The Story You Didn't Write

Many of us are living a story we didn't choose.

Not because anything dramatic happened — though sometimes it did — but because stories about who we are and how we're supposed to live were handed to us long before we had any say in the matter. From our families, our culture, the particular moment in history we were born into, the school we attended, the media we absorbed. We took them on board the way children do: completely, and without question.

And then we just... kept living them.

Narrative coaching is, at its heart, a way of noticing that. Not by going to war with the past, or endlessly analysing where it all went wrong, but by doing something more interesting: looking at the stories themselves. The patterns in them. The characters who keep appearing. The beliefs buried inside them that we've never actually examined, let alone chosen.

I came to this work because I love stories. I have spent decades as a literature teacher, and what I know from that — from years of sitting with novels and plays and poems — is that stories are never just stories. They carry symbolism, they have structures, they contain things we can't always say directly. Our own personal stories work the same way. They're full of meaning we haven't decoded yet.

So in narrative coaching, that's what we do. We decode them.

We listen to the stories you tell about your life, and we start to notice things. Where did this belief come from? Whose voice is that, really? Is this narrative actually yours, or is it your mother's, your grandmother's, the culture you grew up in? Is it serving you — or are you just living it out on autopilot, day after day, with a vague sense of being at odds with yourself, not quite knowing why?

Because that feeling — of misalignment, of performing a version of yourself that doesn't quite fit — often isn't a sign that something is wrong with you. It's a sign that the story needs examining.

Once we can see a story clearly, we can start to play with it. We can ask: what if? What if I'd taken a different route? What if I did now? What would have to change — in my mindset, my habits, my relationships, my environment — for me to live a version of this story that's more aligned with who I actually am?

That question, in my experience, is where things start to move.

The story you didn't write is the one that was handed to you. The work is deciding which parts of it you want to keep, which parts you want to rewrite, and how to start living the new version — not just imagining it.