The Discipline of Mapping the past
This week in my journey with Barefoot Coaching Ltd, our focus turned toward transitions—how we navigate change, both as individuals and within organizations.
Early in the session, a core truth surfaced: it is incredibly easy to assume alignment on objectives when, in reality, the true destination is rarely that obvious. To navigate this, we spent time distinguishing between two distinct types of goals:
The “In-There” Goals: What a person specifically wants to achieve within the confines of the session itself.
The “Out-There” Goals: The broader, systemic changes they want to see manifest beyond the room, in their life or career.
Recognizing that simple distinction shifts the depth of a conversation more than you would ever expect. But the real revelation of the week came when we moved away from pure conversation and experimented with more embodied coaching techniques, somatic movement, and timeline mapping.
The Power of Physicality: Somatic Movement in Coaching
What struck me most during these exercises was how powerful physical movement can be for processing change. As people literally moved through different spaces to represent different moments in time, you could see the shift instantly—in their posture, facial expressions, and overall energy. It felt like watching someone vividly relive a memory, process it, and then consciously step out of it.
For the timeline exercise, flexibility is key. You first agree with your coachee on what works best for the environment you are in:
Spatial Timelines: If you have the physical space, you can literally lay out a timeline on the floor and walk through it.
Micro-Timelines: If you are in a crowded café, a corporate office, or working with limited mobility, you can recreate the exact same journey using post-its, small anchoring objects, or simply drawing it out on a blank sheet of paper.
The underlying philosophy is simple: you map out key moments in time, physically or visually "step into" them to explore what occurred, and then step out to reflect from a position of safety before moving forward again.
Uncovering Hidden Patterns of Workplace Burnout
In my own practice as a client this week, I used the timeline to explore a personal career crossroads.
I didn’t expect the somatic, emotional response to be so immediate or visible. Just stepping into certain past professional moments brought back not only thoughts, but visceral physical reactions.
In a subsequent session, my coach brilliantly combined this timeline with a relationship graph. Suddenly, the bigger picture clicked. Clear patterns started to emerge around communication, mismatched expectations, and workplace burnout. These weren't isolated incidents or bad weeks; they were repetitive, systemic cycles that had been playing out over years.
This kind of deep, reflective work is undeniably intense. When you combine somatic movement, emotional recall, and deep reflection, it becomes a processing-heavy experience. It requires deliberate space. It requires pauses. Rushing through a transition means missing the exact insights that are trying to surface.
Bringing Timeline Mapping into Agency Delivery
From a delivery leadership perspective, this experience completely reframed how I view team dynamics and project management. How often do we try to push teams, stakeholders, and projects forward into a new phase without truly understanding the timelines they’ve already lived through?
Agencies, teams, and stakeholders carry their own historical weight:
Past project decisions that left technical debt.
Unspoken interpersonal tensions.
The lingering exhaustion of recent sprint burnouts.
Uncelebrated successes that were immediately bypassed for the next deadline.
In the corporate world, we rarely make space to step into those historical moments, acknowledge them, and step back out with fresh perspective. Instead, our default setting is to jump straight to a rigid roadmap of “what’s next.”
But what if, even in fast-paced agency settings, we created intentional, micro-moments to map those timelines? Making these organizational patterns visible before they repeat is the ultimate preventative measure against burnout. It doesn't have to be a heavy, bureaucratic exercise—just a small, disciplined pause to bring awareness into how we move forward.
Before we push our teams into the next big transition, we have to ask ourselves: Have we paused long enough to understand the patterns of where they’ve just been?
