The Power of Coherence: Finding Direction Through Narrative Crafting

🎙️ Listen to the podcast version of this post here.

Today I want to talk about the power of Coherence, and why I named my coaching business Coherence Studio. 

This will be broken into three sections: 

1. The current crisis of collective coherence 

2. The skill of creating personal coherence 

3. Healing as the engine to power your personal evolution 

Part One: The current crisis of collective coherence 

Coherence is about making sense of things, fitting different parts into a unified whole. And I would go further to say it’s not just about sense making but about meaning making. Humans are constantly trying to create order in the world. I see it everyday with my two year old daughter. She is making connections constantly, trying to link things into the same category. We do naturally to survive. The way I see it, finding order in the chaos of the world is sense making, but seeing what is actually SIGNIFICANT is about meaning making. What is worthy of my attention? 

I named my business Coherence Studio because it’s all about helping people find meaningful work that contributes to a meaningful life. I’ve been asking that timeless question “What makes up ‘a good life’?” since I was in high school. I was raised without any sort of religious or spiritual teaching. My parents did try to instill in me some kind of moral compass about what was a good way to treat other people and spaces and creatures. But with the strong absence of any grand unifying story about WHY something was good or bad, my main understanding was that it was due to cultural norms that evolved because of evolutionary reasons. I sometimes lamented that I wasn’t raised believing in god because it seemed very convenient and helpful at times when I needed more hope or support to be resilient. 

In college I studied the concept of ‘community’ and particularly how online communities functioned. Was an online community just as valuable as an in person community? I read Robert Putnam’s well known book “Bowing Alone” which was all about the loss of third spaces - declining participation in organized religion and community groups, even going to the bowling alley. A decade later I would co-found my own third space, New Women Space, which was an attempt to create a place that wasn’t your work and wasn’t your home, and was a place to belong where you could commune with others. 

Studying and then creating my own community space I was focused on was giving people a place for more connection in their life. Connection has always been one of my top personal values. My early answer to ‘what is the good life?’ was ‘meaningful connection with other people’. 

I realize now that one big thing that was lost with the declining participation in third spaces was not just connection but shared meaning. Specially with religious institutions. Churches and temples and mosques and anywhere that people come together for shared recitations, readings, practices, and beliefs, help the people who attend them to feel like the world has coherence and meaning. There is a reason why things are the way they are and there are guiding principles for how the world should work. 

So what happens when we lose that shared sense of coherence and meaning. When we lose a belief in the same collective story? Arguably, we feel that life has less order, predictability, and meaning. We can be more susceptible to anxiety about the ambiguity of the future, and we don’t have the buoy of hope that a strong religious story provides where there is some kind of moral order and therefore guaranteed justice. 

This weekend I was listening to a podcast about how parents are conflicted about screen time for their kids. Some parents embrace that this is just happening. Others are trying to take more active measures to lessen or prevent their kids from spending time on screens. The conversation that centered around screen time, soon became a conversation about shared moral frameworks. In the absence of a shared moral framework, parents are left to their own judgement to make decisions for their families around what is considered meaningful and worthy enough for our attention. The guest being interviewed, Jonathan Haidt, the author of the best selling book “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” (which has stayed at the top of the best selling list for way longer than most books), said that we can’t create a moral framework on our own, we have to do it collectively. 

And when I heard that I was like, Wow. That sounds really hard to do. How do we create a new collective story about what makes life meaningful? How do we reinforce a shared value set during a time when so many of us are afraid of speaking up too strongly with any kind of moral assertion? 

Part Two: The skill of creating personal coherence 

Today we have SO many options for what to do and how to do it but so few places to go for wisdom that we trust. We’re at this cultural moment of feeling like the world we knew it is quickly changing, and we’re having to rapidly try to understand what to care about, how to spend our time, and how to find aliveness and creative vision amidst all the change. 

If we don’t have a strong shared sense of what makes life meaningful. The next best thing I can think of is to learn how to develop our own belief about what makes life feel worth living and let that guide our ability to confidently make decisions. 

We need to become expert storytellers. And I don’t mean that in the sense that we need to become very entertaining and learn the craft of storytelling for a captive audience. I mean that we need to be able to form a sensible story for ourselves about who we are, what we want, and where we want to go next in order to not feel constantly paralyzed by indecision. The way we move forward in our lives with confidence is to act in accordance to our coherent story. 

So what I do with Coherence Studio is to help you unpack and integrate multiple layers of storytelling in your life to create a guiding narrative that informs your actions to build your next work/life chapter. You could think of it like understanding your internal operating system — what you care about, what your habits, strengths and weaknesses are — and then applying that operating system onto a protagonist’s narrative arc. If you are the main character in your story (and I hope you are) what do you need to do or learn in order to further the recurring themes of your life. 

As a coach I am interviewing you in order to pull out the important data points with which to later make up patterns and themes. I help you make those connections and really emphasize and validate their importance of them. I help synthesize the multiple storylines into a unified signature story. And finally we work together to apply that signature story to your future chapter. It’s like being the author who already knows the characters and plot lines and is trying to write the next most sensible and ideal chapter for the protagonist. 

While the inroad to my coaching practice is through career or work. It’s really about designing a next life chapter. Work has felt like biggest places of impact and contribution which is why I was drawn to supporting people there. Though I fully acknowledge that so much meaning and impact can happen in our personal lives, with family, friends, and a greater community. 

Many of the people I work with are not trying to optimize for work, but more for their own well being. We bring work into the conversation but we see it in the whole context of their life. 

This past year I took time to independently study the concept of adult development. I was really interested in how adult humans transform over time. What forces and factors influence how someone moves their personal storyline forward. Adult Development incorporates an understanding about someone’s life stage (are they in the exploration of the 20s, the nest building of the 30s, the return to independence in their 40s or 50s) with where someone in a cycle of personal renewal. Are they moving toward a goal, shedding an old life chapter, in the messy middle of not knowing what is next? Everyone has core themes to their life, that show up again and again, manifesting a little differently each time. Learning about Adult Development has given me an additional lens to support my clients and understand my own life. 

My sense is that if we understand the themes of our life, and many of them are related to values and many of them are related to core wounds, then we can use those themes as strong clues about how to direct our own personal evolution. 

Part Three: Healing as the engine to power your personal evolution 

It has surprised me how the concept of 'healing' comes into play here. I feel like healing is a concept that is much more tied to therapy than it is to coaching. But arguably there can be a lot of healing through coaching. Coaching focuses on triumphing over constrictive limiting beliefs in order to break unconstructive patterns.  The core wound can then actually be a guide for what direction someone needs to head in their next chapter.

Let me give you an example. A close to home example. 

One of my core wounds, arguably my biggest one, is from growing up with parents that were not in a loving and warm relationship. When I was a young adult, I saw my parents commitment to ‘stay together for the kids’ as some kind of weakness. I saw that their commitment to each other and keeping the family intact was the cause of much dissatisfaction. I think I made the connection that to be committed to something is to risk being stuck in something painful. In my 20s I jumped around a lot of jobs, boyfriends, and apartments. I was constantly on the move. I lived in 5 apartments in five years living in Brooklyn and had a new boyfriend and a different job every year and a half. I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to commit to anything. 

Working with therapists and a coach myself, the theme of commitment did show up and I saw how it tied to this painful element of my childhood. And if I were to project forward to what I needed to do to heal my relationship to commitment, I think an obvious answer would be to realize that I actually could commit to something and that commitment wasn't actually necessarily tied to being unhappy.

So I might work with prompts like “What is a small thing I can commit to?” Or “what have I actually already committed to in my life that has been a positive thing?” 

Does this example help you better understand how an opportunity for healing is actually a life theme and how knowing your life themes can help guide what you seek to create for your future?

If we come back to the main idea that stories create coherence. We can look at where healing plays a role in common narrative arcs that we can find in popular stories everywhere. 

The character journey patterns that I’ll cover today are: 

1. The Wound-Gift Transformation

2. The Return to Abandoned Power

3. The Integration of Opposing Forces

4. The Completion of Unfinished Business

5. The Mentor Becoming the Guide

Number 1: The Wound-Gift Transformation

In powerful stories, a character's deepest wound often becomes their greatest gift:

• Harry Potter's childhood trauma gives him resilience against Voldemort

• Frodo's burden of carrying the ring develops extraordinary inner strength

For me, I had another painful moment in life when I felt like I had been told I was special so much by my mom growing up, but then I didn’t feel like I excelled or was uniquely and remarkably good at anything by the time I was applying to college. Now I help people see what they are uniquely good at and I help validate that they truly do have something special to share with the world. So can you see how I transformed my own wound into a gift? 

People can find incredibly fulfillment when they transform their wounds into unique ways to contribute. For example: a dyslexic child with ADHD grows up to run a creativity school that is all about embracing many creative ways to do things, or an executive who was overlooked as a child becomes exceptional at spotting untapped talent in others.

For your own Wound-Gift Identification, you might ask “What painful experiences have given you unique insight or capabilities?" “What would have lessened your own suffering during that time?” 

Number 2: The Return to Abandoned Power

Many narratives involve characters reclaiming abilities or aspects they once gave up. 

• Luke Skywalker reconnects with the Force he initially rejected 

• Elsa in Frozen embracing powers she once feared and hid

When applied to one’s career evolution, this often looks like reclaiming talents or interests abandoned for practical reasons. My cousin Janet comes to mind, who I recently interviewed on the podcast. She was pressured into doing a more pragmatic path and chose law. Only to pivot into becoming a children’s book author and give up her lawyer path. Another example is of someone doing an analytical job who secretly loves writing might evolve toward strategic communications, or they might give up analytics all together and eventually decide to make their own books. 

For your own Abandoned Power Inventory, you might ask: "What abilities or interests did you set aside that still call to you?"

Number 3: The Integration of Opposing Forces

Healing in stories frequently requires bringing together and integrating seemingly contradictory aspects of oneself. 

• Bruce Banner learning to integrate Hulk rather than suppress him

• Katniss Everdeen balancing her fierce protectiveness with vulnerability

• Severus Snape's character in Harry Potter embodies the integration of seemingly irreconcilable opposites. He maintains his cover as a Death Eater while secretly protecting Harry, balancing cruelty with profound loyalty, and integrating his love for Lily with his resentment toward James Potter. What makes Snape's character so compelling is that he never fully resolves into a simple "good guy" - instead, his healing comes through holding these contradictions. 

When we think about integrating opposite forces and how this can relate to our careers, this can look like someone who previously was compartmentalizing an aspect of their personality to identity and begins to start bringing it back into their work. For example, I have had several clients who felt like they couldn’t bring their more passionate creative selves into their more buttoned up corporate job. One way to start integrating their life more would be to begin sharing and talking about their creative practice and life within their work conversations. Other examples of seemingly contradictory forces that can be brought together: pairing leadership with collaboration or pairing expertise with continuous learning.

For your own Integration Opportunities, you might ask: "Where in your life are you trying to keep parts of yourself separate that might create something powerful if combined?"

Number 4: The Completion of Unfinished Business

Healing in common narrative arcs often involves returning to resolve what was left incomplete:

• Simba returning to Pride Rock to face his past

• Will Smith's character in The Pursuit of Happyness completing what his father couldn't

We can apply this to the work world by noticing that some career transitions represent the completion of abandoned endeavors or interrupted dreams. The person who left music to pursue business may be ready to re-incorporating music in a new surprise way. Someone who got burned in journalism and left might find healing by returning to a different newsroom with a very different work culture and getting apply their journalism skills in a healthy setting. 

For your own Unfinished Business Exploration, you might ask: “Is there anything that feels incomplete in your story? What do you wish you had pursued or resolved?"

Lastly, Number 5: The Mentor Becoming the Guide

A common healing arc involves characters using their journey to help others:

• Haymitch mentoring Katniss through the games he survived

• Mister Miyagi in The Karate Kid - Having learned karate through his own difficult journey, Miyagi becomes the guide who transforms Daniel's unfocused anger into disciplined strength, passing down not just fighting techniques but life philosophy that he himself had to learn through hardship.
  

This Career Application is pretty straight-forward: Many find healing by becoming the guide they once needed. The person who struggled with learning differences becomes an educational innovator, creating tools they wish they'd had. Again, using me as an example, I am helping guide people to see how they are special after having wished I had had someone to help me in my early 20s. 

For your own Guide Potential, you might ask: "Who could benefit from the wisdom of your particular journey? Who needs the guide you could become?"

I hope those five examples of common healing narrative arcs were interesting and ideally thought provoking! Maybe you now have an idea about what painful part of your past could serve as a clue to how to evolve your own work?

Phew! That was a lot of conceptual connecting we just did. Thanks for traveling with me on this train of thought. I hope that it encourages you to spend some time getting curious about the main themes of your own personal story and where you, the protagonist, are in your own narrative arc.