Exploring the Role of Playfulness, Imagination, and Creativity in Coaching

Embracing the potential of accessing playfulness in our coaching practice may be a route to taking your practice to a whole other level and helping clients develop greater insights, creativity, and transformation.

Drawing from a wide range of research areas as well as lived experience, we will look at what adult playfulness in coaching means, consider some of the theory, and play with how it might look and what it can bring in practice. We will explore how our bodies and brains react when we access playfulness and how it impacts us, our clients, and our coaching relationship. Dipping into the related constructs of humor and creativity, we consider how they overlap with playfulness, and how they provide the possibility for rich contribution to coaching effectiveness.

We will also shine a light on some of the barriers and risks to incorporating this approach. Playfulness opens the door to somatic coaching and experiential learning. It requires mindfulness from both client and coach. How is your level of comfort or discomfort with playfulness serving your client? Through interactive exercises, we explore how you can be more playful and move beyond your comfort zone in service of your client.

We will explore how we can prime ourselves to be playful and how we might help our clients to do the same. Plus, gain a few practical ideas to help you experiment with more playfulness in your coaching.