The final requirement for certification with The Coaching Guild is an exit interview. Mine was a profound experience. One that feels like is contains layers that continue to unfurl over time.*
Dr Dee Frayne asked me about the intersection of my work and social change. I answered that if people learn how to question their own narratives and change them, they can apply those same lessons and experiences to question and change wider social, cultural and economic stories.
Seth Goldenberg calls these old stories legacy narratives. While he talks of them in a collective and societal context, I am interested in them in a personal context.
Legacy narrative is the term I’ve been searching for(without knowing it!) to describe the old stories which unconsciously shape people’s lives and realities. The narratives they pattern match to.
I’m always interested in my client’s legacy narratives: what story underlies their experience; what story is driving their thoughts process, feelings and behaviour. What are they pattern matching to in the outside world?
I just hadn’t found a gentle and targeted way of exploring until running the Prosperity Consciousness Program with Kate Wildrick in the last quarter of 2023. I needed a process, a tool, that could work in group settings with a diverse array of people and stories.
And something that could be done specifically 1:1 (but with capacity to do solo).
The Inner Narrator Process was the process I gave birth to; a 1:1 tool specifically targeted at quickly and safely identify, explore and disrupt a legacy narrative.
*My ongoing work with self-replenishment came from the same interview.
The Inner Narrator Process
The Inner Narrator Process draws on my interest in Narrative Therapy and two decades of editorial work.
Narrative Therapy posits we are individuals with challenges and problems, not problematic or challenging individuals. This allows people to situate issues (in this case narratives/stories) beyond themselves to engage with them in unique ways.
I combine it with my professional and intuitive sense of a story’s current shape and future trajectory. All wrapped up in the magic of words.
The Inner Narrator Process exists in a liminal, imaginal space. Here you can explore and challenge a legacy narrative, at a safe, and playful distance.
It’s been described as D’n’D meets a shamanic journey in real time. Everyone who has been through the process agrees it is a surprisingly safe and potent container for the deep, healing work it is.
Together, in an Inner Narrator Session* we:
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- create and name your Inner Narrator
- shape a setting in which your narrator resides
- explore the story the narrator is telling (the legacy narrative)
- see how you fall into line with the story — including the modes of thinking, feeling and behaving expected to be part of this story
- challenge the legacy narrative and experience what it is to feel, think and behave outside it
- observe what happens to the narrator when their authority is challenged
- contemplate what happens next (this looks different for everyone)
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Erin was the first to experience an Inner Narrator session. She had this to say about the process a few weeks later.
Jodi’s narrator session created an easeful distance between me and the stories I was telling myself, between me and the teller of those stories, my narrator.
Jodi offered gentle, probing questions which helped me understand this inner critic, giving a persona to an entity with so much influence in my life. She then offered language and imagery to dispel the narrator’s rationale and make her story’s failures evident.
I was coaxed out of the story enough to be open to challenging it, and from there shifts occurred. It is impossible to further a story I no longer believe in.
*As someone with aphantasia, this process is 100% suitable for anyone without a visual imagination.
Work The Inner Narrator Process During The Pause
The Pause is the perfect time to go straight to the heart of one of your legacy narratives and disrupt it. It takes less than an hour.
Janette had this to say the day after our session:
This morning in the shower I noticed the old painful thought (story) TRYING to form in my head … but it tripped over its own feet on the way to the conscious surface, and landed splat on its metaphorical face. Weirdest thing ever!! So weird, I laughed out loud and the husbo-dude asked what was wrong.
This process is mind-blowingly potent.
Thank you!
Janette Dalgliesh (Life coach for women-oriented humans)
Sessions are A$150.00 and approximately 45 minutes long.
Book an Inner Narrator Session
From Ben, whose session unfolded in a group call.
Jodi has a remarkable gift of caring AND being curious, which invited me to do the same.
She allowed me to take the lead point in exploring my story, offering prompts along the way to help so I never felt ‘stuck’. The space Jodi created felt safe, and most importantly, PLAYFUL.
I have experienced pivotal changes since working with Jodi.
I strongly recommend a narrator session with her.
Disruptions and Integration
Disruption is one thing, integration is another. As is the time and space for the new to develop a strong root system.
Late last year, I disrupted a big story regarding writing and publishing. I was ecstatic. The next day I walked right back into the old story. I might have disrupted and created a new story, but old habits die hard. It took three goes to get to what I was trying to action, eventually I got there thanks to some savvy self reflection/intuitive insight, incredible friends and universal intervention.
Because I know first-hand how powerful the old story (and the habits and pattern matching associated with it are) I’ve created The Interregnum Package.
The Interregnum* Package is 5 sessions, priced at A$475 (a discount of $75) with options to pay in full or in 5 fortnightly payments of $95.
One inner narrator session to disrupt the legacy narrative
Four follow up integration sessions intended to navigate the messy middle as old and new stories vie for authority on shaping your life.
It can be easy to return to the old because it is habitual, known and pretends to be “easy”. And well, our brains are also change/risk averse.
I’m here to ensure the old stays the old, and the new is given time, space and support to bloom.
Pay by installment (billed fortnightly)
*Interregnum is a period of discontinuity or “gap” in a government, organisation, or social order. Archetypally, it was the period between the reign of one monarch and the next (from Latin inter-, “between” and rēgnum, “reign”. I use it here as a personal period of “messiness” (think the 5’s in the tarot) that covers the disruption of the old and the creation and consolidation of the new.