“This is the most significant event in our industry since Co-active Coaching began.”
Stories and Transformation
Featured Pathway: The Story of Transformation: Crafting the stories we tell about ourselves, our relationships, and our world. Leader: Chuck Allen. Chuck discusses the transformative power of our own personal stories.
I am thrilled to be a Pathway Presenter at the first Co-Active Summit. In my presentation, we will be looking at the role of stories in the process of transformation. This work applies to individuals, groups and entire societies.
I first became interested in the power of stories in coaching when I found myself coaching a number of clients in their 80s and 90s. At the beginning of these coaching relationships I would explain that coaching is about the present and future, so we would not be spending much time looking at the past. Well, they quickly put me in my place!
“Listen,” one woman told me, “most of my life is behind me. If I can’t talk about it, what’s the point of this?” I knew she was right. But I also knew through my training that sitting entranced or bored while my clients rambled on about their stories wasn’t going to serve them. So I started experimenting with ways to actively engage with my clients’ stories.
I found that the Co-Active Model was a perfect tool for this exploration. Stories about pivotal life events, triumphs, and wrenchingly hard decisions – all of these revealed values that still resonated deeply with my clients. I also discovered that the client’s perspective on important past events had usually shifted over time, and the client was not even aware of this shift. They found it gratifying when I asked them to compare their current viewpoint to the way they saw the event at the time. It was also useful to look at the current experience of these important life stories. Often, clients would be inclined to replay emotional states that were not current, because they believed they “should” feel a certain way. It was a liberating experience to get up-to-date emotionally.
The most important foundation of this work has been the discipline and the agreements that allow me to interrupt and interact with the stories my clients tell. I believe that people long to tell new stories, but they too easily get stuck in the old ones. Stories can be pathways to transformation. But we must take leadership in guiding these stories into new realms of awareness and intention.
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http://www.brilliantvisions.net Martha Carnahan
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Andrea
