Simple Images Draw Forth a Profound Client Transformation

The other day I was speaking with Christine Tomasello about stuff for my own business, when she got all excited and said “Wait! I have to tell you what happened during a client meeting earlier this week!” After she told me this story, I begged her to write it up as a guest blog post to share with you, and she agreed. I hope you find her story as inspiring as I did! :^D
-Jeannel
 

To Draw or Not To Draw . . .

Christine Tomasello, Guest Blogger

 
I had a big breakthrough with a client recently and it happened when I started to draw out our conversation…
 
Now, I’m the last person anyone would call ‘artistic’… my drawing abilities rank just above my singing talents (I’m tone deaf and can’t carry a tune to give you some perspective). The extent of my drawing capabilities as an adult includes generic balloons and basic flowers.
 
But I’ve been spending some time with Jeannel lately and I must have picked up on something through osmosis, because when I was sitting with this client, out of nowhere I just picked up my pen and started to draw.
 
Here’s what happened… In my session with my client, she was telling me how stuck she felt in building her business. She does intuitive coaching work and likes to use a technique called ‘constellations’ in which you choose objects to represent certain things and arrange them around yourself like a constellation. You can do ‘current’ constellations and ‘future’ constellations to see how things need to shift to create the change you are seeking.
 
So on this particular day, she was creating a constellation about how ‘stuck’ she felt and was laying out things to represent different roles she played over the last 10 years or so. But I was having trouble following her.
 
So I started to draw out a timeline. I told her to walk me through the constellation piece by piece and started asking her some probing questions like, “When did that feeling start?” or “Were you thriving or just surviving at that point?” and “How were you ‘showing up’ in that role?” As she answered these questions, I started jotting down all the feelings she experienced during that period and plotting them on the timeline.
 

 
What happened next was pretty cool. By plotting her experiences on the timeline and capturing her constellation as a visual conversation, we were able to notice an important piece to this puzzle: the timeframe between when she started a certain job and when she stopped working to take care of her daughter.
 
Highlighting these two events was critical – by looking at the timeline I drew, we saw that she was working for very formal, conservative, and traditional organizations during this time period. More importantly, we saw that it was during this time that she first started to feel stuck, stifled, disempowered, and misaligned with her personal values. The big ‘ah ha’ moment was when she realized that although she hadn’t worked for those companies for several years, she had been carrying the energy of them with her all these years.
 
So that’s cool, but what do you do with that new insight? Well, we went back to the timeline I drew and we put barriers at the start and the end of that time period – literally, we put a visual box around that timeframe to contain the negative energy to that time in her life. This gave her a sense of freedom she hadn’t felt in years. With one visual conversation, my client was able to shed the energy that was keeping her ‘stuck’ and leave it in the past… exactly where it belongs!
 

 
While doing this exercise helped my client break through some old emotional junk she was carrying, it also had some positive implications for me and my work. By picking up the pen and starting to draw during that meeting, I learned three important lessons:
 
• I, too, can be a visual conversationalist, even if I don’t consider myself ‘artistic’ or someone who draws well.
 
• Visual conversations are invaluable because they help you organize information differently so you can see patterns in data that you might not have picked up on otherwise.
 
• And most importantly, what it looks like is much less important than what you capture and how you digest the information.
 
So now if I’m ever questioning whether or not I should pick up a pen and draw something out, my answer is best summed up by one famous tagline… just do it!
 

About me

Christine likes to wear many hats and take on many roles in her life. She has her Masters in Counseling and is the founder of Joyful Coaching, where she offers individual coaching and group workshops in the San Diego area. She is also a freelance Executive Assistant and Project Manager for small business and solopreneurs. Christine’s main passion is helping individuals thrive in life. You can learn more about her at joyful-coaching.com and www.your-ea.com.
 
Photo Credits: Christine Tomasello