Narrative coaching: the stories clients live inside

A head of operations describes herself in the first five minutes of the session: "I'm the one who cleans up other people's mess." She says it as a joke. Over the next hour it comes back four times, in four different situations, and each time it explains why she has not asked for the strategic role she wants.

She is not wrong about her history. She has cleaned up a lot of mess. The trouble is that the sentence has become a story about who she is, and stories like that decide what we notice, what we try and what we assume other people think of us.

Where it comes from

Narrative work in helping professions comes mainly from the family therapists Michael White and David Epston, whose 1990 book Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends argued that problems live in the stories people tell about their lives, and that those stories are shaped by culture, family and institutions. Their best-known move is externalising: treating the problem as something separate from the person, so that it can be examined rather than lived as identity.

In coaching, David Drake has done the most to build the approach into a full practice. His 2018 book Narrative Coaching: The Definitive Guide to Bringing New Stories to Life draws on narrative psychology and treats the coaching session as a space where a client's story can be told, examined and changed.

The core assumption

Narrative coaching assumes that people are not their stories, but they live through them. A story selects. Out of thousands of events it keeps the ones that fit and drops the ones that do not. Over time the dropped events become hard to remember, and the story starts to feel like simple fact.

White called the dropped events unique outcomes: moments when the problem story did not hold. The head of operations has almost certainly had times when she shaped strategy rather than cleaning up after it. Those moments are in her history. They are just not in her story.

How it shows up in a session

The coach listens to the language, not only the content. Repeated phrases, the roles people give themselves, the endings they expect: these are clues to the story underneath. The questions help the client see the story as a story, and then go looking for what it has left out.

What would you call this story you keep telling about yourself?

When did it start?

Who else tells this story about you?

When has it not been true?

What does that moment say about you that this story leaves out?

If you were writing the next chapter, what would happen in it?

The coach does not supply a better story. A new story that comes from the coach is just another script to live inside. The client has to find, in their own experience, the material for one that fits.

Externalising at work

Externalising is useful with leaders because it lowers defensiveness. "I'm a micromanager" is an identity, and identities are hard to change without losing face. "The pull to check everything" is something a leader can look at with some curiosity:

When does the pull to check everything show up?

What does it want for you?

What does it cost your team?

When have you been stronger than it?

The same approach works with teams. Teams carry stories too ("we're the department nobody listens to") and those stories shape how they show up in meetings long after the original reason has gone.

For organizations

Organizations are made of stories as much as structures. Mergers, restructurings and new strategies all ask people to step into a new story before the old one has finished. A narrative coach can help a leadership team notice which story they are actually telling, which one their people are hearing, and where the two do not match.

The head of operations did ask for the strategic role. She told it to herself differently first: not as the person who cleans up, but as the person who has seen, more closely than anyone, where the organization's plans break.