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This post takes the reader on a journey into an art therapy experience that I facilitated for colleagues and it shows the power of art process in surfacing unconscious parts of ourselves to enable personal insight and empowered action.

I recently facilitated a workshop for a group of leadership development professionals. This is not necessarily an easy thing to do, effectively facilitating an experience for your peers. However in this case I knew I would be introducing these participants to something that was new to them: the use of art therapy to get guidance on a personal issue or challenge.

I started by leading the group through a meditation and breath awareness exercise. Even those who have not done much meditation can find such an exercise helps them to relax and release the pressures of the day.

The next step was to take them through something an art therapy exercise involving the creation of a ‘two-handed closed eyes scribble drawing’.

Most of us, especially those working in business- or management-type roles, have long lost the ability to create art. As kids we all did it, but as we grew up we developed an inner critic that caused us to stop even picking up a pencil or paint brush. We are simply paralysed by the thought that the end result of our work won’t be ‘good’.

In art therapy, the inner critic is circumvented by making the process the experience rather than the end product.

As I had the participants take up their pastels, beautiful music filled the room, helping to create the ‘container’: a safe space with clear boundaries. This is what allows the magic to unfold.

The exercise involves spontaneous drawing with, as the name suggests, both hands and closed eyes. The imagery that arrives is a gift from our inner knowing. We are recreating a part of ourselves on the page in front of us. As we open our eyes and engage with this, something shifts within us. It may sound far fetched but I have seen the outcome too many times to believe otherwise.

One of the participants during this experience shared that he had had many months of lacking direction and focus and generally feeling stuck in his work and life. This despite the fact that he himself was a leadership expert, with many development tools in his kit and high levels of personal awareness.

Of course, it wasn’t an unusual situation. Many people in our world have had a similar experience of having a grating sense that something is not right, something is unresolved. Perhaps you have too?

This spontaneous scribbling process relaxed this man’s conscious mind. He found himself surprised that the drawing he created brought to the surface imagery that informed him about what he had been experiencing and that previously he had not been able to recognise. It was as if a cloud had lifted. As he engaged with the image, he felt a sense of relief, an unlocking. He later titled his drawing ‘Stuck in the mud’.

From an art therapy perspective, this man’s response was his unconscious communicating with him through his drawing. It provided him with a newfound clarity about what action he needed to take.

Since I developed my interest in art therapy, I’ve seen how something magical can happen when we bring our inner imagery to the surface in this way, having it on a page in front of us. It creates some space between our ‘self’ and that part of us that is feeling stuck or uneasy. We move from overwhelm and a state of feeling frozen into a new world of possibility. The ‘stuckness’ becomes just a part of us, not all of us, and that makes it feel more manageable. There is space around it:

I feel stuck

Something is stuck

I’m sensing something is stuck

From there we are once again empowered and can take committed action from that place of deep knowing.

This particular client was eternally grateful for having been given access to a new way to connect with his inner knowing from which he could emerge out the other side with clear, tangible and empowered action. This is what this client shared after the experience (reproduced here with his kind permission)

“In the first exercise I saw it in a split second – stuck in mud! And then to draw with both hands; firstly symmetrically and then, as it went on, more and more randomly.And then to see within what I called Mr. Magoo and the freedom that was within. It blew me away!!! This process provided me with the ability to see inside myself and see that I was stuck and to come up with something ( Mr. Magoo) that has given me freedom and liberation.” – Evolving Leaders Client

Art process can change lives. It takes us beneath the surface of the story, the concept the idea, the stress-producing thoughts to access and give voice to our inner knowing: the things we know about ourselves but just can’t recognise – the things that just aren’t revealed to us in conventional personal and leadership development experiences.

This is why I believe art therapy has an important role to play in this next era of leadership development.

Interested in having a personal experience of art therapy? Evolving Leaders incorporates art therapy experiences into Urban Retreats for Teams, Managing Stress with Meditation Program and Team Culture and Wellbeing Development.