Inter-be Coaching and Training.

Narrative Inquiry is possibly the most exciting and powerful recent development in coaching. It draws on understandings from literature and philosophy not psychology and biology, and from education, linguistics and anthropology rather than from neurology, therapy and counselling. It privileges individual stories and personal experience- what are called in the narrative jargon ‘local knowledges’ – over the coach’s expertise, theories and authority.

In this way it is about people’s own, specific ideas about their lives rather than what professional research tells us life is (or should be ) about. It pays close attention to the background issues of ethics, power and equality in the coaching relationship; it is concerned with how the wider invisible issues of culture, social contexts and historical or generational conditions and circumstances impact the coaching structure, process and conversations.

You could describe Narrative Inquiry as a methodology that can be applied to coaching – just as the GROW model is a methodolgy used by a lot of coaches – only it is more sophisticated and far reaching.

At its best Narrative Inquiry is a shared, egalitarian experience; and the course of narrative coaching conversations is often unpredictable, taking us to unknown, fascinating and (possibly) uncomfortable destinations.

This discomfort (often called being out of your comfort zone) can provide opportunities for new, unfamiliar and highly original conversations to occur. These are known as reauthoring conversations and are the conversations that give us the chance to think beyond what we routinely think, to engage in a new way with parts of our story that have been neglected, to throw a light on alternative stories that have been overlooked and to ‘write’ a new story for ourselves and our future that is not necessarily predicted by the past.

By questioning things that we so take for granted that they are almost indistinguishable to us, these kinds of conversations have the potential to to result in breakthroughs and transformations.