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Impactful Coach
Episode 43Interview48 min

From Graphic Recording to Visual Coaching with Christina Merkley

with Christina Merkley, Certified Coach, Visual Facilitator, and Founder of SHIFT-IT Coach, Inc.

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Show notes

A coaching podcast with Christina Merkley and Tobias Weghorn. They unpack graphic recording at conferences and how Christina's "visual coaching" work today goes deeper - combining visual work with the coach’s role of holding space, asking questions, and mirroring what clients say on a live canvas. You’ll hear how graphic facilitation works in real time (not just as “fun notes”), why listening and synthesis matter as much as drawing, and how visuals can support visioning and action planning. Christina also walks through her SHIFT-IT process, including life map coaching and the “alignment work” that helps when plans stall at the “trouble at the border” between where you are and where you want to be.


Key Learnings:

  • Use visual coaching to “capture and reflect back” what clients say: listen for the few key nuggets, condense them, and place them on a simple canvas clients can react to in the moment.
  • Borrow from graphic recording and graphic facilitation by making the visual build live during the session; it can improve clarity, recall, and follow-through (especially when you turn visioning and action planning into something visible and revisitable).
  • Add a life map coaching step (a quick lifeline or a fuller history map) to harvest patterns, beliefs, and turning points—then use alignment work when the client’s stated goals and actual behavior don’t match.


Resources:


Episode Chapters:

00:01 Visual Coaching Beyond Graphic Recording

00:05 Graphic Facilitation vs. Static Visuals (Interactive, Live, Fast)

00:08 From Conference Graphic Recording to Deeper 1:1 Visual Coaching

00:13 The “Four Animals”: Studio Work vs. Process Work

00:18 How Graphic Recording Works: Listening, Synthesis, and “Gold Nuggets”

00:22 What Visuals Do to a Room (Attention, Buffering Intensity, Recall)

00:31 Visual Coaching with Individuals: From Strategy to Somatics and Trauma Awareness

00:33 SHIFT-IT + Life Map Coaching, Visioning and Action Planning, and Alignment Work

00:45 Where to Find Christina (Shift-It-Coach.com)

Transcript

Full transcript, edited for readability. Every timestamp jumps the video to that moment.

Christina Merkley: This is why coaching is so powerful, and other modalities: that we often don't get listened to, or have that kind of attention. So that's huge in and of itself, just to have a space where, ideally, you can be yourself and you can share what's going on inside your mind and heart and spirit, and somebody's listening. And not only are they listening, they're capturing it and they're reflecting it back. Listening is key. You have to be a really excellent listener, get aligned and listen to what's happening. You have to be able to hold a bunch of information in your head, trying to figure out what's the order, what's the important stuff, because you're kind of sifting for gold. You're looking for the big nuggets. Tobi: You said you place the nuggets on the canvas. How do you identify what is the nugget there? Tobi: At conferences that I attend, in the coaching world and beyond, I often come across graphic recorders. These are the people who stand on the side or in the back of the room and capture the highlights of what speakers say on a huge canvas, in a visually fun style. And as a very visual person myself, I always love this. And when I came across the work of Christina Merkley,

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