The Handbook of Knowledge-Based Coaching: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

FOUNDATIONS OF NARRATIVE COACHING

The primary focus in narrative coaching is to work with the stories, as they emerge from clients in conversations, as vehicles for greater awareness, authorship, agility, and accountability. This approach draws primarily on three bodies of work:

1. Narrative psychology (and related work in other social sciences) as a way to understand and connect with the client as a narrator—exemplified by William James’s distinction (1927) between the “I” (as subject) and the “Me” (as object) and Kenneth Gergen’s work on the social construction of identity (1994).

2. Narrative structure as a way to elicit and understand the material in the stories—exemplified by Kenneth Burke’s work on story grammars (1969) and Joseph Campbell’s ...