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: a hundred visions and revisions

I wrote yesterday about the importance of Faith right now. Today I want to turn my attention to Hope.

It is understandable in these times to look for the easy wins, the reshuffling of the proverbial ‘deck’ that will help us find a new winning hand. However, in doing so, we may be avoiding asking ourselves what ‘game” we want to actually be playing. Now is not the time for soft questions or banal answers. Now is the time to dig deep, to find that bedrock of hope that are the foundation for the work that is ours to do. Sometimes the most important step is to first one: to stand still, re-member ourselves, and pay attention. While at the check-out stand yesterday, I glanced over and saw this comment from champion surfer Kelly Slater, “Motivation is temporary. Inspiration is permanent.”

I have found across my life that an essential element in navigating difficult choices and difficult times is to to ensure that I have a strong personal foundation in terms of my mental, emotional, physical and spiritual well-being. I find in working with clients that they struggle most when they gauge their level of hope by what transpires in the external world around them. Most all of us have known despair at one time or another in our life. Hope does not dispense with despair, but rather enables us to stand in whatever is present but guided by a fundamental inspiration that is not attached to the vagaries of circumstance. Hope is about deepening our roots so we can draw the sustenance that the branches—our life—need in order to reach to the sky.

Unfortunately, some clients have become root-bound, unable to change with the times, while others are restless and unrooted, unable to ever quite fulfill their mission. As I thought about my work with them, I was reminded of an ancient African proverb that if people walk too far or too fast, their story will not catch up. Narrative coaching is about helping people ‘catch up’ with their stories so they have the foundation for the life or the organization they desire. We embody hope when we can stand in our stories, individually and collectively, and draw power from the powerful myths of the earth and tell the healing stories of the sky. Cut off for either of these, we are far less sustainable. Now is the time to rekindle our sense and sources of intrinsic hope so we can step consciously and courageously into the challenges of our time.

Where do you need to put down deeper roots? What sustenance do you need to dwell in Hope more often?

photo credit: Serendigity

I was struck by the closing lines of a TIME magazine article yesterday, “[Obama's] story of a boy whose father came from Kenya and mother from Kansas takes place in an America not yet mythologized, a country that is struggling to be born—a multiracial country whose greatest cultural and economic strength is its diversity. It is a country where our children already live and that our parents will never really know. . . But that vision is not really sellable right now to a critical mass of Americans. They live in a place. . . where myths are more potent than getting past the dour realities they face each day.”

What are the myths we need now?

It seems to me that one of the greatest gifts of narrative coaches is their ability to help people re-mythologize their lives in keeping with what is being asked of them. Sometimes it is about relinquishing stories that no longer serve them . . . sometimes it is about shifting stories that no longer match their current realities . . . and sometimes it is about birthing new stories that provide a better path to the future they want to create.

It is tempting in this ‘Alice-in-Wonderland’-like time around the U.S. presidential elections for people to accept the frames that are spun, become seduced by packaged ‘myths’, and fall into the polarities that are evangelised as gospel. However, the deeper and truer mythic function is that of reminding us of the broader principles of human relations. These myths tend to harden as nostalgia when we lack sufficient ability to situate and know ourselves in changing times. It is no surprise that when people are in these places, many are swayed by those who tap into the latent potency of such fantasies. As they say, energy follows attention.

Finding a sense of place

The U.S. is on the cusp of a significant juncture in its young history. It seems to me that the optimal choices involve helping Americans step into a deeper and richer mythology about what it means (and looks like) to be a great nation. Doing so will enable us to gracefully and fruitfully change our stories about dreams and empires. Part of this process will require us to join together in remythologizing what we mean by ‘family’ and ‘home.’ The power of this quest was brought home to me in reading J. Edward Chamberlin’s book, ‘If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?’ when he writes, ‘This is the home we all long for, the Jerusalem are not to forget. It may be the place we came from, five or fifty of five hundred years ago, or the place we are going to when our time is done. It is the place we still haven’t found but are looking for. The place that gives us a sense of self, and of others.‘

Welcome home.

As the United States approaches the election of a new President later this year, it is clear that there are no easy solutions to our ill-conceived and ill-fated intervention in Iraq. I use this picture in my narrative coaching workshops to explore with people the power of symbols, the cognitive and narrative patterns that shape our reactions, and the role of power in being able to tell our stories.

I learned a key lesson about power in the early days of my training business. I was doing a two-day program on leadership and coaching for 100 new managers in a federal social services program. 98 of the participants were women, the majority of them were non-Caucasian, and many of them had started out as low-income parents in the program. While I intellectually recognized the disparities as a upper-middle class Caucasian male, I didn’t fully grasp what that meant until part way through the first day when I realized that the program was not working well. I stopped the session and explored with the group where they were experiencing the disconnection.

In the end, I came to realize that many of the leadership theories, models and admonitions about leadership were written by and for people like me—and implicitly assumed a sufficient privilege and access to power. As a result, I dropped the rest of the design for the workshop and asked these women to talk about who had power in their communities, what enabled them to have this power, and how they used their power. We used these stories to develop some new models about what effective leadership and coaching would look like in their programs.

Much of the work in narrative coaching is to help people discern and transform the often unexamined boundaries of their narration. I work with coaches to get clear on the ethics and implications of narrative work. I am reminded of the work in this area by my colleague Paul Costello. I close here with a quote from Salman Rushdie as a reminder of the role of power in being able to tell one’s story.

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.