"Unlocking Creativity: Exploring Liminal Coaching with Mike Parker"

The Human Centered Design Podcast (Premium)

NEWS: We have just launched our new community ‘CIRCLE’ - A Private Community for Ethically Conscious Designers and Changemakers / https://www.thisishcd.com/landing/circle-a-community-for-ethically-conscious-designers-changemakers

Fast-track your career with our 12-week training programme: https://www.thisishcd.com/coaching-mentoring-for-innovators-change-makers

Welcome to another episode of This is HCD. Several months ago, I started speaking with today's guest, Mike Parker, owner and founder of Liminal Coaching in Wales in the UK. I'd heard Mike's name mentioned several times over the years online, especially after reading the brilliant book by Dave Gray called Liminal Thinking several years ago.

Now that book for me was transformative. Both personally and professionally, and over the years, as I explored ways and means to extend my level of knowledge in this space, I started to read more and more about the benefits of liminality to changemakers. So what exactly is liminality? And more to the point, what is liminal thinking?

If you haven't read that book, I really encourage you to pick it up. It's a brilliant book and a brilliant read. Now, liminal thinking is a concept, an approach to problem solving and understanding. The world that deals with the power of the thresholds of perception and belief. Now, the term liminal comes from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold.

And in a broader sense, liminality refers to a state of transition, the in between phase of a process of change, where you are on the threshold between one state and another. Some of Mike's work is really fascinating and involves holding space for yourself just to drift. So for anyone who knows me personally, they'd be familiar with the constant drive or chaos that surrounds my own life and is in constant conflict with this idea of just holding space.

But I truly love it and I love practicing it. I might not be good at it. But I know I want to get better at it, but that's probably a really nice way of framing it. So this episode is going to be of interest to me, or of interest to you if you're like me in that sense, always running close to empty and always striving for perfection and really ultimately being critically hard on yourself from time to time.

So in this episode we tackle some of those pieces and go deeper into Mike's practices. Let's get stuck in.

• linkedin.com/in/mikekparker