photo credit: xoque

Do you ever get to the place in your work where you feel like there is too much to do, to remember, to track? I used to pride myself in being able to hold a lot at once — in my mind, for my clients, and about my work. As the complexity of our world increases almost geometrically and I find myself affected by the simple arithmetic progression of aging, I find that harder and harder to do.

I thought about this the other day in the context of launching a narrative coaching center with a team in Toronto and the first narrative design lab in Sydney. Add that to my full-time practice, research and writing projects, and a personal life — and it started to feel a bit much.  I had the chance to talk with my  friend and colleague Andrea J. Lee about my plans. In the course of doing so, she suggested that I might need to release my need to understand it all — and just do the next thing that needs doing. It was a wonderful insight that really hit home for me.

Enjoy the vista, but watch your feet

As I put this approach into practice the next day on a planning call with Toronto, there was a much greater sense of ease and grace in our conversation. What had become long lists of tasks quickly distilled into some immediate actions to take. It felt liberating. This is not about ticking lots of ‘to do’ boxes like a mouse running in a wheel; it’s about building toward something meaningful one step at a time. The era of seeing the whole picture, knowing everything about something, and planning the entire journey is over. Now, it is about doing what needs to be done next — and from there seeing what the world looks like and acting accordingly.

It’s like a good story. The magic is in the suspense of wondering what will happen next, and long arc of the plot often only becomes apparent in the end. I think our work is more and more like that. How about you? We take the steps we need to take in order to respond to and create what is emerging . . . and soon marvel at how far we have come and where we have arrived! Like stories, understanding is in retrospect, not a requirement for getting started.

If you feel stuck or daunted by all that needs to be done, ask yourself right now, “What’s the next thing that needs doing?”

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

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?

My wife recently returned from a fascinating workshop with Brad Keeney, psychologist and expert on traditional healing. Take a look at this clip from a Canadian documentary as it shows Brad’s work with what he calls “shaking medicine”. There seems to me to be a growing confluence of what we are learning from the neurosciences and what many have known for centuries about the true nature of healing. If this is so, what does this mean for coaching?

Are there ways in which coaching, when its based in assumptions about linearity, causality, and rationality, misses out on some of the processes by which people actually develop? In my work with people’s stories in coaching and in teaching coaching skills, I increasingly see the ways in which development is nonlinear, noncausal, and nonrational. As I have deepened my explicit and tacit knowledge of the way stories play out in coaching, I find myself being more compassionate and courageous in working with a person’s narrative material.

In doing so, I marvel at the mystery of human nature and growth based in millennia of genetic programming and embeddedness in natural systems. As a result, I wonder sometimes if those of us (at least in the West) over-emphasize the cognitive and linguistic domains in working with our clients. It is as if we carry a belief that higher order brain functions will be able to triumph over ancient patterns if only we work hard enough. While we certainly have sufficient anecdotal experience of this in our own lives, I wonder sometimes what we are missing as coaches by not working with these ancient patterns—instead of against them. Our stories are not just in our head.

It is as if coaches become split between the face we wear in the daytime to fit into an evidence-based, market-driven world and the face we wear in nighttime to engage with other worlds we believe in our heart may actually be closer to the truth of what works. As I’ve written about in recent articles, it is the path of the craftsperson, the artisan who diligently develops the science and skills of the practice while all the while dancing with his/her muse and the mysteries of the art.

Where are you stretching yourself today in terms of how you think about and practice your craft?