Stories of self
I admit it: part of me longs for a tidy “before” and “after” when it comes to personal transformation.
As much as I talk about messiness being a core value of my coaching practice (see my homepage and many past newsletters like this one) there is still a part of me – especially the part that craves to feel in control – that deeply desires an orderly narrative.
Coaching has in many ways heightened my meaning-making and storytelling impulses. I want to tell a great, captivating story. I want it to feel coherent and conclusive.
Because change isn’t always generated from the most loved or accepted parts of ourselves, a permanent expulsion of a dominating narrative often sounds really good, thank you very much. I understand the inclination to draw a hard line between who we were and who we are or are becoming. I understand the discomfort of being in the mess.
When a client gets clear on something they are longing to change, seeking a narrative that is impacting what’s struggling to transform is a powerful early step.
We ask in the coaching space:
What does this well-known narrative want for you?
What role did this narrative play in your life?
What role does it now play in your life?
Does this story still resonate?
What are some new options that might feel more aligned?
After discovering, naming, and exploring currently powerful narratives, emphasis is put on finding or crafting more supportive and presently aligned narratives.
Yet the longer I coach, the more I find myself conflicted about supporting clients in quickly moving from an “old” narrative to a “new” narrative. Is this…too tidy? Is this antithetical to living in a chaotic, ever-changing, incredibly mysterious world? Is jumping from story to story the best option? Will doing so risk getting stuck or lead to discord and dissatisfaction again?
Understanding the power of narratives in transformative work, I’m hesitant to give the practice up all together. And yet I want to be mindful of if there are ways to remain more flexible, open-minded, and accepting of our contradictions when crafting stories.
Thinking of all of our stories like a fantastic library: there are no banned books! Yet there are books from earlier eras of life that we re-read less. There are books that hold a special nostalgic place in our library: we take them out every few years and quietly pour over them with gratitude and reverence. Our library has new additions that will transform us for a season before we find our next great read.
Could we build a library like this within ourselves, that accommodates how many stories we get to try on throughout our lifetimes?
This might allow us to see our stories in a playful, adventurous way with an emphasis on the “trying”! We could shift to prioritizing a lifetime of experimenting with our narratives over an exhaustive quest to get “our story” perfectly right. It strikes me, these alternative framings require some trust, some bravery.
Also at play here in my resistance to a neat “before” and “after” is a desire to not villainize or shame any part of ourselves. In the past when I wrote about creating stories in the coaching space (such as this newsletter) I’ve focused on being willing to rewrite our stories as often as needed as a way to claim more freedom for ourselves.
I want to stay curious and not guide myself – or support my clients – into overly binary meaning-making during re-envisioning processes. Things that are too definitive can constrict our imagination and shrink our sense of what’s possible. At its worst, a rigid approach to our personal narratives can become self-made prisons that limit or reduce our ideas of what growth is available to us.
Some of the work here is to grow our capacity to stay in discomfort, to pour more energy into increasing resilience for being with the mystery. I want to be better resourced to be with uncertainty, in service of my own growth and those I coach! Imagine the impact of celebrating just how much we don't know.
What would change if we embraced that some of the narratives we struggle with will never be fully rewritten? Could we hold our contradictions with more tenderness and less annoyance?
While midway through writing this, I heard a song on the local independent radio station with these lyrics: “I guess I’m complicated and people back away. When the old me has vacated, I’ll become something great.”
I don’t find comfort in separating the old and new parts with such a hard line, and I don’t accept that we are only great through rejecting parts of ourselves. I have an earnest goal to befriend all my stories, or at least try to understand why they exist in the first place. This allows me to let go of the belief that there is such a thing as complete change, which honestly takes some pressure off!
Instead, we can all witness with curiosity how the familiar and unfamiliar overlap in us, like waves crossing as they reach the shore. Change spirals forward and also bends back onto itself. There are stories that will seem resolved only to surprise us as they resurface years later.
Coaching is a place to articulate stories that we are stuck in or outgrowing and to re-envision new narratives. But, like so much of this work, there’s an opportunity to do so in a way that embraces complexity, messiness, uncertainty, and the liberation within the consistency of change. We can get more practiced at holding all of this as we craft stories to accompany us in our lives. We can write and rewrite. We can learn to acknowledge the freedom of being in process, an unfinished story.
