Second Australian Conference on EvidenceBased Coaching Narrative Coaching: A psychosocial method for

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Second Australian Conference on Evidence-Based
Coaching Narrative CoachingA psychosocial
method for working with clients stories to
support transformative results

• David B. Drake, PhD
• Center for Narrative Coaching
• Catalyst Communications, Inc.

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• Beware of the stories you tell yourself for
  you will surely be lived by them.
• Shakespeare

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ACTIVITY

• Think about a recent coaching or coach training
  experience in which your usual way of
  communicating with or relating to people did not
  work well or made you feel uncomfortable.
• Form a dyad with another person and take turns
  telling a BRIEF version of your story to each
  other and what you think it might mean.
• Give your story a headline.

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Formative theoretical influences

• Carl Jung self as system
• Roger Schank mind as storyteller
• Joseph Campbell development as journey
• Victor Turner ritual as passage
• Michael White story as instrument
• Paulo Freire praxis as liberation
• Homi Bhabha culture as third space
• Carol Gilligan voice as power

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Guiding questions

• What if the Jungian perspective on dreams as a
  screen on which the unconscious projects its
  inner drama (Johnson, 1983) plays out in waking
  life in the stories we choose to tell?
• What if the characters in these stories are all
  parts of ourselves projected onto familiar
  forms to work through developmental issues or
  needs in our own identity?
• What if coaches worked with clients stories with
  these two points in mind?

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Why narrative coaching?

• The significance of situated identity
• The function of the field in coaching sessions
• The role of the margins and borders in change
• The need for a more socially critical stance
• The value of participatory narrative evidence

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What is narrative coaching?

• An emerging body of work and set of practices in
  which there is an explicit focus on
• Identity as a lever for change
• Client stories as the currency for change
• Rites of passage as the framework for change
• The opportunities for liberation

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Narratives

• Three criteria of a story temporality, causation
  and human interest/meaning emplotment
• Role of grand narratives and antenarratives
  (Boje, 2001)
• Stories make visible the invisible identity
  process identity can be seen as a narrative
  performance (Mishler, 1999)

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Stories enable us to

• Establish and sustain public identities
• Maintain a continuity of self and sense-making
• Make visible our identity processes
• Make visible our cultural/contextual norms
• Claim and navigate our memberships
• Negotiate our self in our environments
• Test out and rehearse new selves
• Observe ourselves from the outside

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• Every man sic invents a story for himself
  which he then often, and with great cost to
  himself, takes to be his life . . .
• M. Frisch

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Identity at the intersections
Community Story
Personal Story
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Identity

• Story and identity are situated activities and
  constituted through language and discourse.
• Identity is a function of a co-adaptive
  interactive process between a person and her
  environment.
• Identity can be seen as a collection and
  expression of selves more than a unitary self.

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We are the stories we tell

• Identity can be seen as a narrative construction,
  and behavior as an embodiment of identity.
• People act to be consistent with and sustain
  their preferred identities change requires
  creating new narrative options at the identity
  level.
• Working with identities requires moving beyond
  the psychological dimension to include their
  socially constructed nature.
• Coaching can be seen as a narrative intervention.

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• Narrative identity
• A socio-cognitive construct that captures the
  essence of a person and is
• sustained over time
• situated in community
• embodied in discourse
• guided by canon

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• A persons identity is found in her capacity to
  keep a particular narrative going (Giddens,
  1991).
• Narrative breakdowns, a loss of narrative
  coherency when the old story doesn't work
  anymore, are openings for breakthroughs in a
  clients life.

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• By refusing his web of constructions, she also
  cut him off from his supporting fiction.
• James Hillman

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The Narrative Rites of Passage Model
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Model elements

• The discourse of narrated space is shaped by
  available narratives the discourse of the
  potential space is shaped by potential stories
• Narrative liminality can occur at the border
  places in stories the in-between spaces often
  indicative of transitions in narrators identity
• Markers in stories are pointers to these
  boundaries in the narrators identity and
  openings to her potential stories

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The role of third spaces

• Found at the threshold and draw on the subversive
  nature of liminality to increase the available
  narratives and create spaces for potential
  stories.
• Emerge from living/naming the dualism of the
  potential story and the current narrated story,
  and provide a path to transcend it.
• Can be used to help people move out of polarized
  fixations (and resulting behavioral ruts) and
  onto a path of integration and individuation.

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Case study Nell

• Her initial stories reflected themes in her own
  life being stuck in the middle and parenting.
• Tracked her emergent identity shifts in telling
  her stories and using them to see herself in new
  ways
• Separation Now thats not true
• Liminality I dont know how to be 58
• Reincorporation I am an oldest now
• Third space Before the stereotypes kick in

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• Leaving home isnt really completed until we
  create a new center.
• James Hollis

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• Rather than merely attempting to return a person
  to a past state of equilibrium, a rites of
  passage approach is oriented toward the future. .
  . . Liminal categories construe crisis in terms
  of progress rather than regression (Carson, 1997).

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Taking it to the streets

• If you want people to adopt new behaviors or
  attain new results as a result of coaching, you
  must help them build an identity from which to do
  so.
• If you want to support a client to change, you
  must be willing to take a critical perspective on
  the narratives in which their identity is
  situated.
• Coaching can be seen as a narrative intervention
  in which clients can create new options for
  themselves through work with the stories they
  tell.
• Any consideration of evidence in coaching must
  account for these narrative identity processes.

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ACTIVITY

• Form the same dyad and revisit the stories you
  told at the beginning.
• Share what you can see now in your stories as a
  result of this presentation. You are encouraged
  to ask questions of each other to explore the
  stories in new ways. Would you give your story a
  new headline?
• Join with another dyad to share highlights from
  your discoveries in terms of their implications
  for coaching/coach education.

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• People construct their own reality by finding
  the events that fit the skeleton convenient for
  them to believe.
• Roger Schank
• What stories do you
• choose to believe?

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Everything you need is right in front of you

• To continue the dialogue, contact
• David B. Drake, PhD at ddrake_at_narrativecoaching.co
  m