Session Description: This interactive and experiential workshop introduces participants to the use of poetry — and the stories behind poems — as powerful tools for coaching. Drawing on Poetry for Coaching: Transformation Through Verse (The Creative Coaching Collective, 2024), the session explores how poetry can evoke awareness, unlock new meaning, and create spaciousness for reflection. Participants will listen to selected poems and origin stories, notice their own responses, and practice identifying the specific coaching purposes each piece can serve. They will also experience real-time matching of poems and stories to issues shared within the group, demonstrating how verse can illuminate insights and shift perspectives. Participants are welcome to bring their own poems to share if time allows.
Using the anthology’s model of the ten coaching purposes for poetry, attendees will learn how to integrate poems and stories into coaching conversations, reflective practice, and client work. They will gain practical strategies for identifying the coaching purpose of a poem or story and for selecting pieces aligned with a client’s needs. The workshop highlights the benefits poetry brings to both coach and client, including enhanced awareness, emotional resonance, and the ability to explore new perspectives. Because the session features poems and stories written by coaches from around the world, it also provides a rich global perspective on how verse and narrative can expand the coaching space and enable new possibilities to emerge.
Learning Objectives:
Describe how poetry can be used in coaching to evoke awareness and list the benefits to both client and coach.
Identify, for any poem or story, the specific coaching purposes it can be used for.
Implement the use of poetry in a coaching practice for the benefit of clients and for a coach’s reflective practice.
