Group narrative course

This advanced course is designed for experienced executive coaches, consultants, L&OD practitioners, HR professionals and business leaders.

Our Group Narrative Course

The group course will enhance your coaching potential in working with personal and organisational stories, while adding an additional strand to your coaching offer. By connecting you with a small group of other high calibre coaches from a range of different sectors and backgrounds, the course provides an opportunity to learn and grow within a supportive and stimulating environment. It will train you to apply our distinctive way of coaching to your practice in your own way. It is particularly effective when used with clients’ leadership roles and at transition or decision points in their lives.

The two experiential days are complemented with individual coaching sessions before and after the group training.

We have selected a spread of fascinating ideas from the narrative world and presented them in a highly accessible manner. They are explained and explored in a way they can be easily applied to coaching.

The course focuses on advanced coaching skills in three crucial areas:

  • Narrative literacy, sense making and purpose
  • Decision making, change and follow through
  • Addressing your client’s most pressing personal and business needs

This training will enhance your coaching practice by integrating multiple perspectives and different time frames for your clients; it will build your capability to connect the immediate and the personal with wider relational and organisational matters.

Courses

2021

  • June 24th & 25th
  • November 4th & 5th

In-house company courses can be arranged as needed.

Course Aims:

As a coach, you will also gain:

  • More confidence in working with your clients’ stories – personally and professionally
  • Increased understanding of how people’s identity and purpose are framed through the multi-layered narratives within their lives
  • Added capability in working with inner narrative, including: blocks, assumptions, and on-going habitual thinking or behaviour
  • Greater awareness of the ways in which clients connect with their resourcefulness and resilience through their own story telling
  • Insight into how to apply the dynamic frames of Professor Dan McAdam’s – ‘Actor, Agent, Author’ to clients’ lives
  • Deeper skills in eliciting your clients’ values and drawing these out so that they are clearly defined
  • More dexterity in helping clients identify the variety, depth or brevity of the narratives that are appropriate to their situation
  • Enhanced abilities in supporting clients to construct effective organisational and team narratives
  • Valuable expertise to complement your existing coaching approaches – one that will set you apart from the many other coaches

The Story So Far…

As part of the course you will be given the book The Story So Far’ – An Introduction to Transformational Narrative Coaching by Nick Isbister and Jude Elliman. Nick and Jude are also the course developers and run the group training at regular intervals during the year.

Their book covers the content of the training. It is a valuable resource to back-up the course, and will extend your understanding by describing the ideas in greater depth.

What does the course cover?

The course explores the most important current theories around narrative and stories, and it will introduce you to the key thought leaders in the field.

These include the ideas of Dan McAdams, Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Bourdieu, Erving Goffman, Susan Greenfield, Ruthellen Josselson, Michael Bamberg and several others. We will be integrating Martin Buber’s concept of I-Thou dialogue and incorporating insights from Gestalt Psychology.

The Group Training Framework

  • Two 90-minute coaching sessions.
  • Two days of small group course training.
  • Two 90-minute coaching sessions which take place afterwards.
  • First-use supervision session.

There is a follow up supervision session available with one of the course tutors as you work with your first client using this narrative approach.