Why I offer this work
I am offering this work because I have been changed by it.
When I was a child, my imagination was like a dear friend. Always available, we spent many nourishing hours together.
As I grew up, I gradually lost touch with my friend. I became disconnected without really knowing what was missing. I felt different: less confident, less fluid, somehow gummed up. Was this age? Something was lost.
I went to therapy because I wanted it back.
Therapy didn’t give it back. But maybe it began the journey…
Training, stretching and reconnecting my imagination through waking dreaming helped me rediscover and reconnect with a familiar sense of inner knowing and with the world as a living presence I could communicate with as well as feel part of.
I began to understand what I had been missing: a sense of unfolding and possibility.
And it was joyful. Energising. To be reunited with that part of myself and, to inhabit that way of being again was fun.
steph patten
Story, experience and the worlds we inhabit
I came to coaching by way of anthropology.
For more than ten years, I worked as an anthropologist and ethnographic researcher, often for some of the world’s most familiar brands. I spent time with people in their everyday lives, listening to conversations and exploring the stories, relationships and cultures that shaped their experience.
Culture is an invisible ordering structure. We rarely stop to explain why we think something, do something or respond in a particular way. We simply do.
Anthropologists learn to notice what sits beneath the obvious: to listen for what is left unsaid, and to understand the worlds we inhabit through the assumptions, stories and patterns that organise everyday life.
I explored how this understanding could inform creative practice when I later lectured at University College London in documentary film and ethnographic research methods.
A recurring theme throughout my work has been making the invisible visible.
Now I use that same curiosity in service of the individual: helping you notice the stories, assumptions and ways of being that shape your experience, so that knowing yourself can create more freedom and choice.
Alongside anthropology, my training as a physical performer and my work as an actor, musician and storyteller deepened my understanding of the many ways people express and communicate their worlds. It also strengthened my lifelong interest in imagination as a way of knowing, sensing, creating and participating.
Reconnect Your Imagination brings these threads together: anthropological appreciation of myth, fairy tale and cosmology; ethnographic attention to the realities of everyday life; creative practice; and trust in the transformational power of storytelling.
Why coaching?
Coaching is different from therapy. Therapy can help us understand and work with what has happened to us. Coaching is oriented towards what we want to become and how we want to experience our lives.
As a coach, I work alongside you and we work ‘from the ground up’. It is similar to the positioning of an ethnographer: listening carefully, staying curious and paying attention to what is emerging.
We can learn from the past where it helps illuminate the present, but the work is oriented towards the journey ahead: Who do you choose to be?
Through waking dreaming, I discovered a way to experience stories that I could learn from. Images, characters, places, feelings and sensations come from the individual allowing an encounter that takes the blinkers off allowing us to see ourselves differently and glimpse possibilities we might not reach through ordinary reflection.
Through coaching, I offer space to explore those stories, deepen self-understanding, and experience the presence and choice that can emerge when we become less bound by familiar ways of being.
Reconnect Your Imagination brings together these two pathways: waking dreaming to awaken imagination, and coaching to explore what becomes possible when we live from it.
Both pathways are grounded in trust: trust in careful listening, trust in the client’s own inner movement, and trust that imagination can help us re-engage with life in fuller and more meaningful ways.
