A couple of years ago I took a photography course (it is an amazing training course), where one of the tasks during our Composition Skills class gave me much more than a simple photographic experience. The task was to take a dozen pictures of an old, decaying double gate in Szentendre, without having any images composed the same way. At first, we were just standing there, taking some “evident” shots, but afterwards we didn’t really know what to do. So we started to examine the gate closely, looking at it almost inch by inch to find a theme. We took amazing photos. What has changed? All that happened was that the gate displayed a different appearance from each angle, in various light conditions and with various camera settings. And this is something similar coaching invites you to do –to keep changing your focus, to look at your situation in the morning, in the evening, after lunch or during hiking and see what it tells you.
Let’s play! Next time you go out in the nature, just find a bench, a road sign, a tree, a flowery meadow or anything else that grabs your attention. Get a closer look and then observe it from a distance, from above, from the bottom looking upwards, from the right and from the left. Then close one of your eyes. Then the other one. Do you have sunglasses on? Then take it off. How does it look now? If possible, walk around it. Find a tiny detail-on its surface, something about the size of your fingernail. What is it? What does it resemble? Are there more of them? Now move away from it a little bit. In what sense does your impression of the object differ from the one you had at the start of the game?