Park Benches

One of our Canadian colleagues, Heather Plett, wrote the following to describe her experience with narrative coaching after participating in one of my labs in Toronto. I include it here with her permission because it so beautifully captures the spirit of narrative coaching and the sense of “coming home” this work offers people. Enjoy the parable and the rest of the book.

Imagine you are a pilgrim on a long journey, gathering stories as they appear and stashing them like gems in your backpack.

Sometimes you pull the stories out, dust them off, and share them with fellow travelers. Sometimes you keep them to yourself, afraid that other travelers will find them ugly or unsavory and you will feel shame. Sometimes you roll them around in your hands, reshaping them to better fit with the other stories they share space with.

The stories in your backpack don’t look like those in any other traveler’s backpack. They have been shaped by the journey through which they’ve been carried, by the way you’ve used them to define yourself, and by your assumptions of how other people are judging them.

Now imagine you’ve been invited by a kind and supportive fellow traveler to sit down on a comfortable park bench along that journey. Your new companion invites you to open your backpack, promising that he will be gentle with the stories inside.