photo credit: Shereen M
It has been awhile since I posted. I’ve been quite engaged on two other fronts: One is an intense and wonderful coaching project in Australia.

The other arose just before I left when I followed a gut feeling (reinforced in my dreams) that something was not quite right in my body. I discovered through an ultrasound that I have a large nodule on my thyroid. The biopsies were inconclusive and so I will have surgery sooner rather than later to take part of it out – and find out for sure.

They say the chance it is cancerous is about 5%. However, I soon discovered that while the statistical difference between the 0% chance I had before and the 5% I have now is not all that significant, the emotional difference was huge. I’ve since moved to a better space where I’ve come to appreciate this wake-up call.

I found that in this time of waiting—and the not knowing that comes with it—it was hard to know what story tell about my situation. I was not well but I was not sick. In some people I evoked a story of great concern while others resorted to hurried optimism. I came to realize in some important new ways both the power of the choices we make about how we narrate our lived experience and the power of the stories that are told about us.

I am choosing to be grateful for what IS — an opportunity to recalibrate some elements in my life. Oddly, this re-balancing process mirrors a dilemma that surfaced in my Hogan assessment where I scored very high on ambition and fairly low on power. No wonder my thyroid is out of balance!

The fact that the problem is there has important symbolic, energetic and practical implications in terms of how I express myself and live my life. What a gift! Regardless of the biopsy outcome, I am using this time to be more courageous and clear about the story I tell through my life and work.

What story is your body telling you? What story are you telling through your body?

I began this blog to bring together two communities doing great work in the world: narrative practitioners and coaches. I am writing from Melbourne, Australia where I presented a workshop on narrative coaching at the International Coach Federation Australasia Conference. It has been an excellent event focused on how the coaching community can step up more fully to engage the extraordinary challenges and opportunities facing the world in this tumultuous time. We were provoked by many inconvenient truths and inspired by stories of leaders who are “giving it a go,” as they would say here, in terms of creating a world that works for all.

A big takeaway for me was the importance of the choices we make in each moment, the stories we create about another person or situation — and to reflect in the moment whether my choices add to a greater consciousness and contribution — and to choose accordingly. As Rollo May once said, “real human freedom is our willingness to pause between the events in our lives and the response we choose.” It is the disciplined art of not being swept up in the habitual stories we are told and tell ourselves, but developing the capacity to continually reframe and reconnect to a larger view. Individually and collectively, we become the stories we tell.

I will use this space to share my reflections and foster connections to help professionals and organizations work with their stories and their place in the larger narratives in which we live in order to grow into the changes that have already happened. Thanks, Christopher, for that last insight.

If you’d like to know more about our introductory or advanced narrative coaching workshops for 2008, sign up for our list under Narrative Workshops. You can be assured that your information will not be given out to others. You can also use the RSS button at the top right to add the feed from this blog.

Welcome.

David