Expanding Your Group and Team Coaching Toolkit - Somatic and Kinesthetic Approaches (10)

This week in the Building Your Team and Group Coaching Toolkit I want you to think about how you

are incorporating somatic and kinesthetic approaches for working with groups and teams. While coaching is a verbal modality, incorporating somatic and kinesthetic approaches provide an opportunity to gain new insight from a different perspective.

What do I mean with somatic and kinesthetic approaches? These approaches incorporate movement, doing and physical action. It may also reconnect people with their body. With this in mind, there is a wide variety of different approaches we might incorporate into our work as group and team coaching including (and not limited to):

• Making things more tactile and physical. Instead of doing a Wheel of Life on paper, what about doing it on the floor? Instead of just talking about strengths, is there a way you can make them more visual? Instead of talking about values, is there a way people can body them.
• Using annotation: In the virtual space we often are focused on dialogue. It is possible to get people more active during the call using annotation. Annotation in most virtual platforms allows us to draw, write and even map things out visually.
• With teams, consider getting them to undertake something hands on. With my own roots originally in the experiential education sector, I find I still incorporate several hands-on activities including building things, or solving problems together with materials. Essential to this approach is giving hem time at the end to not only debrief what happened during the exercise, but to consider how these behaviors, values, beliefs are showing up in their own work.

• Building in reflective walks – For many years I ran multiple summer programs in rustic settings up north. Providing space for reflective walks always created multiple layers of learning. 
• Creating models- Getting clients active with creation is another opportunity to create expanded awareness and insight.  Consider giving the space for people to create a model – whether it’s out of aluminum foil, clay or other materials. IT’s not only the process of creation but the value a structure provides in the coaching process.

For resources around more experiential and kinesthetic approaches you may want to consider exploring:

·         Marlena Field’s work around Body-Centered Coaching

·         Project Adventure’s experiential resources from the 80s onwards

·         What your virtual platform allows you to do. Can you use annotation? Breakouts?

·         Is there something you can send in advance of your next virtual call to make it more kinesthetic?

Note: always ensure people have identified hazards in their own areas before moving around. This holds true for streaming and movement.

Six Questions around kinesthetic approaches: As you consider incorporating more kinesthetic approaches consider these questions

1.       From this exercise, what do you notice?

2.       Accessing your head, heart and guts – what does each one of them say?

3.       What is transferable from this exercise to our everyday experience?

4.       What helped? What got in the way?

5.       Where do you sense this?

6.       What’s going to keep this visible?

Enjoy the conversation,

Jennifer 

Jennifer Britton, CPCC, PCC – Potentials Realized 
Leadership | Teamwork | Business Success
Author of Effective Virtual Conversations (2017), Coaching Business Builder Workbook and Planner (2018) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013)
Follow along with the #90DaysPlanDoTrack series over at Instagram @CoachingBizBuilder 
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