In this October workshop, practitioners will explore how to help clients maintain perspective during challenging times. Using art, poetry, and reflective exercises, participants will learn practical techniques to support clients in recognizing their strengths and finding clarity amidst adversity. Through creative reflections, expressive art activities, and guided discussions, practitioners will work through their own cases / challenges to experience this way of working first hand and gain tools to help clients navigate difficulties with resilience, transforming challenges into opportunities for growth.
This session will empower practitioners to guide clients in finding balance and maintaining a sense of perspective, fostering resilience and adaptability through life’s storms.
Session outline:
In this monthly series of workshops, participants will learn creative approaches to help clients navigate anxiety and uncertainty. Leveraging art, poetry, and seasonal themes, practitioners will gain fresh perspectives to support clients in embracing uncertainty and finding calm amidst the unknown. Each session draws inspiration from the changing seasons to provide tools for deeper understanding and growth in client practice.
- Opening Reflection: Defining the supervision case and question through individual, guided reflection.
- Art Exploration: Participants explore a selected piece of art in pairs or small groups, discussing what emerges with their supervision question in mind. Emphasis on noticing other participants’ perspectives.
- Poetic Resonance: Reading the accompanying poem, followed by brief inquiries into words, phrases, and salient points that resonate.
- Second Reflection: Re-reading the poem, focusing on the individual supervision question.
- Creative Pairings: Breakout rooms for paired discussions on new, creative perspectives for the participant’s question.
- Group Debrief: Collective reflection on insights gained.
Art and poetry pieces will reflect the month and season, selected from Gillian’s ‘Choir of Brave Voices’ publications. Participants will receive these materials in PDF form, along with reflective practice prompts and background information to support personal and professional practice and client reflection.
Learning Objective Participants Can Expect From This Event
- Apply creative and reflective approaches to help clients manage anxiety related to uncertainty.
- Use artistic and poetic prompts to explore clients’ responses to unpredictable situations.
- Develop new strategies to foster resilience and adaptability in clients facing the unknown.
Who is This Workshop Appropriate For?
- Therapists, counsellors, supervisors, coaches and other professionals interested in enhancing their reflective practice and client work through creative approaches.
How May This Workshop Impact Your Practice?
- Integrating creative reflection techniques into professional reflective practice supports practitioner learning and growth. Including these techniques in client work helps professionals address anxiety related to uncertainty, providing fresh approaches and stability in unpredictable times. This workshop will empower participants to use creativity as a tool to enhance their own practice and clients’ resilience and adaptability, fostering more dynamic and effective professional relationships.
Course Content
Presenter
Gillian offers a safe space that’s held lightly. There’s room to explore with playful curiosity or serious conversation; whatever’s called for.
Gillian is a master coach, supervisor, mentor, artist, owner of Inside-Out Coaching and author of 7 Choir of Brave Voices books and creative reflection resources. Accredited by the ICF, EMCC, EASC and CSA, her client work stems from creative, narrative and somatic coaching and supervision methodologies with a specialisation in working creatively and supporting clients’ reflective practice. British born, she now lives and works in Switzerland with her family and Schnauzer.
Gillian works with creativity and metaphor to build safe and abundant space for working and thinking from new perspectives.
Shirley Smith is passionate about the potential of working with creative methodologies in supervision. She has been actively involved in enabling the ongoing development of leaders as a vehicle in support of wider culture and systemic change.
Shirley works mainly in multi-cultural environments around the globe from her current base in Vienna, Austria. She mainly provides supervision to individuals and small groups who are keen to access supervision as part of their own ongoing professional development and self-care. They also want to develop their own practice in working more ‘creatively’. She has been experimenting more recently with ways of making creative supervision accessible online and also with and without video. A kind of learning laboratory.
