Narrative Coaching Exercises and Listening Cues

Your client has been talking for twenty minutes about the year she moved her family abroad. You know the dates, the city, the flat they rented. What you don't yet know is how she built the story: who acts in it, where it ends, and whether the hard part ever gets a reason.

Any good question gets a client talking. The narrative coaching exercises below were designed by researchers to do something more: to make a story readable afterwards. That is the part a coach can borrow.

Short answer: Three narrative coaching exercises come straight from life-story research: dividing a life into chapters, narrating a high point, a low point and a turning point, and describing a self-defining memory. The full research interview runs one to two hours (Adler et al., 2017); one exercise fits a session. While the client talks, listen for five things: authorship, connection, redemption, contamination and explanation.

What are narrative coaching exercises?

Narrative coaching exercises are structured prompts that ask a client to tell part of their life as a story, so that coach and client can look at how the story is built, not only at what happened in it.

Narrative coaching is coaching that works through the stories people tell about themselves. David Drake's model, for example, organizes the work into four stages: situate, search, shift and sustain (Hunt, 2023). We don't teach that model here and have nothing to add to it.

Our exercises come from somewhere else: the interviews psychologists use to study narrative identity, the internalized and evolving story of the self that a person builds to make sense of their life (McAdams & McLean, 2013). In plain words, these research prompts work as narrative coaching questions:

1. Chapters. Think of your life as a book. Divide it into chapters, name each one, and say briefly what it was about.
2. Key scenes. Describe one specific moment that was a high point, one that was a low point, and one that was a turning point.
3. A self-defining memory. Describe a memory, at least a year old, that you have gone back to many times and that helps explain who you are.
4. The closing question for every scene. Why does this moment stand out to you now, and what does it say about who you are as a person?

None of these began as a coaching technique; each was written so researchers could compare one story with another. That is why they suit a coach: the prompt is neutral, so the shape of the answer belongs to the client.

Exercise 1: life chapters

The chapters exercise asks the client to treat their life as a book, divide it into chapters and name each one; it opens the Life Story Interview that Dan McAdams first described in 1985 (McAdams et al., 2001).

How to brief it. Read the instruction once and stop. Don't give an example chapter title: the client will copy its size and tone. It works well as homework on paper, with a deadline.

What to hold back. Don't suggest where a chapter ends. Don't help with names. A period the client cannot name is information, and a name you supplied is not.

What to listen for in the list. Which chapter took longest to name, and which one the client hurries past when reading the list back to you. Both tell you where to ask next. How to read the breaks themselves is in our guide to the life chapters exercise.

Exercise 2: high point, low point, turning point

The high point, low point and turning point exercise asks a client for three bounded scenes from the Life Story Interview. Adler and colleagues describe them as three prompts that "have received extensive attention in research on narrative identity," and suggest the three scenes on their own for studies that do not need the whole life story (Adler et al., 2017). For a coaching session, one scene is plenty.

How to run it. Ask for one specific moment, not a stretch of years, and end with the question of why it stands out now and what it says about the client: that answer is where the explanation cue below gets its material. Let the first telling run to the end before you comment. The exact prompts, and why researchers word them as they do, are in what the life story interview asks.

A note on the turning point. Adler and colleagues put the difference plainly: the Life Story Interview's "turning point prompt assumes the importance of change to identity, whereas a self-defining memory allows more room for the narration of change and stability" (Adler et al., 2017). Some clients see their life as continuous and will strain to produce one. For them, Exercise 3 is the better prompt.

Exercise 3: a self-defining memory

A self-defining memory is a vivid, emotionally intense, well-rehearsed memory that links to other memories sharing its theme and to an enduring concern or an unresolved conflict (Singer et al., 2013).

The prompt comes from Jefferson Singer's work; the written instructions go back to Singer and Moffitt (1992). Adler and colleagues (2017) call Singer's prompt (Blagov & Singer, 2004) "an alternative prototype" to the Life Story Interview, one that has been "widely used in research on autobiographical memory and narrative identity."

How to brief it. Ask for a memory the client keeps going back to and that still carries strong feeling; the full research criteria are in our article on self-defining memories and what they show.

What to listen for. The concern under the memory. A follow-up of our own, not part of the research prompt: ask whether any other memory feels like this one. If the client finds two or three, you are hearing a theme, not an anecdote.

What to listen for: five cues in a client's story

The five cues are authorship, connection, redemption, contamination and explanation: features that narrative researchers code in life stories, rephrased here as things a listener can notice in the room.

They are listening prompts, not a scoring rubric. Researchers code these features with written manuals and trained raters who check each other's work (Adler et al., 2017). You are hearing one telling, once, and the cues only tell you where to ask the next question.

Two rules from our own coding instructions carry over. Each cue is independent, so a story can be high on both authorship and connection, or carry both redemption and contamination. And a cue you don't hear is absent, not low; a short answer simply gives it less room.

The client lines below were written for this article, not quoted from real clients.

These five come from the coding definitions behind our own assessment, which follow the research ones without being identical. Our Quick reads six such features in written answers; the sixth, thematic coherence (one theme running across several episodes), is hard to hear in a single session. We map which feature each Quick question reads in a separate guide.

Narrative coaching vs narrative therapy: where the line is

Narrative therapy is a form of psychotherapy; narrative coaching is not, even when the two use the same techniques.

Narrative therapy, developed by Michael White and David Epston (Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, W. W. Norton, 1990), works by separating the person from the problem (externalizing) and re-authoring the story. The fields borrow from each other: a 2018 paper compares how externalizing conversations are used in both (Jensen, Høyer, & Spaten, 2018).

Our line is simple. Coaching works with the story a functioning adult wants to develop. Therapy treats distress. The three exercises above can sit in either room, but the room decides what you do with the answer. If you are a coach, a low point that turns out to be a trauma is not yours to work through.

Can you use a life-story assessment with clients?

You can use a life-story assessment such as WhatsMyArc with a client only as the client's own reflection: they take it on their own account and decide what to share.

WhatsMyArc is a narrative identity assessment: a person writes open answers about episodes from their own life, an AI reads them for features like the five above, and the report returns one of ten narrative types and a written analysis. The free Quick is five open questions and about 7 minutes. Several of its questions ask for specific episodes, and two are close to the protocol's high point and turning point; it does not run the chapters exercise or ask for a self-defining memory.

There is no practitioner or multi-client version, and the Terms of Service set the limits plainly. Users agree not to use the service to assess, screen or make decisions about another person, not to submit another person's personal information as interview content without their knowledge, and not to misrepresent results as professional psychological assessments, diagnoses or clinical evaluations. Users must be 18 or over. The analysis has not been independently validated as a scientific instrument.

So the honest workflow is short: a curious client takes the Quick and can download the report as a PDF to bring to a session, or not. You don't take it for them, and you don't use it to assess them.

When you don't need these exercises, and when to refer

You don't need narrative exercises when the client's goal is concrete and close: a presentation next month, a negotiation, a delegation problem. Their life story is not the bottleneck.

Skip the chapters exercise for a client who struggles to see their life in periods; the chapters give them little to grip, and one scene works better. And skip all three for a client who does not want to talk about the past. These exercises need consent, not persuasion.

Refer when the story goes somewhere coaching should not follow. Researchers anticipate this. Adler and colleagues note that "reporting personal narratives can be a taxing, emotional experience, particularly for certain types of events (e.g., low points, traumas, and transgressions)," and advise defining the task before consent, checking in during the session and being prepared to make referrals (Adler et al., 2017). The ICF Code of Ethics (effective 1 April 2025, checked October 2026) asks coaches to stay alert to a shift in the value of the coaching relationship and, where appropriate, to explore "the potential for a different coach, professional, or resource." It does not define where coaching ends, so the judgment is yours.

If the story brings up distress the client cannot settle, a trauma that is still open, or any risk of harm, refer them to a licensed mental-health professional. In an emergency, that means local emergency services, not the next session.

Start with your own chapters

Before you ask a client to divide their life into chapters, divide your own. Half an hour, on paper, no rewriting. You will find out where the instruction is hard, and brief it better for having stalled on it yourself.

To see what a structured reading of a few episodes looks like, open the sample report on fictional data.