In this issue
Features
The body knows: the pathway to implicit knowledge
Tsafi Lederman and Jenny Stacey
Thinking global
At home in the world: from change to deep transformation
Peter Wrycza
Supervisors speak: what do we do, how do we do it – and why?
Amanda Larcombe and Michelle Lucas
Are you on the Register?
Dr Hadyn Williams explains the process for joining the BACP Register
Regulars
Message from the chair
A day in the life
Personal consultant, author and university lecturer Nash Popovic
Coach journeys
Coaching Academy founder Jonathan Jay in conversation with Eve Menezes Cunningham
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Editorial
Working with people in a helping capacity can be an incredibly humbling experience. I’ve just finished a clinical placement in a specialist forensic clinic of a psychiatric hospital, working with some immensely vulnerable and violent individuals, and that has been an intense learning curve for me – and I have learned a lot about myself in the process.
But whether they are troubled and traumatised psychiatric patients or the ‘worried well’ clients I work with in my private coaching practice, I find every relationship contains a potential wealth of learning experience for both of us. And every relationship requires that we begin from a place of not-knowing and trust the process as it unfolds.
Uncertainty is a necessary component of creativity. And it is often in the stillness, the silences, the spaces in between words that the creative breakthroughs happen and the learning takes place. For me, using creativity in my coaching as well as my dance therapy practice gives my clients a means to communicate when words are not enough.
The use of creativity in our work is explored in this issue’s cover feature by embodiment practitioners Tsafi Lederman and Jenny Stacey. They use their knowledge of the arts and creative practice to help their clients access deep-seated, unconscious thoughts and feelings that are impacting on their behaviour. As they explain, implicit, ‘non-conscious’ knowledge is not processed consciously; it is something we ‘know’ but cannot easily express in words. Their work is testament to the power of creativity as a vehicle for healing, awareness, understanding – and self-knowledge.
In another collaborative piece, supervisors Michelle Lucas and Amanda Larcombe share their learning through a ‘conversation’ in which they discuss the role and purpose of supervision – what they do, why they do it and what it means to them. And, in the return of our Thinking Global series after a brief hiatus, transformational coach, mentor and supervisor Peter Wrycza suggests coaching becomes fully transformational when the coach is willing and able to open up into a place of ‘not-knowing’. It is in this place, ‘beyond dualities and difference’, that coach and client ‘truly meet’, he argues.
In this way, coaching transcends the realms of the rational and the known and becomes creative practice. He writes: ‘We need to cast off from the safe shores of what we already know into the uncertain waters of “not-knowing”.’ It’s from this place of ‘not-knowing’ that I end my work with my forensic clients, complete my studies and bring those accumulated layers of knowledge and experience into my future practice.
I wish you all a wonderful summer.
Diane Parker
Editor
editorial@bacpcoaching.co.uk