One of the critical principles of a coaching culture is encouraging people to become self-authoring in their approach to life and its challenges. An author gets to draft the story rather than have the story written for them.
Often when we talk to people who need coaching, they talk in a passive manner in the sense that life is something that happens to them, rather than something they can authentically author. This is not to suggest that there are no limits to our power as our own life authors. We all have experiences where we have no control over what has happened, but critically, we can always author our own response. Taking a coaching approach engages the person in growing in their ability to self-author their responses.
So, what role does that place us in? In some ways it can be useful for us to consider ourselves a bit like the narrator of a story. One of the roles of the narrator is to highlight the bigger plot context when we are caught up in the detail of a particular scene. A good narrator can help identify the story’s point of view. This role of reminder and challenge to contextualization is a significant role for anyone engaging in a coaching approach to practice. We need to make sure we are not becoming the author of the individual’s story but are instead helping them to challenge the limiting narratives and creating new horizons in the narratives they live through.