Coaching often requires changing perspectives, doing things in a different way than usual and being able to imagine how we could "be" different if we adopted different mentalities.
In short, coaching also stimulates a good dose of creativity on the part of the person who relies on their coach.
This is why it is therefore useful to reflect on the link between coaching and creativity.
Have you ever read a novel by Stefano Benni? Or maybe you have known him for one of his comics, an article, a story, but also a ballad, or for his poems, and then for his plays or screenplays? And in each of his works, one wonders how he gets all that creativity! Stuff you would not believe in, so much so that even though it often describes Italian society in its texts, it has been translated into more than thirty countries, due to the wealth of images it manages to evoke.
But there is another type of creativity, which we are all capable of, and sometimes it can produce extraordinary results! I explain it with an example, a little play on words, telling you that: "Well yes, I would really like to die in my sleep, like my grandfather, quiet without noticing anything ...... Certainly not like those four who were in the car with he!!" In short: at first, you will have imagined my grandfather dying in bed, and in the end, you will find him instead taking a nap in the back seats of an unfortunate car!
Here, these puns, in fact, these changes of perspective, will not change the world, and to tell the truth even Stefano Benni's novels do not change it, but if we can make these mental switches, then we are also able to innovate.
Because if we think, for example, of the first Ikea worker who removed the legs of the table, Lovet, to allow the customer to load it into the car, we realize that from this small gesture was born the change of perspective that in so years allowed Ikea to change its business model and establish itself on the market.
Or, think of Fleming, who discovered penicillin starting from a joke: "Oh, how funny, this mold has killed bacteria". The procedures would have asked him to throw away that "bad" tube, which Fleming did, but then, speaking to a colleague, he told him about that rather bizarre case ... and it was a moment: "if it can kill bacteria in a test tube, perhaps it can also do it in the human body ”. A small change of perspective, which changed the world.
So, even if we are not highly creative novelists, we do not produce furniture and we are not biologists, but I bet that each of us happens to make jokes, puns, or sometimes even tell jokes. So why not use this talent, the ability to look at the same things, but from different points of view, to do something more serious, like innovating, in our professional fields, a bit like Fleming did?!?
Because, let's remember, innovation consists in seeing what every one has seen, and in thinking what no one ... has ever thought!
So, whether you want to grow personally and professionally through coaching, or even on your own, never underestimate that precious ally that is your creativity !!!