- Mon, 20 July 2026
When was the last time you paused while listening to a song because it reflected something you could not fully explain yet?
Or found yourself staring at a photograph longer than expected?
Or doodling during a meeting and suddenly realizing you understood the situation differently?
Or writing something only for yourself, without editing or improving it?
I have been thinking a lot lately about creativity as part of reflective practice for leaders and coaches. One potential way of noticing, processing experiences, exploring emotions, and making meaning.
In coaching and supervision spaces, people often say they are “not creative”, or “they cannot draw”. A few moments later, they are choosing images that describe their emotions more accurately than direct language, or using metaphors that suddenly open entirely new perspectives.
For many people, reflection is frequently connected to analysis, verbal processing, and problem solving. These approaches are valuable, but they can also keep us inside familiar thinking patterns. Creative reflective practice sometimes slows us down enough to notice perspectives, emotions, memories, or associations that would otherwise stay unnoticed.
I still remember introducing Points of You cards into a group coaching process in a corporate manufacturing environment back in 2017. Many people in the room were not used to openly verbalizing emotions or personal reflections in professional settings. Once images entered the conversation, something shifted. The cards created access points into some very special conversations. There was more openness, more sharing, and more connection between people who usually communicated mostly through roles and tasks. It was amazing to see how, without conflict or blame, people could openly describe changes they wanted to see in the team and improvements they were willing to take responsibility for.
Research around arts based approaches increasingly supports what many practitioners already experience intuitively in practice. In Art-Based Coaching, Andrea Giraldez-Hayes and Max Eames explore how visual imagery can hold multiple complexities and paradoxes simultaneously. The book also references studies showing that creative and visual methods can support self awareness, emotional processing, creativity, perspective taking, and problem solving.
I see this often in leadership and coaching spaces, where people often experience contradictions that are difficult to explain logically. Confidence and insecurity can exist at the same time. Structure and freedom. Clarity and ambiguity. Creative reflection sometimes helps people stay with these tensions long enough for deeper understanding to emerge.
In Coaching Beyond Words, Anna Sheather explores poetry, music, movement, collage, metaphor, and visual reflection as ways of deepening coaching conversations and reflective practice. Many of these approaches gradually became part of my own reflective process as well. I draw plans and ideas, photograph details constantly and visualize some concepts. Sometimes I create collages or make some collections from things I gathered in nature and play with their positions making meaning of systemic topics I want to analyze.
I also bring some of these approaches into coaching and supervision spaces. Recently, during a reflective session, I invited a client to pause our conversation and write a short poem alongside me. Separately and silently. Later, we shared what emerged. The poem opened emotions, memories, and reflections that had remained outside the conversation until that moment.
Creative reflective practice can begin very simply:
Choose a topic, challenge, transition, or question you want to reflect on.
Choose a place and time where you can slow down a little.
Then experiment with a reflective format that feels interesting or makes you curious.
You might reflect through music, photography, poetry, metaphor, movement, collage, drawing, or visual imagery.
You might also ask yourself:
What is the soundtrack of this phase of my life?
What image reflects my current leadership experience?
If this challenge had a shape, texture, or color, what would it look like?
Sometimes a different form of reflection allows us to notice something we could not access before.
And if you think you cannot draw – just watch this TED talk. 🙂
Sign up our newsletter to get update information, news and free insight.
