On my last birthday, two friends sent me surprise gifts. I was not only surprised but super stoked that both chose to send me T-shirts that had the book worm theme. The message was simple – they knew what I loved most.
There has always been something about reading that has called to me. My first brush with reading long form stories was Nancy Drew in Grade 5- introduced to me by my mother who was a teacher. She brought in books from her school library. The weekly exchange of two books was the only entertainment I looked forward to. Before I knew it I was devouring and craving the days when she would get me two more for the week. I realised in my pre teens, I perhaps used books to escape until I have come to realise that maybe its not just escape.
Whether it is a hard day, a restless mind, uncertainties, life’s unpredictabilities, I find myself reaching out to a novel, a poem or a well made movie. I thought I could slip away into someone else’s mind and escape my world. I was so wrong! I was not escaping reality, it was as though I was stepping into it. Any book that I reached out to, subconsciously felt familiar. Pages and scenes, words and limericks, sonnets and monologues felt like they were my voice. Invariably, a sob or a laugh would escape me I would gape into space processing “what just happened”.
As this continues even today, I have come to understand that whatever I chose to read, it was a reflection of what I needed. I needed to read words that I was incapable of voicing, I needed to see the life of a young woman unfold just like mine and draw inspiration or sometimes read something that I had no idea about and find myself marveled at the fact that such a thing even existed! It gave me perspectives that I could never imagine and even dared to look at! and so the whole point is just this – Growth!
Self-Awareness: Seeing Ourselves in Stories
When we engage with artful storytelling, we enter the inner worlds of others and like I said unexpectedly, our own. The characters come to life, are realistic and somehow resonate with us. They are eerily familiar so much that they seem to be making the mistakes we made. Or they are carrying fears that we carry. They bring back the dreams we have long forgotten. The magic happens when a book or a poem articulates something we have felt but could never articulate.
Take “Lessons in Chemistry” by Bonnie Garmus. While it’s a novel set in the 1960s about a woman scientist breaking norms, it is also a story of someone discovering their voice in a world that constantly tries to silence it.
“Some things needed to stay in your past. And some things needed to be pushed even further into your past.”
These lines are so profound that I give the author a standing ovation. It really invited me to think if I was still carrying something that no longer served me?
Empathy: The Courage to Walk in Another’s Shoes
Art opens up lives we may never live and yet feel as though we have. My father always encouraged me to read and travel. He said these were the only two ways to quickly get “educated” And thus, when we try to live another person’s life – there we are at the root of empathy. It is the perfect way of imagining what it is to be like someone else.
Movies like “The Pursuit of Happyness” or “The Pianist” did not become block busters just because they had an amazing star cast to entertain. The movies provoked some deep thinking. They asked us to acknowledge the fragile, resilient human spirit and how it works under pressure. They awaken our capacity for compassion, kindness and love.
In The Pursuit of Happyness, Will Smith’s character tells his son:
“Don’t ever let somebody tell you, you can’t do something. Not even me.”
For me, even today when Netflix has this scene as it’s teaser, it sets me thinking. It is a lesson in seeing others not through the lens of their limits, but their potential.
Poetry does this too — think of Mary Oliver, Rumi, or Maya Angelou. Their words do not just describe life, they seem to crack us open and extricate our innermost and deepest feelings. .
While I write this, I realise that my love for written works was perhaps the reason I chose to be a Coach because this is the core of Coaching. Of being able to empathetically understand others and be supportive of what they would want to do.
Art and Coaching: Where Stories Become Strategy
It is a privilege to see a transformation take place when it is intended and my work helps me witness this as a Coach. Art becomes a conduit. Many clients have confessed that a book opened them up. A movie brought back a memory to the surface. A poem became an instrument to change.
Stories give us access to emotions, patterns, and possibilities we mostly cannot reach in conversations alone. For me as a Coach, this form of art has become springboards for deeper Coaching questions:
What character do you most relate to? Why?
If your life were a novel, what chapter are you in?
What belief would you rewrite if you could?
In Coaching, we use narrative not just to reflect but to make a shift. The narrative is easy. You are the protagonist. And the story is still being written. We are all work in progress.
The Story You Tell Yourself Matters
During a coaching session, I often ask – What is the story you are living by, What is the story you are scripting?
I feel that movies, books, and poetry offer alternatives not to escape our lives but to see it differently. When we come back to our own lives trying to work around our messiness, nothing of the situation has changed but our approach definitely does.
Not just that, they expand our emotional vocabulary. They build bridges between us and others giving ways to grow sometimes subconsciously. And that in itself is a form of transformation.
So next time you curl up with a novel or hit play on a movie, ask yourself that while I sit down to entertain myself, what is it that I am learning about myself?
And if you are ready to explore those answers more deeply, Coaching might just be your next chapter.