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UPCOMING EVENTS
Friday, November 7, 2008 The Land of AND Workshop
for ASTD-OD SIG
Tampa, FL
Saturday, January 24, 2009 The Land of AND,
full day
format
Tampa, FL
Watch for announcement
of our new site:
mettaphoria.com
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UPCOMING EVENTS
Friday, November 7, 2008
The Land of AND
Workshop for ASTD-OD SIG
Tampa, FL
Saturday, January 24, 2009 The Land of AND,
full day
format
Tampa, FL
Watch for announcement
of our new site:
mettaphoria.com
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Mettaphoria: approaching the experience of
presence on its terms.
The word metaphor comes from the Greek
pherein, "to carry," and meta, "beyond" or
"over." So metaphors carry you over into new
mental, emotional, and psychic territory.
Most who use metaphors in change work
emphasize how to work with
metaphors. Our approach invites the
metaphors to work through you. Metta
is a Buddhist term for loving-kindness: a
wish for the welfare of another, as
distinguished from friendliness based on
self- interest or desire to control
outcomes. Our use of metta refers
to a quality of spontaneous, altruistic
presence, of releasing the need to control
and opening to where metaphors may lead you.
The term phoria in medicine refers
to various tendencies of the lines of vision
to deviate from the normal, but we emphasize
a change in vision or worldview, a positive
deviation from the normal when "normal"
refers to the way you've always seen things.
So while "mettaphoria" is obviously a coined
term, it describes pretty well how two coaches
with decidedly different backgrounds bumped
around and into one another through a carefree,
caring and sincere search for what creates the
greatest success in this change-work-thing we
do.
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Mary discovered that her lifelong desire to
perform like a jazz musician was not to be
found in music at all, despite many attempts
in that direction. Mary's improvisational
chops were to find expression in the
coaching chair. Artists and athletes can
talk about hitting the "zone," why not
coaches? Why can't anyone adopt any metaphor
as a way to honor their current experience
and grow more readily into new ones?
Tim's background in the creative arts had always
fed his sense of purpose. Theatre arts,
advertising design and creative writing informed
him along his journey, and yet performance in
these areas seemed to be leading somewhere else.
The arts fed his sense of purpose but were not
the purpose itself. The excavation: under
performance Tim found connection, under
connection he found healing story, and under
healing story... the jazz of story-improv.
So here we are, in Mettaphoria, happily
growing along lines of our own choosing and
imagining, committed to exploring Presence,
Spontaneity, and Symbolic Change modalities.
See next article for how we are doing this.
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"The Land of AND," Atlanta IEA, 2008
The back-story: Two years of joyful
wandering about together over gallons of
Starbucks and through the myriad potentials
and similarities of our coaching styles
brought us (Mary and Tim) to the point of
"stand and deliver" at the International
Enneagram Association convention in Atlanta,
August 2008. Our workshop title: "The Land
of AND; Building Presence through
Improvisation and Metaphor." Targeting
coaches, counselors and therapists, our idea
was to jump over any left-brained discussion
of the (obvious to us) parallels between an
improv actor taking stage, and an effective
coach/counselor/therapist being spontaneously
present with a client. In Part One we chose
a series of improv exercises that
foreshadowed both the theme and the
energetic stance required for Part Two, in
which participants practiced rounds of
eliciting and developing metaphors with
clean language - using ONLY the
client's words.
The day of the workshop: The usual jitters made
their appearance, of course. Would anybody come?
Would too many come? And underneath these
concerns, the more deadly ones. Would our improv
in Part One introduced only with a "you'll have
to trust us," scare/bore/embarrass people into
leaving before they got the point of it all in
Part Two? Could we accommodate the wide variety
of positive and negative reactions people might
have to Improv? Would the practice with
metaphors at least hint at Mettaphoria's
value? All were valid questions. And as it
turned out, we had already answered them, a
tribute to those hours at Starbucks.
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Mary's concerns about bringing the reticent
safely into the improv space and Tim's
countering insistence that moving quickly
into that space was the only way to avoid
left-brain high jacking resulted in what we
felt to be a risky little intro exercise.
Risky perhaps. Successful, most definitely,
as it turned out. Our Atlanta participants
were like ducks to the water, and in a
contingency we had not planned for, we had
to pull them back from their enthusiasm to
stay on track. We found out later that many
of these people had faced their own fears to
show up at a workshop involving Improv, and
we had met them in that space in a good way.
With "no mistakes are possible" as our
motto, our group laughed their way through
four rounds of improv performance. Then with
equal enthusiasm they translated this
experience into practice rounds where they
helped each other develop their metaphors.
Our poetry improv set the theme and
energetic for 'eliciting metaphor," our
sing-along improv set theme and energetic
for 'qualities of metaphor,' and so on. And
so the point was made, the design and the
delivery a success, a fact we are very happy
to report.
(Click here
for rave reviews.)
Parting shots: We had not made a point of the
quotes and one-word displays we had placed
around the room. In one of the debrief periods,
one participant stopped and pointed to the sign
with the one-word 'Presence' and said, "That
really is what we're doing here, isn't it?" Our
reaction? Happy doesn't begin to express it.
Another of the signs on the wall helps with
this. It's a Mary-favorite-quote from Dizzy
Gillespie, when asked where his jazz came from:
"It's out there, man.
Don't you hear it?"
Mary and Tim will reprise this workshop in an
extended day-long format (to more fully explore
the potentials of Mettaphoria) in Tampa on
January 24, 2009.
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Metaphors can DIE...????
A colleague asked Mary recently how we use
metaphors in change work. As she described
eliciting and mirroring metaphors, she
rather casually gave him an example: "You've
said you want to be able to distinguish
between falling into excitement, which
carries passion and commitment, or falling
into yearning, where you're stuck in envy
and unable to move forward. If I asked you
what falling into excitement is like and you
said 'It's like flying, like a bird in
migration that 'knows,' follows its
instincts,' I would ask you to tell me more
about that bird, and where you are in the
picture. And you might say you're flying,
following the bird, and it's an eagle."
She then explained, of course if he were her
client his metaphor might be very different and
it would be important to honor that because a
metaphor is only potent if it's alive for the
person wanting the change. "But as soon as you
mentioned eliciting a metaphor," he said, "I
thought of flying!"
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In his next email he wrote, "Thanks for an
enlightening conversation. There is a subtle
excitement in me... like the feeling I feel
just before flying in a dream... a warm
light that tries to burst from my chest..
pulling me forward... a child's spirit... a
wisdom unmistakably ancient... an eagle
turning its smiling eye back at me...
knowingly flapping its wings.. leaving a
soothing breeze in its wake... I will follow
it."
Unwittingly, Mary had used a metaphor that
was alive for him. But metaphors can be dead
if they have no figurative value. Someone
who sails might say, for example, "It's like
being on a sailboat in a heavy wind," but
continue discussing feelings in everyday
language because the sailing image is
literal and therefore dead as a metaphor. If
the same person says "It's like I'm
balancing on top of a huge ice skate going
very fast" this is probably a live metaphor.
Listen for combinations of words that don't fit
known patterns of meaning - these are more
likely to engage right-brain processes, and live
on, as the eagle did for Mary's friend. |
Snippets from Metaphor Studies
"Over the years I have become convinced that
we learn best--and change--from hearing
stories that strike a chord within us ...
Those in leadership positions who fail to
grasp or use the power of stories risk
failure for their companies and for
themselves." (John Kotter, Harvard Business
School, at Forbes.com)
[When we listen to a good storyteller, we]
"actually live those adventures inside."" (David
Gordon, in Therapeutic Metaphors) |
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Workshops, Coaching, Community
Mary & Tim want to support the journey of
others in this exploration of high
performance for change agents. Private
coachings using this approach are available,
as are workshops for groups expressing an
interest. With the upcoming launch of
Mettaphoria.com, structures and exercises
for building a community of interest will
open yet other opportunities for growth.
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The Land of AND: Building Presence Through
Improvisation and Metaphor, January 24,
2009, Tampa, FL.
(Click here
for rave reviews.)
Join Mary and Tim for this experiential
learning spree. In this expanded, day-long
reprise of their workshop at the IEA in
Atlanta (see above), they will expand on the
practice of presence from a right-brain
approach.
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