In short: in my in-person coaching and mentoring sessions I like to use quick sketches to help me:

• Translate: when I'm working with someone who's oral skills in the language we share aren't super strong, drawing helps a lot to "show" instead of "telling".

• Explain: when there is a process to show, or a complex idea to share, sketching it out makes it clearer than just a bunch of words

• Note taking: I like to have some visual notes of the session, and here some rough sketches also help to summarize the content of the session.

Drawing for translation

I coach people from all around the world, so the common language we might both have often ends up being english. A language that both me and the coachee aren't natives in. So obviously that comes with a few challenges.

When oral language is really a problem, I like to really sketch out what I'm saying and use the pen to point at the different parts that I'm mentioning.

It then also helps the coachee to point on the sheet of paper elements and ask questions.

Drawing for understanding

A lot of Service Design work is about taking different steps one after the other. It can be pretty overwhelming when you describe steps or processes just orally. That's why, when I'm sharing a more complex idea that has several parts in it, I like to draw it.

It makes clearer when I'm speaking of a new phase, how the different elements work together, etc.

Drawing for note taking

In many of my coaching sessions, I like to take visual notes to summarize what we're speaking about with the coachee. I feel this helps to transform a conversation into something tangible that people can then even take with them.

To make those visual summaries richer, from time to time, I add tiny sketches in them to either make them clearer or just more visually interesting.

A note on remote drawing

These are all things that I do a lot during in-person coachings. But it's also possible to do this during remote coachings. I've just found that in remote coaching it's a little bit harder to do. If I do it on the laptop that I use for the coaching, the trackpad doesn't allow me to great looking sketches. But when you really need a sketch, it really doesn't matter if it looks good, as long as it's understandable.

But I have to admit, the mental effort of drawing on my laptop, or taking a second device just to draw, is much higher when I do remote coachings, and therefore I use sketching in remote coaching only when it's extremly important to clarify something visually.

In fact, in remote coaching it's often easier to "grab a picture" that is already existing.