Sometimes you know exactly what you need to do.
And sometimes you really don’t.
You might be juggling too many balls, going round in circles, unable to see the wood for the trees, facing a crossroads, or simply aware that something needs to change without knowing what that change might be.
That’s often where my work starts.
With something you don’t know what to do about.
For over 25 years, I’ve been helping individuals and organisations see situations differently - often by sending conventional and logical thinking on a coffee break and using metaphor, nature and, increasingly, poetry to uncover perspectives currently hidden from view.
The destination isn’t always known when we start.
That’s rather the point.
You don’t need to arrive with a clearly defined problem, a carefully worded objective or even an idea of what you need from me.
You might simply be saying:
Those words give us somewhere to start.
Because the language we use to describe a situation often contains far more information than we realise.
My work uses metaphor to help us step away from the story we’ve been telling ourselves and explore the situation differently.
If you’re juggling too many balls, for example,
Changing the metaphor can change what becomes possible.
Poetry can do something similar.
A poem can bypass the part of us that wants to analyse, justify and find the “right” answer. A few carefully chosen words or an unexpected image can provide a different vantage point from which something previously unseen suddenly becomes obvious.
Not because I’ve given you the answer.
Because you can now see your own.
Bring something you don’t know what to do about.
We’ll use metaphor, poetry and the tools I’ve developed over more than two decades to explore it from somewhere different.
Sometimes one conversation is all that’s needed. At other times it becomes part of a longer piece of work.
Sometimes a particular poem provides exactly the perspective needed.
Rather than talking endlessly about the situation, we use the poem as the starting point for a conversation and see where it takes us.
This is also the thinking behind Conversations from The Bookshelf - stories and poems that offer another way of seeing familiar situations.
For teams and organisations, I use metaphor and poetry to help people think, talk and work differently.
That might involve exploring a particular challenge, opening up a conversation that has become difficult, helping people see beyond familiar assumptions, or introducing metaphor as a practical tool for transformation.
Sometimes my role is not to help people find the words, but to listen carefully to the words already being spoken.
As a conference poet, I listen to presentations, meetings, conversations and themes emerging throughout an event and weave them into poetry that reflects something of the experience back to the people who created it.
It can capture not only what was said, but something of what was felt, noticed and perhaps left unsaid.
Not everything fits neatly into a box.
That suits me.
If you have an idea for using poetry, metaphor or a different way of thinking - at an event, within a team, in a conversation or somewhere I haven’t thought of yet - tell me about it.
In fact, you don't even need to know what the answer is.
That's my territory.
Come with the question, the confusion, the crossroads, the tangled web or the too-many-balls-in-the-air.
We can start there.
Do get in touch alison@alisonsmith.co (yes just .co) +44(0)7770 538159
