A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
Stories are Explanations
We use stories to explain our lives, relationships and the world around us. Therefore, our stories carry the potential to infuse our lives with positive meaning and purpose, and to equip us to act more effectively to actualise our meanings and purposes. Just like the fictional stories we read, the structure and content of our life stories is created by these key elements: plots and conflicts, settings (contexts), characters, points of view, themes and symbols.
How effective our stories are at explaining our lives, and generating positive meaning and purpose, depends therefore on our capacity to reflect on the key elements of our life stories, by questioning the origins of our stories, their content and their validity.
Story in Coaching
Coaching is present- and future-focused, and therefore the origins of our stories, while acknowledged, do not take centre-stage in coaching. Rather, coaching offers us the opportunity to consider the current content of our stories, to reconsider how valid our stories are and to question how we might change our stories in service of our personal development, relationships, work or businesses, and contributions to our contexts.
The Elements of Our Stories
How then, can we reflect on our life stories by reconsidering each of its elements?
Plot and Conflict
The plot of our life stories tells us and others what has happened. The plot most-often narrates events that tell ourselves and others how we solved problems or met challenges. The problems and challenges we face are presented as conflicts that motivate us to act in certain ways. The four grand conflicts in life stories are humans vs humans, humans vs nature, humans vs society and humans vs themselves. In the telling of events, therefore, we share important information not only about what happened, but who we and others are, i.e. our and their characters, and our relationships with other humans, and our social and natural contexts.
Character
A character in a story is a person or other being who embodies thoughts, emotions and beliefs, and acts in ways that confirm or evolve these aspects of themselves. In our telling of our life stories, these aspects combine to create a story about characteristics such as:
our moral qualities
our motivations
our capacities or attributes
our contributions to the plot or conflict
In the telling of our life stories, we also share information about other characters; about their moral qualities, motivations, capacities and contributions both to events and to the unfolding of our stories. We position others as allies, enemies, mentors and role models. As the cause of our dilemmas and the recipients of what we offer.
Settings (Contexts)
In storytelling, our narration of the setting tells the reader or listener about the mood of the story. In telling our life stories, we share the contexts in which characters exist and act, and events unfold. Through our tellings about the contexts, we sketch a picture of the influence of context and our and others impact on the contexts in which our stories unfold. We most-often position the contexts as either positive or negative. We may also position the context as dominant, and our capacity to act within it, as being limited. Alternatively, we might position ourselves as the architects of our contexts.
Points of view
Point of view refers to who is telling the story. In the telling of your life stories, we most often begin by using first-person point of view. We tell the story as it happened to us. We tell the story from our perspectives. Over time and through conversation with others, we develop the capacity to include others' points of view in our life story. We become equipped to include how we impacted others' lives and how they view us (our characters) and our actions. We become equipped to question the validity of our perspectives.
Themes
The theme of our life story is the message that the story carries. The theme of our life story is most often a message about life and human nature. The type and content of the conflicts we include in our life stories generate these themes. For example, we might tell a story about a failed relationship (human vs human) . In the telling of this conflict, we might choose to position ourselves as victim or co-contributor to the demise of the relationship. We might also extract a deeper or universal truth from the events, such as "We must never give ourselves to people who don't value us," or we might link it to the philosophies we receive from others. Such as that of poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who wisely said: "For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is but a preparation." The theme of our story might be consistent across time, place and relationships. Or we might have conflicting themes.
Symbols
One of the most powerful symbols we include in our stories are metaphors. Visual metaphors give us new ways in which to appreciate the theme of our story. Metaphors also enable us to tell something that cannot be expressed literally. So, in the story of the failed relationship, we could use the metaphor of relationship as a journey that teaches us something and in which the process and challenge of relationship is more important than its outcome. Or we could use the metaphor of relationship as a game, in which risk and outcome are foregrounded as we tell a story about winners and losers.
Examining Your Story
Right now you are living a powerful story. And you have the opportunity to examine your story by asking yourself these questions about each of its elements:
Plot and conflict: What problem or challenge are you facing? What are you doing to solve that problem or challenge? What are others doing that helps or hinders you?
Character: What attributes are you using to solve the problem or challenge? How are you contributing to the existence of the problem or challenge? How are others contributing? What does this tell you and others about your character? What does this tell you and others about the characters of others?
Context: In which context/s does this story unfold? Does it unfold in one context or multiple contexts? How do you represent the context/s in which this story unfolds? For example, are these contexts friendly or threatening? What makes these contexts friendly or threatening?
Points of view: What point of view are you primarily using to tell this story? What other points of view can you include in the telling? What perspectives do these points of view exclude and shut down or allow you to include?
Themes: What are the messages about your life, relationships, contexts and human nature itself that your story is telling you and others? What are the origins of these messages? What do these messages tell you and others about your role in your story, and your capacity to move the plot forward in positive ways?
Symbols: What symbols do you use to communicate these messages? Which metaphors shut down the possibility of positive change happening? Which metaphors enable you to create a story in which you are empowered to make the changes you and others need?
Changing Your Story
Whatever your story, I wish you well in it. And if you think that coaching can help you to craft a more empowering story or simply tweak parts of the current story, then please reach out. Let's set up a conversation to explore how I can support you.
Alternatively, and if you are still uncertain about the power of coaching to help you, I encourage you to read more about the coaching process in the What to Expect section of my website.
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