photo credit: Artotem

One of the aspects of narrative work that has most fascinated me over the years has been what do with all of the shadow stories that don’t quite fit into the larger and more convenient stories about our past or present. So much of the work in narrative coaching is about helping clients to befriend, mature and embody parts of themselves that have been held back for any number of reasons.

Little change is possible without the reincorporation or adaption of our stories to provide a stronger foundation for the changes we want to make in our life. For a recent client, it was about recognising that she had been pretending to be a flamingo—making others in her swamp at work quite uneasy in the process — and needed to make more space for her nature as an ‘eagle’. [I sense a career change is in the works for her . . .]

At a time when our economies are in great flux and we participate in ever-increasing networks, we need to find ways to express more and more of ourselves — even those parts of ourselves which we may have previously not used or not used well.

Given that this is not often an easy task, it helps to have others who can guide us in doing so. In this context, we can see the value of the other connotation of the word ‘shadow’ as skillfully observing someone. In coaching, this relates to our ability to provide real-time, in-the-moment feedback and inquiry for our clients.

New Workshop!

I am excited to announce that I will be co-facilitating an extraordinary three-day workshop with my dear friend and colleague Donna Karlin called “Stories, Shadows & Self-Discovery” on April 12th-14th in Toronto.

For the first time ever, the founder of narrative coaching and the founder of shadow coaching are offering a workshop together! It will be a highly experiential session, designed to transform how coaching practitioners view and deliver their work. For more information and to register, visit the special page on Donna’s website or here.

Please share the news with others you know in the region. Thanks.

photo credit: Andreas Øverland

What does this simple photo evoke in you?

Among other things, it reminds me of how much of our daily life is a screen onto which we project our narrative frames. Does the photo stir excitement in imagining what you might find if you climbed the stairs? Does it stir a sense of foreboding as you imagine what might come down the stairs? Or something else altogether? I’ve been vividly reminded in recent weeks of the impact of our choices in how we construct our views of people, places and events. Even though we know that this story-making is central to how our individual and collective minds work, it is not always an easy task.

I’ve come to believe, however, that the art and discipline of noticing our stories as they emerge in the moment is at the core of narrative coaching and of being more fully human. This is particularly important when we feel ensnared in events that are challenging for us. With a tip of the hat to Irving Yalom and Byron Katie, in these times I ask myself questions like, “What is the ‘story’ I am telling myself? How is that ‘story’ serving me? What do I need to release so that I can see the situation with a bigger heart and a bigger mind? What would I gain if I did so?

Waking up in a New Year

As I look out across a new year, I am reminded of a quote from the famous photographer, the late Henri Cartier-Bresson. While in Vienna recently for some holiday and lining up two projects there for later this year, I had the unexpected pleasure of seeing a major exhibit of his work as well as another of my favorites, René Magritte. Each of these artists was gifted in helping us to question how we see the world. As Cartier-Bresson wrote in 1994, “My passion has never been for photography in itself, but for the possibility—through forgetting myself—of recording in a fraction of a second the emotion of the subject and the beauty of the form, the geometry awakened by what is offered.” He describes it as a ‘decisive moment’ when the head, heart and eye are aligned along the same line of sight.

Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder. As you make your way into a new year, spend five minutes right now reflecting on a story you’ve recently told yourself (and perhaps others) that now feels limiting to you.

1. Where is there an opening to release your ‘narrative grip’ to make room for new possibilities?
2. What part of the story needs to be released, like a drop back into the ocean?
3. What other part of the story wants to be told?
4. What space would open up in your heart, mind and life if you shifted your frame?

Resolutions in the new year are less about grand promises and more about the daily practices of increasing our awareness and our courage in the stories we choose to tell. Every moment can be a decisive one. Peace to each of us on our journey…

photo credit: Koshyk

As you are wont to do when you are young, I had been traveling across thousands of miles of Alaska by thumb and by foot. Near the end of my journey, I came to a small town in the middle a majestic nowhere. I had been eating quite simply for weeks but was starting to crave the foods of my native California. While resting on the porch of the only store in town, I struck up a conversation with an old man who had been traveling by bike. He offered me his last orange as a gift, the first fresh fruit I had eaten in almost a month. I savored each bite, both for its sweetness and for the graciousness of the gift for a young man traveling far from home. Somehow, the best that is our humanity was captured in that moment as two people who had never met and would likely never do so again connected for a brief time. As he rode off, I was struck by the simplicity of the gift yet the profundity of the experience.

Creating moments of meaning

The title for this month’s post came from close friend in high school (here’s to you CW) if I recall. I thought of it again in light of this story as a way to illustrate how the ordinary can become the extraordinary. It reminds me of a principle of narrative coaching: to generate powerful experiences with clients to help them move toward the not-yet-known rather than to gather information in order to move them toward the known. When we create ‘moments’ of meaning’ for our clients that which was unknown becomes known in ways that can be quite eye-opening and empowering. For example, I didn’t realize how much I was ready to head for home until I took the first bite of that well-traveled and juicy orange. Even more, I’ve never forgot that simple, yet timely gesture.

My invitation to you is to find someone today — a client, a colleague, a loved one— who needs an ‘orange’ from you. Amid the din and rush of our days, give this person a few moments where they feel ‘met’ and cared for. It is those experiences, where the unknown skies open, that will bring about the insight and inspiration we all need. It is about grace more than about goals. If each of us gave a few more ‘oranges’ and allowed ourselves to receive them more easily, imagine what a difference it would make!

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!

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?