
study were one off coaching sessions.
So I met them once for the first time to work together in a gallery space.
I do think it's a little different if it's an enduring relationship,
coaching relationship with a client.
There's nothing to suggest that you couldn't or shouldn't do your first
session of an enduring relationship in a gallery, but there is some really
explicit upfront contracting around that would be needed in my view.
Everyone who signed up to come and have a coaching session with me in
an art gallery signed up to that.
experience that I didn't say, would you like to have some coaching with me?
And then it was, surprise we're in the Whitworth.
It was, I'm interested in these spaces.
It's, this is the exchange.
90 minutes of my time for free for you to come with something real.
We held an exploration call online before we met at the gallery space.
There was time to withdraw between that exploration call and us
meeting up, and then there was an explicit part of the contracting
happened in person in the space.
It was quite contained.
It was, as advertised, if you like, that's what people signed
up to do and then came and did it.
When it's within a relationship, I think it's the question has to
be, always with anything that we introduce, like, who is this for?
And I was really explicit in that opportunity with the
people who came to help me do my thinking and write my chapter.
I'm interested in this, so I'd really welcome people that can
come and help me explore it.
If I was taking a client who I'm working with over a longer period
of time to a gallery, you It cannot be because I think, 'oh, I'd really
like to take you to an art gallery'.
It's because I may be thinking, right, we meet in the same space or you're
in your house having this coaching and there is a sense of stuckness that maybe
a different perspective might offer, whether that is a Outdoors, whether
it's let's turn our cameras off and just have audio, whether it's let's go
to a gallery, whatever it might be it's because there's a sense of actually we're
getting stuck, we're in Groundhog Day, we're feeling a bit in the quicksand, if
you like, so let's change something and the environment is one of those things
that we might change and therefore within that exploration a gallery might be the
most appropriate space for that person.
And there's all sorts of factors, like if you live near to them
and there's a gallery and they've expressed an interest in arts and
creativity, great, take them there.
It should never be because you as the coach think, oh, Unless you're
explicitly contracting, I'm interested in this, can you help me understand it?
Like, in our relationships, it should always be, I think this might help you.
I think this is in service of you and the work that you're doing.
It's not, and I'd like a day out to go and have a look at some nice paintings.
You can do that on your own time.
Absolutely.
And there are so many factors to really take into consideration here,
but at the same time, I really don't feel you can plan for everything.
And this is the same in our work in museum education as well.
go into the museum with the best plans in mind and an idea of who our participants
are and who we're going to be meeting and what we're going to be talking about and
things crop up so we can take all of this into account but we also must be able
to think on our feet fast when things do arise that are out of the ordinary
because we're in a public space, right?
Yeah,
absolutely.
I think that's the piece with this.
If you're thinking about whether it's formalized coaching or whether it's
actually just, can I invite a colleague, a friend appear into a reflective
dialogue where we're going to use the space as part of that process.
The preparation and thoughtfulness behind that is always, is this person and am
I safe to have this conversation here?
And that is, physical, but also emotional, spiritual safety.
There's different levels of things that, even in our own home, we can be disrupted.
We can have the postman arriving when we're in the middle of a session, or
the cats, like my cats are actually, I don't know why I'm saying this out
loud, because they'll probably come and be really rambunctious now, but
they're usually floating around in the background and, sometimes hanging
off things on the wall behind me.
There's interruptions and kind of other life existing around us wherever we
are, even in a more kind of contained environment, but absolutely the potential
of these spaces is huge, but the cost, the risk potential is also bigger, and
we need to be really aware, like there's a heightened level of awareness of the
surroundings, of the potential of other people and what's going on in the space,
that, we would maybe like to give 100 percent of our focus to the client.
I don't know if that's entirely possible in a public building.
I think you have to have maybe 80 percent focus on the client.
20 percent peripheral and unexpected, like ready to evolve.
And that almost big red stop button has to almost be, metaphorically
between you at all times.
And that the conversation, with no questions asked, that the
conversation can just stop if it needs to be, if it's not safe.
And you've been investigating this in your PhD research on arts based supervision.
So tell me How what differences you observe between working with
coaching clients and working with coaches, practitioners in
supervision in these spaces?
What are the differences?
Yeah, great question.
And if I just talk more broadly, both coaching and supervision, coaches are In
theory, already reflective practitioners, it's part of their training, it's part
of their way of being in their work.
And I often talk to coaching clients about what I'm trying to do over time
is to build their reflective capacity, to build their reflective muscle to a
point where they no longer need me to be a partner in that reflection, like
they're strengthening their own process.
And so coaches arrive with that muscle already quite strong most of the time.
The downside of that actually is that In my experience can be that
the coach is less aware of the risk of emotion or harm coming to them
because their capacity to take on information and knowing and stimulus
from their surroundings is heightened.
So the impact of being in the space, thinking of one person in particular who
came to a coaching session, but wasn't an experienced coach, had an incredibly
strong, almost immediate reaction to being in the space and was quite
emotional throughout our conversation.
The positive side of that, if you like that, because they're used to
being in their emotion and they're used to Just being in, in that kind
of heightened sense of reflection, they didn't want to, or feel the
need to shut down the conversation.
They were able to contain, they were emotional and upset and
crying actually at one point in the space, but That's an emotional
space that they've been in before.
They've accessed that level of reflective practice before.
And so being in a public environment, we're all different.
They felt comfortable to be a bit tear stained and a bit snotty.
with other people around them.
And so they were able to almost acknowledge that emotion had risen
and move past it to be able to do some really transformative thinking about
what, what is going on for me there.
Whereas when I was working with non coaches in the space, if emotions surface,
And again, it's an individual experience, but I would say typically that comes with
a lot more shame around it or a lot more embarrassment of like, Oh my God, I can't
believe that I'm having this really strong reaction and a desire to suppress it.
So the role of the coach is to really help that person to both
embrace the emotion, but also make a decision about whether we stay there.
And I think coaches in coaching and supervision are used to supporting
other people in that way and they're used to doing that level
of reflection for themselves but
I think non coaches are better at acknowledging I feel really vulnerable
and withdrawing slightly and that feels a bit safer than I'm just here, I'm going
to let it all out and abandon all sense of convention of what's going on around me.
So yeah, Not everyone gets emotional, but I would say that feels like the biggest
distinction for me between coaches and non coaches who are using this space.
I ran a workshop for some coaches with EMCC UK at Manchester Art Gallery, and
again, very quickly, lots of them had really strong emotional responses to
things in the building and in the space.
So the connection is probably a little quicker because we're open to it, we're
used to trying to reflect and think things through it at depth, but the risk is
therefore a bit increased I would say.
That's so interesting.
And where is your research taking you next?
Yeah, my, my PhD research is really interested in arts based approaches in
coaching supervision and how they might influence or impact our professional
development and sense of professional identity as coach practitioners.
The research that I did before I was experimenting in galleries was using
music and mark making and the kind of overall trend, if you like, of my
research is, almost having a creative or arts based interruption in dialogue.
So the format that I've given an overview here and talked to in the
chapter of dialogue, creative pause, if you like, back to dialogue,
is a pervasive thing in my work.
I'm interested in The power of almost a short burst of creativity or arts to
interrupt our cognitive processing and get us into more of a felt embodied spiritual
sense of what's going on for me, whatever other knowledge and wisdom is available
to us outside of our overthinking brains.
So the research that I'm going to be doing, I'm just doing a systematic
review to understand what do we know about the links between supervision and
development and identity so that I can be really clear what's the difference
with the, that the art space bit makes, because otherwise it's you could say
well this might happen anyway without the art space bit, how do you know?
So yeah, I'm laying the groundwork, I use the analogy, I'm
preparing the soil at the moment.
And then my studies, I'm going to do two studies, and one will be
group supervision most likely, I'm just finalizing the design using
different arts based interventions.
So I'm quite interested in an extension of the work in galleries,
of actually taking that out to the built environment as a whole.
In a group setting, unless we're meeting in person, that will most likely mean
field recording, photography, fragments or aspects of the built environment around
people that they can capture and bring as a kind of part of their reflection.
But I'm also really interested in introducing portraiture, so could we
If someone is one of the coaches in the group is bringing a client to life and
talking about them as a bit of a case study that they want to think about,
could the other members of the group try and draw a portrait of this client as
they're hearing them being described and would that offer us a different lens?
Are they sad?
Are they happy?
Have they got a giant head?
Like, what is it that, however we've drawn them?
And I'm also doing a course at the moment on deep listening.
So kind of Pauline Oliveros the pioneer in that space, but I'm also
really interested in the central concept of that is to listen to
everything all the time, all at once.
So I'm really interested in using sound I'd love to be a musician,
but I don't possess musical ability so I live vicariously.
I love music, it's a really big influence in my life.
And I'm extending that out into sound, because in the same way that
saying, draw something to someone who thinks they can't draw is a barrier.
Music feels like, the zenith, like the end goal of creating
sound, like we can all make sound.
In some way, whether it's vocal, whether it's drumming on the desk,
whether it's, recording sounds from elsewhere and replaying them.
So I think that sound is a space that I'm really drawn
to and would like to bring in.
So yeah, there's some physical and environmental
things I'd like to introduce.
And then there's some other more, more traditional arts based playing around that
I want to do, but the end goal really is to support people to understand that these
approaches are accessible to everyone, but that they're also powerful, and
therefore they might not be appropriate for everyone's practice, whether that's
because we're brand new to coaching, and actually for me This is a mature,
advanced practice because of all of the complexity that sits with it, because of
the risk of speeding up that surfacing process, and because of all of the ethical
implications that kind of sit around it.
But that doesn't mean that you can't ever use them in your work
or that you shouldn't because you're not a creative person.
So I'm trying to find, the edges of what's possible and then maybe some people will
be working at the edges and other people might use a more diluted version of
some of this thinking in their own work.
But I think there is a barrier for people.
There is a bit of a rhetoric of you're either a creative coach or you're not.
And for me, it's well, it's innate in all of us to some extent.
So why not find what's possible here, evidence it, and then allow
people to make their own, conclusion about what that looks like for them
if it enters their practice at all.
Such important work you're doing to add to the conversation,
add to the research on this.
There's not a lot out there, as you say, that it's been
very limited in scope to date.
We need to wrap up our conversation.
How can people find out more about you and your work?
So
the place where I am most active is LinkedIn.
And yeah, I can share the link with you for the show notes.
And my website as well, you can find my contact details and email me from there.
But yeah, LinkedIn is unfortunately the place where you will most
often find me posting about the things that I'm doing and bits of
research that I'm interested in.
And also, who knows, maybe opportunities to come and have some coaching with
me in a different space or in a different modality depending on where
I land up in my own experiments.
Brilliant.
Thank you so much for coming to talk to me today.
Beth, it's been a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
It's been gorgeous talking to you.
So a huge thank you to Beth for joining me on the podcast today.
Be sure to check out the show notes to find out more about her work.
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That's it for this episode.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see you next time.