Coaching Tools: Future Visualisation

Visualisation a way of helping someone to tap into where they want to go in the future. When we coach, we tend to stay on a very cognitive level. We try to generate new thinking in our coachees, we ask questions and they think and respond, which is great. It’s great to have that space.

Visualisation helps them to go a little bit deeper with this. They can imagine being there, take themselves into that space in the future, to notice what they notice about it. As a result, they might gain new perspectives, ideas, realisations, that they didn’t have before.

It most definitely comes from within the client. Sometimes it’s really easy to be influenced by what other people think, and what we feel we SHOULD be doing or aiming for. Using future visualisation in the coaching space helps us to go deeper into what we really feel we want to do and removes many of those external influences. It can help with motivation as well. Using visualisation allows you to connect with that future vision of yourself, of where you want to be at a really deep level. Then that can trigger a deep intrinsic motivation to get there.

In using visualisation, we can help our coachees to explore what their vision looks like, but also:

• what else is there,
• how they are in that place
• who are they in that space.
• And we can also look at ideas, perhaps, of how they’ve got there, so it can help with steps along the way.

Sometimes someone will come to coaching to think about their work or career progression and when we do a visualisation, that’s what they expect to be imagining. But they find their future vision is more focussed on their personal life, or their family life an what that looks like in the future. That then helps to inform where they go with their work. Oftentimes, the most important things come to the surface when we use visualisation techniques.

How Do We Use This Practically In The Coaching Room?

A common technique from Solution Focused Coaching is the magic wand question. Visualisation is not so very different to this, but we tend to use a more meditative approach. It’s, typically a closed eye exercise, we talk someone in to a more relaxed situation, feeling relaxed in their body, focussing on their breathing. This allows us to really slow down their conscious thinking, and we tap into an altered state of consciousness. We encourage slower brain waves (alpha brainwaves) where someone gets more into a state of flow. You might recognise this as a daydream state, relaxation or meditation state.

When we are functioning on the everyday, we’re getting on with activities, we have beta brain waves. We also have lots of gamma brain waves, and they’re our thinking and problem solving brain waves. So, when we’re doing work, we’ll have the majority of beta and gamma brain waves. When we start to relax and to daydream, perhaps, when we start to breathe deeply, and maybe are just chilling on the sofa or starting to get into that relaxed state ready for bed, our brain waves slow down. As our brain waves slow down, they go into alpha brain waves. The the more we relax, the more our brain waves become more slow and deep. And eventually they become so slow that we go in to sleep. When we’re in alpha brainwaves, we also are able to have gamma waves present, so we can imagine and daydream, visualise things, and still do thinking and rationalisation, and we can still problem-solve. So it’s a really nice place to come from in imagining what we want to have happen in the future.

This ties in with some of the research around neuroscience and coaching, with the idea that in coaching it can be extremely beneficial to activate the default mode network of our brain, which is where we do that daydreaming and visualisation.

The following Q&A is Tom asking Helen about her experiences of using visualisation in the coaching room. It is taken from our podcast on the topic.

Tom: This may all sound little bit ‘woowoo’ for some people, So, if someone was more practically minded and not really… perhaps you weren’t sure if they were going to get this, what would you do in those circumstances?

Helen: It’s really interesting that you asked that because it has really got me thinking, because I’ve done this meditation with most of my clients, and I’ve never really stopped to think, Oh, are they going to get it or not? I’ve just tried it. I always say to people, I’m going to ask you to visualise. It’s like imagining. So even people who are perhaps more practical, they can imagine where they want to be. If they perhaps don’t go as deep into it and connect with it in the same way and allow those things to bubble to the surface from their unconscious, they will still benefit from the imagining of this future potential scenario. But yes, I don’t think I’ve ever stopped to think, does this work for this person? I’ve just gone with it to see what they’ve got. I’ve done that in workshops situations where people have even said, ‘I didn’t think this was for me, but actually I’ve really benefited from it’. I think that most people will get something from that. And if it doesn’t work at all, we’ll try something different. But It’s never not worked to some extent. 

Tom: So how long would you typically allow someone to be in that space of visualising?

Helen: It really depends. A full visualisation can last for 15 minutes, or even 30 to 40 minutes if you’re exploring the future steps along the way. This element is really useful as it can help you to build in a bit of an action plan that comes from really deep within you.

Tom: That could take a big chunk of a coaching session. What impact does that have for the coachee?

People start off thinking that they’ll focus on one thing. They do the visualisation, and they often come back and tell me, ‘Oh, it’s really odd. I thought I was going to think about work, but I was thinking about family’ or vice versa. And that’s absolutely fine because it’s where their unconscious takes them. It’s where perhaps, I like to think, their heart wants to go. And so the outcomes are them getting a better understanding of how they want their lifestyle to be and how they want to show up in the world. It’s about them working out a way that they can be the person they want to be. And oftentimes, they might have an idea of who and how they want to be, but they don’t know how to get there. So it can really help them to engage with that process. If they feel really distant from that version of themselves, it can bring it closer and more like, ‘Oh, I don’t need to make the huge step. I can make a small one’. It makes it real and realistic. So it helps them to engage with the things that they can take action on that bring them that feeling.

They might not have the house in the country with a small holding that they want, but they might discover that something else gives them a bit of that feeling. Having a greenhouse gives them a bit of that feeling. Perhaps they could explore doing that. It helps them to get closer to it. It gives them new perspective. It might help them to feel what’s in alignment with that version of themselves that they want to be and to embody. Visualising that future goal, if you like, that vision, really helps them to connect with it powerfully and emotionally and give them that real intrinsic motivation. As I say, we’ll often see steps along the way that they could take, which is when we do that longer visualisation. I just feel that there’s all sorts of outcomes that you can get from this. They can certainly start to feel more about what’s in alignment with that future version of themselves and what isn’t, so they can start to make those changes. And I don’t put a time frame on this. It’s just part of a future potential. It might be five years, it might be 10 years, but it’s not my place to say that. That’s up to the client, and they can work on that framework later when we come back for another coaching session. But that’s not for me to put that on there, so I do make sure that I try to avoid that.

Tom: And thinking about when they come out of this meditative visualisation meditation, how aware are they of what’s going on for them in that space?

Helen: Often very aware because we don’t go really deep into that meditation. But some people may not remember everything, but they remember feeling. So we might talk about that feeling and how they could conjure that feeling again. But for most people, because it’s quite a light meditation, they do recall the things that were important. So, yes, they usually have something from it.

Tom: What would be your top tips for coaches who want to try this process with their clients?

Helen: Firstly, I’d write a script. Now, it might be odd for people to write things down word for word, but that’s the best place to start. It should include a wind down in the beginning. (If you listen to the recording) You might have noticed as I started to pre-frame, my voice got slower. That continued until it was nice and calm and slow. Towards the end, you need to have a build back to full wakefulness. If you listen back again to that visualisation, you’ll hear that my voice got slightly louder and faster until we’re ‘back in the room’.

Once you’ve got a script, practise saying it out loud, for lots of reasons. Sometimes the script won’t work. You need to also practise on someone else so that you can get the timing right, so that you can practise your tonality and your voice, because it’s your voice that will help people go into that nice place. Then thirdly, perhaps record it and listen to yourself. Much like coaching, we can learn a lot when we listen back to ourselves. If you get to the point that you can meditate to your own voice, other people will be able to as well.

Tom: I noticed when you were doing the actual meditation, not the wind down and the wind back up again, there’s a different rhythm to your speech. It’s more sing-songy and there’s more pauses. It’s a different way of speaking, isn’t it?

It’s a very different way of speaking. It’s a different language as well. We tap into all the senses. ‘Notice what you notice, just feel what you feel’, hear what you hear’.

It’s really important to do that because we don’t want to assume. If we say, ‘imagine you are seeing this’, someone might not be ‘seeing’ that. They might be hearing something or feeling something. We have to allow for all of those. Yes, that sing-song way of talking helps people to get into a nice, relaxed state. Think about how you would read to a child before bed.

We hope you found this article useful and that you might consider using future visualisations in your coaching.

Experience It Now

If you would like to experience a short visualisation exercise you can do so on the podcast episode relating to this topic. The meditation/ visualisation is about 9 minutes long and can be found at 10 mins and15 seconds in to this episode:

https://yourcoachingjourney.com/project/episode-16-using-future-visualisations/

To find out more about our Doctors’ Transformational Coaching Diploma click through here