Helping a client work through an issue, it occurs to me, not the first time, that I could do with answering some of my questions myself.
Nothing very earth-shattering there.
What is new for me is realising that a way to help ourselves get our thinking straight is to help someone else with their issues, notice the questions we are asking, and then apply them to ourselves – as a deliberate approach, I mean, and as a by-product of coaching other people. That’s somehow different from just trying to figure out our own issues solo.
The reason this works is to do with the principle of projection. We see unacknowledged things about ourselves in other people. So the questions we come up with to help other people actually arise from the structure of our own issues. It’s all reflections, in other words, and sometimes we see the questions we need to ask ourselves more clearly in the mirror of other people.
Do you notice that?