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
- 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).
- 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?”
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Tags: Coaching, Development, idenity, narrative, narrative coaching, stories
