photo credit: ginnerobot

One of the trends I’ve noticed with my clients and in other organizations is a need for a greater integration of coaching skills and conversations within teams. The reasons include:

1. the recalibration of the spend on external coaches and how they are used
2. the growing need for more agile and conscious decision making
3. the increasing capabilities of internal staff to facilitate and coach issues in real-time
4. the recognition that the sources of many challenging behaviors are environmental

For example, I am working with one client, a large professional services firm, to develop a team-centered coaching model to enable hundreds of teams to use a common, team-centered approach to address the real business issues they face. The work is part of a broader effort to (1) reframe some of the internal narratives about what it means to be a ‘good’ team through research on exemplar teams, unpacking how they work, and sharing their stories with others; and to (2) instill greater accountability at the personal and team level for learning, development, and performance. In a conversation the other day, a team leader asked me how to help his team become more ready for these types of conversations. I immediately thought of a simple metaphor to use in answering his question and coupled it with familiar model to describe the evolution of a team:

Growing a team is like making a cupcake

Storming: The first phase is getting the group together to decide what they are going to make, assemble the ingredients they will need, and stir the batter.

Norming: The second phase is about confirming they still want to make cupcakes, deciding what size and shape they want, and what is important to them about the final products.

Forming: The third phase is finding the right pan in which to cook them and lining the pan for a smooth outcome, turning on the oven to the right temperature, pouring in right amount of batter, and placing the pain in the oven.

Performing: The fourth phase involves taking them out of the oven at the right time (often a true test for the bakers), letting them cool (again, a call for good judgment), taking them out of the pan, and then decorating them (often an occasion for friction as preferences emerge about beauty versus efficacy, for example).

Transforming: The final phase is an important one in that the true purpose of this process is not just good performance but to use the result to achieve a higher purpose — in this case serving them to others for their enjoyment. While teams often provide valuable experience for people at many levels, they are perhaps more of a means rather than the end themselves. It comes down to, “what do you want to accomplish with this team?”

Part of the value of working metaphorically and narratively with clients is being able to use their everyday experiences rather than lots of complex models and long lists to help them achieve their goals. As far as I know, no team in history has every been transformed by bullet points on a PowerPoint slide. It comes down to getting in the ‘kitchen’, rolling up your sleeves and having meaningful, authentic conversations about things that matter.

Nine ethical guidelines for narrative coaches

As part of our due diligence as professionals, it is incumbent upon coaches to be aware of our own unconscious biases and preferences that shape what we see and do with people and the stories they share with us. What are the acceptable shapes of a life we find ourselves promoting based on our training, professional/business pressures and aesthetic preferences? What our preferred formulation patterns and how do they keep us from more courageously and cleanly meeting others and their stories? In closing, I would offer the following nine ethical considerations in working with peoples’ stories; they serve as the bedrock of a narrative approach to coaching:

1. Coachees expect their coach to create a safe container for their storytelling.
2. Coachees expect their stories to be heard in a nonjudgmental, non-assumptive manner.
3. Coachees expect to have their community and cultural stories taken seriously.
4. Coachees have the right to tell their own story in their own way.
5. Coachees tell and understand their story as best as they can at the time.
6. Coachees have the right to change their stories, lives and selves as they choose.
7. Coachees are accountable for the impact of their stories on themselves and others.
8. Coachees expect their coach to manage their own stories, agendas and participation.
9. Coachees expect their coach to be exemplary stewards of the stories that are told.

I hope you have found these posts helpful in giving you some practical strategies for taking a more narrative approach to your work. We are scheduling master classes in various parts of the world for the latter half of 2010 and in 2011. It looks like Zurich and London will be next. Let us know if you’d like to host one in your area. You can reach us an director [at] narrativecoaching.com

Listening narratively

Narrative coaches stay in the lived experience of the conversation as much as possible. Some of the practices they use in doing so:

1. Create a rich narrative field, notice what appears, remain connected even in silence, and actively engage with the coachee’s narration as it emerges. Invite coachees to stay in their stories as they unfold across a series of present moments. As they do so, the characters, context, and conclusions will become more apparent and available for renegotiation.
2. Help people come to their stories with less judgment in order to loosen their group on their identity and lives and provide an opening for greater awareness, more trust in themselves, more conscious choices and better results.
3. Put more emphasis on generating experiences and less on rushing to interpretation, meaning, or action. Doing so, will more likely and fully engage the whole person and create conditions more similar to what they will encounter after the session.
4. Trust that people will begin at the level at which they are ready and the critical themes will be forthcoming regardless of which stories they share first. Any story or set of stories can be a portal into the larger issues at play for people and the path to reaching their resolution or aspiration.
5. Build rapport through hemispheric resonance by starting with coachee’s preference but then invite them onto the path of change by drawing on the other hemisphere to bring in elements that were not part of the original story (Siegel, 2007).  Draw on the factual, sequential, and verbal parts of the story, largely a product of the left hemisphere and the more personal, contextual, nonverbal parts of the story, largely a product of the right hemisphere, as needed to elicit the whole story.
6. Help coachees identify narrative data from their lives that support an alternate view of who they are and how they want to be in the world—what White and Epston (1990) called “unique outcomes,” Hewson (1991) called “exceptions” and the Heaths (Heath & Heath, 2010) called “bright spots.” At the same time, realize that in order for new stories or new relations between stories to take hold in coachees’ lives, they must build on elements of familiar stories in order to ‘scaffold’ their ascendance.

Therefore: (1) help people to become more aware of the contours of their available narratives and either reframe them or their relationship to them; (2) guide them in discovering and developing new options (often hidden as gems in their own stories) and a more evolved repertoire; and (3) help them to successfully launch their new story as the basis for fulfilling their aspirations. Any story told in a coaching session, even if it has served as a transformational vehicle in that setting, must survive the ‘retellings’ if coachees are to sustain the changes they have begun.

Narrative Identity

A distinguishing feature of a narrative approach to coaching is its emphasis on the critical role of situated (e.g., somatic, relational, contextual, and adaptive) identity in understanding and supporting coachees’ development and performance. It exemplifies a shift in thinking of identity as a set of static properties to a reflection of dynamic and relational action — and from seeing it as a fixed object to an adaptive performance. There is an intimate connection between the ways in which we construe ourselves and the ways in which we are likely to behave.

Coaching Applications

1. Provide both an interpersonal structure and a narrative structure in which coachees can safely and fully engage and explore their stories. In doing so, appreciate the centrality of “place” in creating a generative space for the conversation and in helping coachees’ ground their stories (past, present or future).
2. Realize that people tell stories to make, confirm or experiment with a way of being in the world/being seen by the world. Therefore, ask yourself, “What is this person trying to achieve through telling these stories, particularly at an emotional level, and how are their current narration strategies working for them?”
3. Draw on Bakan’s (1966) assertion that there are two primary drivers of human behavior—agency and communion—in observing coachees’ unique narration patterns and supporting the growth of their cognitive and behavioral repertoire.
4. Recognize that if you want people to adopt new behaviors or attain new results, you must help them build an identity, through an alternative narrative.  To sustain that new identity, people need to enact new behaviors—and the stories that go with them.
5. Realize that people can only see as far as their stories will take them; they can only act as far as their stories will back them (before and/or after they act). As such, it is important to help people to connect their personal stories with the social contexts from which they came and to which they will return in new ways.

Four general guidelines for taking a narrative approach to coaching

1. Create nonjudgmental and generative spaces in which coachees can work in the moment with their narrative material in order to discover, explore and potentially reframe their habitual narrative patterns and open up new possibilities for their development and outcomes. It is less about causation and more about creation.
2. Track how people organize their stories, e.g. which events are included, which themes they organize around, which characters are portrayed as significant, and which voices are privileged in the telling. Help people examine their assumptions about reality through deeply engaging in their stories.
3. Listen for the gaps, the thresholds where the person’s emplotment strategies (how they make sense and meaning of events) have broken down or are no longer working. These gaps in narration can be seen as “breaches”  and the stories coachees tell us as attempts to resolve the discrepancy between what they expected and what has transpired.
4. These gaps in coachees’ stories can be an opportune time to help coachees formulate a different story and outcome because it is in these liminal, in-between spaces where growth most often occurs. Stay present to what is happening in the session, in what narrative coaches think of as storytime and storyspace , in order to notice openings for change. Everything you need is right in front of you.

A client’s story

I believe that stories about the past, present and future all contribute to the shaping of people’s experience in any given moment. Who they once were, how they are now, and who they want to be all shape their current state, identity and behaviors. Each of these three temporal dimensions is represented in a person’s narrative patterns and can be accessed in coaching them to unlock new stories. I saw this in a recent conversation with a client who commented that I seemed to know what he would say next at times. I responded by saying that I was just noticing glimpses of the future as it curled back into our present experience because of the sense of relational flow (Moore, Drake, Tschannen-Moran, Campone & Kauffman, 2005) we had created. Stories about who he thought he was, what he was noticing about himself as he was telling his story, and who he was hoping to be when he ‘retired’ came together — resulting in some new insights about what he would do next.

When I am speaking on and demonstrating a narrative approach to coaching, many people are quick to recognize that it seems both quite powerful and quite different to more traditional approaches to coaching. I often get asked, “How do you do it?” Therefore, I decided that over the next few weeks I will share with you some of the foundational elements behind narrative coaching and some of the practical implications for our work. Much of this material will appear in my chapter in a forthcoming coaching encyclopedia edited by two colleagues from the evidence-based coaching program at Fielding Graduate University I helped to found. I look forward to hearing about your observations, reflections and experiences.

Narrative coaching is a body of knowledge that draws on millennia of ancient wisdom, a century of social science thinking, and breakthroughs in domains like the neurosciences to create an approach to development fitting for our times. It is a mindful, experiential, and holistic approach to helping people shift their stories about themselves, about others, and about life itself in order to create results that matter to them. Narrative coaches take a more “decentered” position in their role, a more nondirective approach to the coaching process, and a more contextual view of coachees’ identity, development and behavior.

Six philosophical assumptions which inform narrative coaching

1. People’s situated identity and their situational behaviors are mutually reinforcing and each can be tapped as a lever for change
2. The power created in the relational field between two people in coaching is more important than the specific techniques that are used
3. Margins, borders and the unconscious are more central to making meaningful change than linear plans focused on symptom relief
4. People’s own stories provide the primary material for coaching conversations and the language and vehicle for change
5. A keen awareness of the present without judgment and the ability to pay closer attention are as critical in coaching as external goals
6. The rites of passage model (a contextual frame) is more useful for guiding change than the medical model (a mechanistic frame)

A narrative approach to coaching works exceptionally well across cultures as it is less tied to western epistemologies and more easily tuned to local dynamics. It is quite useful in giving voice to non-dominant groups as part of a larger evolution in the systems in which they work and live, ie, in organizations embarking on culture change.

photo credit: Eddi 07

I often get asked, ” So, what is narrative coaching, anyway?” I had occasion recently to put the essence of it on one slide for a client. I found this process very helpful, particularly because so much of what I have done and taught since I midwifed narrative coaching is so experiential. In putting this together, I realised that narrative coaching is as much a philosophy as it is a set of practices, and it is as much about spiritual development as it is about practical change. In some important ways, it is a way of Being more than acts of Doing. I offer these to you, not as the definitive scripture, but rather as an invitation to a conversation.

Narrative coaching is:

1. A sacramental approach to holding space and working with the relational field as it emerges

2. A non-directive, real-time attention to the experience and narration, focused largely on the other person

3. A dynamic use of narrative material as the primary source and narrative pattern recognition as the primary skill

4. An appreciation of identity as situated in communities and embodied in discourse in supporting sustainable shifts in behaviors

5. A commitment to deep, generative listening based in understanding narrative structure, neuroscience, psychology and practice

6. A  process of raising awareness, focusing attention, taking new actions and increasing accountability in yourself and others

7. A methodology for helping people, individually or in groups, to make shifts in their lives one story at a time and with increased agency

I look forward to you comments and your views on what you think narrative coaching is all about!

Everyone now and then we get opportunities to step into something bigger than ourselves and bigger than the life we had once lived. This post is about one of those moments for me. I invite you to be alert for yours.

Through a dear friend, Diana Sterling, I met the wonderful Frederick Marx, one of the directors of the acclaimed documentary “Hoop Dreams” and an important voice for the Mankind Project. Through conversations with Frederick, I learned about his new film, tentatively entitled “The Road to Zanskar.”  His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama said that  Zanskar, the last remaining Tibetan Buddhist society with a continuous untainted lineage dating back 1,000s of years, was vital to the survival of Tibetan Buddhism. This movie is the story of two monks he has instructed to help Zanskar’s culture, language, and religion survive by leading a group of children across high mountain passes to a school where they can learn their native ways.

The movie will be out next year, narrated by Richard Gere. You can watch the trailer here (choose the “watch in high quality” option). You can donate money to help Frederick complete this film and get it out to audiences by going here.

Aside from this moving film, the other story for me is how I came to be involved. All my life I have donated time and money to causes that were important to me and charities that were worthwhile. While I am doing well in my business these days, more importantly I wanted to feel like my contributions were making more of a difference. As such, I chose to make a significant contribution to this film in order to help its get made. It meant a lot to me to know my offering would make its way into the world this way. My gift was more up front and personal. Where would you like to make a new kind of difference?

Secondly, I have been researching, writing, teaching and coaching about narratives for ten years. While I have felt proud of what I have accomplished in my work, I wanted to move farther out on my own learning edge to see how I might apply my expertise in a new domain. I was able to use what I know about transformative stories  to support Frederick’s development of the film. It was such a joy to take that risk and help shape something so tangible.

We are all on the road to our own Zanskar, seeking to preserve and nurture that which is important to us and best about us. We live in a time when we need your courage and imagination. Where can you step into a new and richer story of your life?

photo credit: chez_sugi

Coaching is the latest in a long legacy of professions designed to heal the human spirit and our human communities.  At this juncture in history, we live on a threshold — asking new questions and seeking new answers. What is on your mind these days as you think about your place in the world? What is opening up for you about what is essential and possible in this time of great change?

I’ve continued to explore in my work and my writing the impact of contextual and communal stories in our lives and workplaces. For example, I’m speaking at the ICFA Conference in Adelaide on September 1 as part of a gathering of coaches to explore how to create more sustainable lives, practices, leaders, and organizations and communities. I’m working on a large coaching culture project designed to shape the collective stories in support of greater accountability at personal and team levels for learning and development. When asked by a team member how I would measure “success” in the end, I responded that if I felt that 100 people whose lives we touched in the project “woke up” to what was truly possible with this work—for themselves and others—than we will have done well. In each case, it is releasing the need to wait for others to begin and instead embracing the opportunities we have each day to take a few steps forward in conversation with others.

What are you waiting for?

I was reminded of a few lines from Annie Dillard’s marvelous book, Holy the Firm:

There is no one but us. There is no one to send . . . but only us, a generating comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time . . . [feeling] exhausted [at times] and unable to see the thread . . . But there is no one but us. There never has been.

Where can you add beauty, grace and compassion today — even if it is just one flower in the street, one moment in time?

photo credit: valentin.d

I’ve been away on holiday as the new year has begun. Even with the gift of a new American president, I find it hard not to wonder how we will fare in the coming year. One of the approaches I have been taking with clients is to return to some  classic mythological motifs as a way of understanding the broader narrative patterns at play in organizations and in the lives of its people. In doing so, I am increasingly drawn to my work on liminality and the role of ‘in-between’ spaces in development. In the Western world, the Grail legends provide a powerful set of stories about these spaces as part of the human quest for knowledge and growth. It is important to remember here that the Grail is about who we become not an object we obtain.

In her magnificent book on the centrality of language in understanding the Grail stories, Linda Sussman writes, ”The person seeking initiation at the end of the twentieth century is called not just to connect with the tribe(s) of the past but also to prepare the way for the ‘tribe’ of the future. Obviously, this tribe will be very different from the ones our ancestors knew. . . .  We are the tribe of the ‘in-between.’ ” It seems to me that history is marked by certain periods in which humanity’s choices become even more pronounced. I believe we are in one of those periods.

We can no longer take for granted that the technologies of the future will save us from the unintended consequences of our present lives, but must instead be more accountable to previous generations in terms of what it means to be ’sustainable.’ We can no longer take for granted the historical notions of continuous progress, but must instead factor in the future generations in terms of what it means to ’succeed.’ For many of my clients, it is about recognizing that we are moving into new territories in which new approaches to leadership are required. We are leaving behind one era but are only beginning to discern the contours of a new one. As Sussman writes, ”In the process, one has quite often to give up a favorite storyline to gain access to a larger context.”

Three tips on living an in-between life

1. Recognize that there is no ‘normal’ to which to return. Much of what has enabled us to get this far may have to be set aside to make more room for what has yet to be imagined. What you are being asked to leave behind in order to take your next steps? In my own professional life, it has involved letting go of the need to “fit in’ in order to make more room for my own vision and leadership.
2. Recognize that we each must enter the ‘forest’ where it is darkest for us (as it was for those who sought the Grail). This darkness is about aspects of ourselves that remain hidden within and/or from us, but that hold the key to the next stages in our development. Only when we move out from the safety of what we know and who we once were can we see what else is possible. I saw this in a recent workshop in which a new leader came to face her fears around claiming her Voice in relating to her boss (by moving beyond waiting for him to grant it to her). 
3. Recognize that the greatest opportunities for growth are found in-between what was and what is not yet. It is in these spaces that we can most clearly see what is being asked of us now. To be successful, seek out new allies, draw on new resources within yourself, lead with strong resolve and true humility. I saw this in a coaching client who was willing to forego the comforts of a familiar place in one leadership team in order to discover a new role (in a new organization) that challenged him to grow in some profound ways.

Those who have gone before us and those who will come after us—in our families, our communities and our organizations—are calling on us to rise to the occasion as part of the ‘tribe of the in-between’. What is your Grail?