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.