Integrate!

© Can Stock Photo / liveslow I'm beginning to feel like this sign is everywhere.  This week, a marketing expert I respect wrote that people want smaller and smaller chunks of information. To provide value today, package your stuff in little boxes.  I started out studying poetry, where a few words can be used to tempt someone to dig deep for meaning. Sometimes small packages open up in the reading.  I even like teaching people to notice and explore the surface. At the beach, skimming along the surface can be fast and fun. But remember when you were a kid at the pool? It was a big deal to swim well enough to be allowed in the deep end. You only got there by working and risking. You could only brave the heights of the diving board when you were capable of navigating the depths of the water. When you want to be one of the big kids, you have to break through the surface and explore the air above it and the waters below.

This post will surprise some of you. I often talk in metaphors because they are a very compact form of communication. A metaphor uses something known to explain something new or intangible. In a very few words, you can sketch in a web of relationships and meanings. Although many people don't know the word 'metaphor' very well, they use metaphors unconsciously. It may be that metaphors are hard wired into our brains. image credit: Criss Cross via free images (license) Sometimes the wires get crossed. One of the great achievements of human beings is that we figured out how to own more than we can carry. There was a time when a person could own only what they could move around on their own. That was a long time ago. Now we own houses, cars, furniture, and overstuffed backpacks. We own more than we can carry. This is fine until we use our stuff for a metaphor of our internal experience. We are afraid to face many elements of our experience because we are condition...

I've been at the beach. As you can see, it's not a metaphorical beach. This picture was taken in the national park on the north shore of Prince Edward Island. The bird in the foreground is a real seagull. This beach is a metaphor. It tells me exactly what I want in my experience as I encounter the clouds and the sunshine, the wind and the sand and the waves of life. It speaks to a paradoxical balance of elements, a balance of focus and soft edges, a balance of ground and flight. If you asked me to describe what I want REALLY, I would stumble and hesitate. I would contradict myself and backtrack. I would have commitment issues. If you asked me to tell you about this beach, you would know exactly what I choose as my experience and who I am choosing to be as I move forward. This is my desired future. But my desired future is not to stay on vacation - it's to bring this paradox into the clutter and contradiction and productivity that is my work and my life and my...

Yes. I am being pretty hard on you. I said that to someone in a coaching session last night. He was curious about how I decide when to challenge and when to support. He'd watch me do some metaphor coaching, which probably looked like fun from the outside. It was about stepping into the body of a powerful animal and exploring a landscape to which that particular animal was well-suited. Compared to that, some probing questions that led to uncomfortable answers were rough. The difference was that the first client knew what he wanted and so we were able to explore what he wanted using a metaphor. That metaphor protected his privacy while it allowed him to discover that he was stronger than he might have thought as he approached a challenge. The challenge was relatively well-defined, and since he picked the metaphor there was no danger that I was leading him to feel stronger than he really is. He  felt pushed a little anyway. Coaching is not about letting someone sit with their li...