discovering stories
Welcome to the Lifting the Fog series, ‘Discovering Stories’. In this collection, we hope to explore stories and storytelling in coaching, as well as uncover the mysterious qualities of the spoken word and how people make sense of the world around them.
stories: what are they and how to tell them
Over the last two years, storytelling has been something I have been deeply interested in. One of the things that I have found fascinating about stories and how people tell them is the way in which thoughts, feelings and information is shared with anyone who will listen. Stories are essentially about how we communicate emotionally. Not just what happened, but why did it happen, and how do we feel about it…
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designing immersive storytelling
The next adventures in storytelling are toward how we can design immersive learning environments. What implications do non-linear experiences of learning and our stories have for our coaching process? How can we plot the course of a learning journey that doesn’t limit those onboard to experiences prescribed for players? And finally, what lies behind the mysterious immersive qualities of some stories, and is noticeably missing in others…?
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themes: the silver bullet we all want
When beginning to talk about stories, I went out on social media to find some great examples of what storytelling looks like in coaching. There were some excellent tales of coaches plotting out their seasons and their sessions with their players and athletes: from pirates raiding island, to climbers scaling Mount Everest, to Shackleton and his adventure to Antartica, to a Game of Thrones-styled empire. Is storytelling as simple as cobbling together some popular culture references into our environments and talking in coded language related to the theme the coaches have picked?
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kishōtenketsu, a story without conflict
Kishōtenketsu is something a little different to the kind of stories we’ve been talking about previously in ‘Discovering Stories’. For one, what is this story about? We don’t see the trials and tribulations of success and failure that we’d usually expect to see in a story. We also don’t see much character development: we may witness a character flaw, but that’s it. But somehow there is a story here, and it is one that doesn’t happen necessarily on the page, but in our reading and understanding of the plot and narrative.
lifting the fog 
