The Uses and Benefits of Coaching With the Arts*

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• Art can help you dig deep to come to the core issue more quickly than traditional coaching, as long as you are open to it.

• It can help you get unstuck.

• It can help you break out of your comfort zone:  experiement, explore your world, do something different.

• Art is something you can keep and look back to over time to see progress made easier than "words only" coaching sessions.

• Art can provide that shift, a deep sense of awareness, that can create lasting change.

• It is a powerful communication tool.  Pictures bring back memories of people, places, experiences that you can then explore to find answers to current challenges.

• It can help you communicate what you can't find the words to express--what you are feeling, thinking, and experiencing.

• It can help you communicate in a way that aids healing and growth and resolution.

• Our visual perceptions develop prior to our ability to express ourselves verbally, so that means that art is closer to the unconscious, where some of our answers, insights, lie regarding our struggles, challenges, blocks, etc.

• It brings clarity regarding a challenge or problem. 

• It can help break through repetitive thought and behavior patterns.

• It helps you develop your emotional intelligence:  the ability to recognize, understand and manage your own emotions and recognize, understand and influence the emotions of others.   

• It helps you achieve your dreams by facilitating the  uncovering and exploring of what is holding you back. (For example, limiting beliefs)

• It helps you face and knock down barriers and make shifts in perspectives to allow for desired change.

• Using the arts in coaching can help the more creative and artistic right hemesphere of the brain come to the forefront and the more academic and logical left hemisphere to back off and let it do so.

• It can facilitate mindfulness.

• It can boost confidence and self-worth.

• It can bring about transformational change.

• It can help you discover your potential, know yourself better, boost your abilities and make life more meaningful.

• It encourages playfulness and creativity, which are cathartic.  You're able to release emotions that may have been previously locked inside.

• It is a stress reliever--increases serotonin in the brain causing relaxation.

• Communicating through art is a way for you to forge a deep connection witin yourself that can facilitate insights, personal development, growth and fulfillment.

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*Source: "Coaching Beyond Words" by Anna Sheather