S5 Episode 65: What’s the Connection Between Coaching and Jigsaw Puzzles? with Alex Martynov

Coaching is a wonderful thing and I think it should be simple and accessible to everybody. I'm Claire Pedrick. I'm on a mission to upend the coaching industry and change how we have conversations so that they're better, more effective and more fun. Today's episode highlights how we are solving a puzzle in coaching, but it's not ours to solve. So we're thinking about jigsaw puzzles and what we can learn from them about coaching. So my special guest is Alex Martynov who loves jigsaw puzzles.

Listen in and let the conversation begin. Hello, welcome back to The Coaching Inn. I'm your host, Claire Pedrick, and today I'm in conversation with Alex Martynov, uh my co-conspirator in jigsaw building. Alex and I have known each other for quite a long time now, and he posts really interesting pictures on LinkedIn of his jigsaws. So I found out we had a shared passion for jigsaw puzzles. And it's a passion that I developed quite recently and quite surprisingly.

I found them quite boring at first. And it was like tedious and I was just mostly helping my wife. And then I started discovering a few things that made me more interested. How interesting. So we'll get on to jigsaws in a minute.

Let's start with you as a person, a human, and as a coach. Tell us a bit about your journey. Huh, so I've been doing coaching for 11 years already, but full time two years. I think I'm an accidental coach. So it's not something that I was planning to do. And probably a lot of people, a lot of coaches are like that. But for me, like there was like self-development journey. So I did some NLP training and did some hypnosis training before coaching.

And I was not considering coaching at all, but a friend recommended me a John Whitmore's book, which I really liked. And it seems so logical and just, I want to learn more. And since then, I just cannot stop. and now you're catching full time. I do, which is a roller coaster in a way, but it's an interesting journey. Nice. And where in the world are you Alex? I am from Ukraine for the last eight years I've been in Prague. And apart from coaching, also I have a restaurant business with my wife.

So we are running like two restaurants right now. One we're going to close soon. and when you're going to keep open. Yes, that was plan B and it's working out for now. Good, lovely.

So, you said, you told me that you were writing some reflections on the connection between jigsaw puzzles and coaching. I am so interested, as is our lovely listener, Fran Cormack, who saw us sharing pictures of puzzles on LinkedIn and said he couldn't wait for this episode. Hi, Fran. Hi Fran! Yes, and actually it's good that I wrote them because now I know what about to talk. OK so what are you noticing?

There are many things and kind of what I share about not loving them and then growing to love them I think it's also part of the of the journey because at first what I was doing I was just doing something and Then at some point where doing something didn't work out.

Started thinking about how I'm doing something So there was like this almost idea of reflective practitioner and I think in in every field it's possible to become a reflective So it's just possible to go in through the motions where it's possible to step back and think about what I'm doing. And for me, that moment was when I think at the moment that was the biggest puzzles that we are doing. was, think, 1,500 pieces. it was this probably a lot of people saw this photo.

it's called lunch at the top of the skyscraper. with a steel beam and people sitting on it and having the lunch. And I think the shift, this kind of awakening to more reflective practice was for me that, well, it was very difficult. And with a lot of people, it was very difficult to understand like how really to work with them. And what I did, I just numbered the people. So on this thing on the top of the box, I just put numbers from one to 11.

And I just started gathering the pieces of puzzles based on who they belong to. And then it started working. Then it's really started working. And I realized that, well, there is something to it. And another interesting thing is that, like, I learned everything on my own. I'm sure there should be some kind of knowledge base or knowledge lore about, how, what are the best practices in doing the puzzles. And intentionally, I didn't. I didn't do about studying that on my own.

So it was like self-discovery in a way, or discovery of how can I do the puzzles on my own. So that's one thing is that it's possible to reflect on almost everything. And I think in a way, everything can become a spiritual journey as well. I I don't consider doing puzzles a spiritual endeavor, but I think it's possible to do. to approach everything in a very mindful, reflective and spiritual way. It's a very slowy down thing.

I'm so interested in you numbering the people because I've just, I just shared on LinkedIn the puzzle that my daughter gave me for my birthday, which is a holiday photograph of six of us having dinner. And I knew who all the people were. So I knew, oh, that's Ellie's dress. That's Lucy's shirt. That's my brother's sunglasses.

And it made me think if I'm coaching somebody and we are discovering, we are unraveling the puzzle together, I was observing how annoying I would be doing that puzzle with somebody else who didn't know my family and didn't know who was wearing what. Because I was ahead all the time. If I'd been doing it with someone else, I'd have been ahead all the time because I'd have gone, oh, that's my dress. Oh, I was also wearing a necklace.

And so I'd have been a step ahead at every single point rather than us both both looking at a puzzle piece together and going, is that the sea or is that the sky? Yeah, that's great insight. I never thought about that. we have to thank Lucy for giving me the puzzle. oh we often do the puzzles with my wife together, but typically we have like this area that you are doing and this is the area that I'm Rarely it's the same figure or the same area that we're doing together at the same time.

That's really interesting. We have somebody who comes to the house who won't share. And we also have different styles, sorry, very different styles. Are you edge first or edge last? edge first, but I'm very So she's very linear. So she likes to just fit them together and watch the shape of the piece. I'm looking at the pictures. So I can have one thing and just look for five minutes, but just like be very slow, but very deliberate. And that's something that I find to enjoy.

And I think that's another learning for me is that like there is no inherent joy or fun in doing puzzles. that that's only something that we can attribute to it. And all of us, if we are doing them, we need to discover what it is for us. Like everywhere, in life and work. my first quick tip video for YouTube was a clip of me doing a puzzle that my dad gave me.

Because there's something about making meaning, I don't know about you, but if I'm getting to the last hundred pieces, nobody is going to touch my jigsaw. Because I've worked so hard to get it to that point. I want to put the last pieces in. And, and I, the, the, the puzzle that I was doing when I recorded that video was really hard. It, it, had trees and grass and everything was green and all the greens were the same.

green, there was just, it was like 70 % green and all the greens were the same, pretty much. And, and so lots of people had helped me on the way and I was really grateful. But when it came to the last hundred pieces, I wanted to go, this is my puzzle. You are not touching my puzzle. And for me in coaching, there's something about we share the exploration together. But I think when we come to that last bit, we have got to let them do it on their own. Hmm. Hmm. It's interesting.

And I'm not like that. Recently a friend was visiting and basically she finished the puzzle that we were doing. It felt okay, no, no problems with me. But I see how it can be with the client or at least they need to have the permission to choose how they want to finish it. Because if we try to top with our conclusion or with our... piece of wisdom that can be disrespectful, I think. So I have a question.

My observation in my small experiment of observing people do jigsaws is that I see people with a habit of when you put in a difficult piece, you go, you kind of double click it afterwards because you're so pleased that you've put it in the right place. Do you do that? Definitely do something. Yeah, there's definitely some kind of joy in doing a particular challenging one. I work at a retreat centre and they have a jigsaw in their lounge and so you can watch lots of people doing it.

my observation there the other day was that there was lots of double tapping. But I noticed that in coaching, if we double tap when we think we've asked a great question, it's kind of drawing attention to us when actually the thing to do is to notice the piece that's gone in and then to look at where do we go from here. Hmm. So what else did you learn? I do at some point want to ask you about your 3D puzzle.

And I'm hoping my kids aren't watching because if they buy me for Christmas and it's too difficult, I won't be happy. and I realized that the metaphor or the analogy here. There are many things and I hope that someday I will write something.

one thing is about looking and I guess in your work, you talk a lot about noticing, but I think what comes before noticing is looking or sometimes even staring and this looking, at least for me, it has an interesting property because it's not, it's not, binary.

it's not like you either look or not, or you look, you see, you look, know, It's often that you need to stare at the same piece of puzzle for an hour or sometimes for an hour, three days in a row in order to start really noticing what does it mean. It also could be that there is a particular challenging piece of puzzle that you take once. It doesn't make sense. It's nowhere there. How could it be part of this? Yes, yes. And sometimes it happens several times and then you see it.

So sometimes you pick up something and you put it down, but you stare, look sometimes continuously, sometimes in several attempts. ah Another thing that I'm learning is that... And obviously, puzzles are not exact metaphor for working in coaching or problem solving because they are more or less kind of defined and complete, you know, that they will fit in life. It could be slightly different, but it's interesting.

I'm thinking about this, like almost correlation between like the coaching conversation and the life out there. And there's like this big puzzle that you are collecting. And also there are some pieces where you kind of gathering them out there. So it's like you have the lab and you have the experience itself. You have the arena or you have the balcony. And it's interesting that often how quickly I'm going to do puzzle depends on how close the pieces are to the thing itself.

And when I move them closer so that it's easier to take a look, then it often becomes easier to make sense of them. And it's interesting because I have, well, I'd say I would say therapy session on Friday, which I deliberately scheduled during the thing that was going on. And it's interesting that sometimes I may have a conversation with a new client and they would say, well, let's have our sessions on Fridays because Fridays are the most easy days.

And I said, what about if we do the session when it's not easy, when it's packed and jammed? because sometimes it's very easy to do a coach session when it's lighter. But what if we do it in the middle of the challenging situation? So kind of bringing them closer and sometimes maybe even changing where we put the puzzles, where we put the thing that we already assembled.

As you were talking about the looking before the noticing, I was thinking about my puzzle and I was thinking about the sky, my husband's t-shirt and the tablecloth on the table in this photograph. And they were all white. And when I started, I got a little pot of white pieces and they were, I promise you, they were all the same and totally indistinguishable. Mm-hmm. I got the first bit of his t-shirt, which was a bit that had some arm in it, so I knew it was his t-shirt.

And then I looked at the white. I knew exactly which ones were his t-shirt and which ones were the sky. But before that I hadn't got a clue. And that's what you're saying, isn't it, about timing? Yeah. And ability to distinguish different shades because like often like it's all the same, but then it makes so much difference in a month or whatever the puzzle is. But it's the same in the coaching session. You look at the problem and it seems like insolvable.

But when you keep looking, when you keep considering when you are with it for a longer time, you see different distinctions, shades that you are not able to perceive before. And I think that's sometimes the value of coaching, not even the new thinking, but just quality time with a problem. thinking of something that happened in therapy the other day where I arrived and I said to her, it was almost, we need to do the blue pieces. but I don't want to do them today. And she said, okay.

So she remembered that and we came back to it in another session, but it was almost putting it to one side and going, we will deal with the blue pieces. And when we get to them, we'll see the different blues. And we did.

So not everything is for today, it, in coaching? Yes. And I think with puzzles, it's probably even more ah obvious because you know that you cannot do it in big ones, at least. So you need to choose what's the work for today, what's the work for now. What's the best way to start? And for different people, it could be a different thing. some, it's the edges. For some, it could be an interesting color or pattern or anything else. And some work is prep work.

You need to get all the white pieces in one place. And it could be boring, but without it, kind of the fun work, slightly harder to start. I also noticed that I use a different strategy for different puzzles. So the last one, the one I did before this one was the universe, which 1500 pieces, which my friend Peronel who's been a guest on the podcast, she gave it to me and it was almost all black. The edge was entirely black.

And how I did that puzzle was so different from how I've just done this one. Cause you have to kind of trial and error like your wife. all the all the bit all the three bits. Yeah, yeah. And we have names for different shapes. ah I don't remember all of them, but one is going to be like pants in English. I don't know why. I don't know why. I know which one that is. Yes, we might name that. Pants in our house now. But having names for those help, right?

Because you can develop vocabulary and then have this dialogue between different things, knowing what they mean. Yeah, I need the one with four innies. I I call it star or something like this. I don't remember. So Alex, you are so much more advanced than me.

Tell us about this 3D one. I mean, I picked up in a thrift store, and it looked very interesting. ah But I think I'm 75 % into it. What's more difficult is that, at least for me, is that you don't have a very clear reference because it has like two 3D pictures of it and you can't look across it and understand how exactly it should fit. So that makes it much more difficult because the reference is not that clear. But what's interesting also is like how you connect different ages.

It's an Empire State building. like, you need to do this and this and this. So kind of, you need to observe things not in the 2D space, but in three-dimensional space. It just makes challenging. like uh yesterday, I told to my wife that I want to do a regular one. It sounds like you have to be a bit more strategic because do you have to put each side of the building together before you can connect them?

I'm guessing that it's possible to do either way, but what I'm doing is like I'm having those different facets of the building first and then trying to connect them. Respect. I think that would drive me mad. Yeah, do! Yeah. Also like it falls apart all the time. So I guess it's gonna be solid one once you have more of it, but right now it's also falling apart all the time. And then you have to start again. Almost. So what else are we thinking about jigsaws and coaching?

And lovely listener, if you are a jigsaw addict, well, two things. One is I'm really curious. Are many coaches, lovers of jigsaws, would love to hear from you? Info@3dcoaching.com or comment on our socials. That's one question. And the other one is what are you learning about jigsaws and coaching?

So what else are we learning, Well, one thing is, I mean, not a regular word, but there's a huge difference between foresight and hindsight. Oh And what seems logical in the end when you already put this piece of the puzzle there, where it belongs, it can be very different at first. But also sometimes there are some kind of insidious pieces that fit, but they are not the right ones. So sometimes you need to go back and revisit stuff. Or at least you understand that something is wrong.

and you need to reconsider how you put it before. So I think a lot of people want to approach the problems with the idea that they want to solve them the way we approach hindsight in a kind of logical straightforward way. But it doesn't work like that, at least in many nonlinear life challenges. Well, some problems obviously can be solved like this. But sometimes you need to spend time with the problem.

You need to be able to stay with this fuzzy, unclear feeling of what exactly is happening there. Stare, look, notice, and only then some insights or some ideas will start to pop up. And there's something for me about being side by side. So when I'm doing a puzzle, so if you and I were doing a puzzle together, we would be looking at the puzzle and we'd probably be talking about it or we might be silent, but we would be looking at the puzzle and we wouldn't be looking at each other.

And for me in coaching, it works much better, I think, when we're looking at the thing together versus when we're looking at each other and talking about the thing. Yeah. Yeah. And I noticed it kind of in the worst coaching sessions that I have, it's kind of like push and pull. They try to push it on you and you kind of try to push it back to them, which obviously doesn't work. And like ideally you kind of move away from this type of thing. Yeah. I agree.

Having this collaborative attitude of like, how can we be? shoulder to shoulder and look at the same thing and then doing it together. I was just thinking about what the difference would practically be with this puzzle that I've got here. So if we were talking about it, I'd say to you, well, it seems as though the sea has got a greeny bit and a whitey bit and a different bit.

But you might not understand that, whereas if we both look at it, you're going, yeah, and I can also see that there's that yellow bit on the headland and all of those interesting things. Interesting thing I recalled recently is that Alfred Korzybski, who many people know him because of this phrase, the map is not the territory, but he wrote like a huge magnum opus in 30s, I believe, or 20s. And it was about language basically and how deceptive language is. And his idea was about to learn.

to interact with language in a different way and be in the world in a different way, you start to just pointing out the things rather than naming them. So sometimes that could be more profound way to interact with things rather than creating the labels. just naming, not naming them, but pointing out to them like what was that? Yeah, and I think that that's kind of what you talk a lot about it because It's very easy to say, frowned or you said or whatever.

But like when you say what's with the browse, it's going to be a very different quality. Yes, because otherwise you're going, that is a tree rather than, and that. What's that about? Isn't it funny that in a puzzle, there's always one piece, isn't there, that you were absolutely convinced was something. And you've been trying for the whole time you're doing the puzzle to make it be the thing that you think it is. And then suddenly right at the end, it's something else. Yeah, yeah.

I think of it as optical illusion, almost like as an optical illusion, because it starts making sense only when it's there in a broader context. But on its own, it's something, but you don't know what to make of it. And I think that that's often ah what people bring to coaching. Something doesn't make sense. There is something, and there is a feeling attached to the something, but what does it mean?

And until you explore it, until you spend more time with it, it's hard to understand what exactly it means. Or sometimes you need to go for a walk with it. One client of mine says like, I need to take it for a ride. Yeah. And that's about distance, isn't it? Sometimes we get too close to the jigsaw and sometimes I think in coaching we get too close to the thing and we just need to both take a bit of a step back and see what we see differently.

Yeah. Yeah. That's why I often invite people to think about what they do between the sessions, like how they end the sessions, what's happening with the insights afterwards. Do they need to do something about them or it's good because if they pick up the work only in the hour that we have together or half an hour that we kept together and then it's not even that. like they are putting it, they just kind of dropped. Then typically not many things.

Well, some things happen, but I think people need to find a way of their own to interact with the work that they are doing. And often it's not something that we are doing in a mindful way. so they don't leave the pieces with you. Yes, yes. Or sometimes you can almost see, can almost sense like the person is rushing to the next meeting. like, hmm, what are you going to do after we end the call? And maybe it's just like a 30 second just settling.

Or maybe you want to take the blue pieces away and just be with them. Yeah, yeah, find a place for them for the time being. emerges, what you see differently. What are we missing? wonder about the connection or not between coaching and jigsaw puzzles.

Huh. Well, obviously mismatch in this metaphor is that they are not packed and given to us. So in life and coaching, we need to find our own pieces. They're not given. And sometimes, I mean, it could be sad, but sometimes you spend your life looking for a particular piece of puzzle, for the right question, for the right answer, for the right person, for the right situation, for the right. sense of how I want to do it. And yet you know when that piece comes along that that's the missing piece.

Yeah. believe that I got a connection there. So this retreat centre where they do puzzles, they have about 10 puzzles and when a new lot of people come into the retreat they just put out a new box and they kind of rotate them. But there's always a piece in the box that doesn't belong in that box and there's a thing on the wall which is for leaflets so you can pick a leaflet and go for a walk. It's the maps. that people have slotted the missing pieces down the front of this glass thing.

So you can go, oh yeah. Well, first of all, you go, there is a piece missing, which usually means there isn't, doesn't it? And then sometimes there really is. And then you can look up at all the missing pieces from the different puzzles and go, oh, that's ours. biggest one I was working on was 6000 It was like, I don't know, it was like. two, three square meters, probably. It was big. And it was a... the carpet, was it? No, no, it was like some Disney characters.

And it was a gift from a friend who just like throw in the towel that they were not able to do. But what I figured out much later when I kind of solved it and kind of because they were not all the pieces. They had a dog. dear. I didn't feel bad about it, but I think that that's also sometimes, you never know whether it's full or not, whether it's complete or not, the set of the pieces. And sometimes you figure out it only in the end.

I mean, it's possible to 6,000 and realize there are not all 6,000 of them, but I think it's not that fun. Well, I'm very sad about my puzzle which has got one piece missing and I'm going to spend the weekend searching for the missing piece. Hmm. It's interesting whether it's possible to order a missing piece. Well, I think not because it's our very own picture. I don't know. Who knows? Empire State Building's says that if you're missing something, email us and then we will send it to you.

Oh, how exciting. But sometimes there are missing pieces, aren't there? And sometimes there are missing pieces in the conversations we have. Yeah, yeah. And also it's interesting like what happens then in the coaching conversation because people may... They may react in different ways. Sometimes they may become resentful. Where's the peace? Or they may become sad. They may become inactive or they might find way to look for solution. I don't know, maybe. cut it from somewhere with the same shape.

Yeah, wow.

Well, what an amazing conversation, Alex, about jigsaws and coaching. I'm guessing if you're still listening, lovely listener, you like jigsaws. So if people want to talk to you about the rest of your work, uh how do they get in touch with you? I think the easiest place to find me is on LinkedIn. I write there kind of regularly or my email alex@alexmartynov.com.

Perfect, so that's how you contact Alex and if you want to connect with him on LinkedIn, he also shows photographs of his jigsaw puzzles. And hopefully, someday I finish the piece that I want to write about. Yeah, it'd be great to hear something about it. Thank you, Alex, for coming to The Coaching Inn. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Do subscribe or follow where you find your podcasts and then you'll get next week's episode as it drops. Thank you. Take care, everybody. Bye bye. Take care.