Essays on art and coaching
The question under the picture
Twenty words at most, no verb that tells the viewer what to feel, and nothing in it the coach would need to explain. How we wrote the twenty questions.
Each of the twenty photographs in THE WALK carries one question beneath it. Writing those twenty questions took longer than selecting the twenty images, and most of the time went into removing words.
The rule we set ourselves came straight from how I teach coaching: a coaching question is a question and nothing else. No preface ("I'm curious whether..."), no reflection folded into it ("It sounds like you're tired; what would rest look like?"), no quiet suggestion of the answer. A question that leads is a statement wearing a question mark. On a gallery wall, with no coach standing beside it to soften anything, a leading question reads as manipulation within a second, and the viewer closes.
So the first draft of every question was cut until only the question remained. "When you think about the things you keep postponing, what have you been setting aside?" became "What have you been putting aside without noticing?" The first version tells the viewer they postpone things. The second assumes nothing and still goes to the same place.
The second rule was that the question had to survive the image it sat under. A question that depends on the picture ("What is this person waiting for?") sends the viewer into the picture and away from themselves. A question that ignores the picture entirely wastes it. The ones that worked sit in between: they can be answered without the image, but the image changes the answer. "What feels most familiar to you right now?" is a complete question on its own. Under a photograph of a long concrete corridor, it becomes a different question for each person, and that difference is the point.
Third, no word that names a feeling. The moment a question says "fear" or "hope" or "grief", it has decided what the viewer is carrying. We used verbs of attention instead: notice, accept, hold, put aside. These describe what the person is doing, not what they are feeling, and they leave the feeling to the person.
Fourth, length. Nothing over about fifteen words. People read a wall label standing up, often with someone behind them. A long question becomes a paragraph to be skimmed; a short one becomes a sentence to be heard.
The twentieth station has no picture. Its question is the one the other nineteen were leading towards, and by then the viewer has done enough looking to meet it without an image to hide behind. I will not print it here; it belongs at the end of a walk, not the start of an essay.
If you write questions for a living, in sessions or on walls, here is the test we used. Read the question aloud to someone who knows nothing about your work. If they ask you what you mean, it is too clever. If they answer immediately and confidently, it is too closed. If they go quiet for a moment and then say "hm", you have one.