Ruth’s pattern of seeing & making sense

Curious about the unexpected

Ruth D Moore Systemic Coach & Artist

I didn’t see the connection…

But looking back, I can see that the beginnings of Find Your Pattern were there long before I knew what they might become.

As a child I lived in Trinidad and then the UK, before moving to Switzerland 21 years ago. Now, in my late 50s, I'm building a new life in Spain.

Each move has meant encountering different languages, cultures and ways of being — and learning that what feels completely normal in one place can look very different from somewhere else.

At the time, I didn't know I was learning about perspective. I was simply adapting, getting things wrong, paying attention and working out how to belong.

But it taught me something that has stayed with me:

There is rarely only one way of seeing something.

Learning not to rush

For nearly twenty years I worked as a Zen Shiatsu practitioner.

Shiatsu taught me invaluable lessons about the importance of presence. A beginner’s mind. Paying attention before deciding what something means. Meeting what is there without judgement. Allowing things to unfold in their own time rather than rushing towards what I thought should happen.

And perhaps most importantly, learning that doing more isn’t always the answer.

Sometimes the work is noticing.

Someone else’s dream is precious

My training in Creativity Coaching brought another piece.

It reminded me how precious someone else’s dream can be — and how easily another person’s assumptions, advice or enthusiasm can alter something before its owner has had the chance to discover what it is for themselves.

That’s stayed with me too.

That distinction — between creating space for someone to discover something and telling them what you think you’ve discovered — has stayed with me ever since.

And then there was art

For the last ten years, I’ve also been an artist.

That has been a largely self-led education in not knowing.

I’ve experimented, made things that worked, made plenty that didn’t, abandoned ideas, returned to them, followed accidents, tried again and repeatedly wondered what on earth I was making and why.

Over time, I became as interested in what happens while I make as opposed to the thing I’d eventually make.

Art taught me to stay curious for a little longer before deciding — and to pay attention when something didn’t go the way I’d planned.

“Rose” Mixed Media on Board. Original Artwork by Ruth

Finding the thread

Systemic Coaching gave me a thread that connected these experiences.

It taught me to look beyond the individual or the immediate problem towards relationships, context, position and the wider systems we’re part of.

Something can look completely different when we encounter it from another position.

That idea felt very familiar.

I had lived it through moving between cultures. Experienced it through Shiatsu. Encountered it in Creativity Coaching. And practised it repeatedly through making art.

My work creating artworks for the Inner Development Goals — Stories of Collective Leadership in Action, Volumes 1 and 2 brought these worlds together in another way: using visual work to engage with ideas about human development, relationships and collective change.

I still wasn’t thinking, all of this will become a methodology.

The different parts of my life still felt largely like different parts of my life.

Until they didn’t.

Now, I can see the pattern

Find Your Pattern isn’t something I could have arrived at through coaching theory alone. It has grown from the way I’ve learnt to make sense of the world — by noticing, questioning, making, adapting and looking again.

Looking back, the connections seem obvious. I just couldn’t see the pattern until I stopped looking at the pieces from the same perspective with the same comfortable story.