Day 134 - 10:06am, 14 May 2019
Today's course at work covered metaphor and clean language, and no, it's not what you think it is. Rather, it is a coaching technique which involves reflecting the individual's words back at them by using a series of set questions. This helps the person to deepen and flesh out their metaphor and thereby gain insight into a question or a problem, free from any influence that the coach's words might exert - i.e. without the coach muddying the waters, hence the clean language. The assumption is that the individual being coached has the answers already within them, they just have to illicit them, which this technique is designed to allow them to do.
One of the exercises involved drawing a picture to represent what we thought working at our best would look like. I drew a penguin. So I started off by suggesting that when I was working at my best, I was like a penguin swimming free in the ocean and then my colleague continued to question me using clean language. Before I knew it, my penguin was taking turns to go fishing, asking permission from the other penguins to do so, letting others go off to swim too and knowing that he (yes, I know, it surprised me that the penguin was a he too) and the others were doing so for a purpose. And that purpose was to look after the next generation. We ran out of time at this point, which I was quite thankful for, because I was beginning to wonder what I was about to reveal of myself.
Unsurprisingly, I didn't see any penguins looking after their young on the way home, but I did see Mummy and Daddy ducks leading their ducklings out on the water. It was a heartwarming sight and it made my inner penguin smile.
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