A Prolegomenon for Ethical, Effective, and Culturally Responsive Practice

By Dr. Dawn C. Reid, PCC

Introduction

Coaching discourse often cautions practitioners against “getting lost in the client’s story.” While intended to preserve focus and accountability, this heuristic is frequently interpreted as narrative avoidance—especially among developing coaches—thereby constraining meaning‑making, identity‑relevant context, and culturally shaped experience that can be essential for growth. This prolegomenon introduces Developmental Narrative Holding as a foundational construct for discerning when narrative functions as developmental context versus limiting structure. Drawing on narrative psychology, social constructionism, and adult meaning‑making theory, the construct clarifies how coaches can engage story without collusion or bypass. The prolegomenon further situates Culturally Responsive Coaching (CRC) as an applied expression of Contextual Narrative Engagement, specifying how culture and social identity inform narrative work while preserving professional coaching boundaries.

Keywords: coaching, narrative, meaning‑making, culturally responsive coaching, ethics, supervision, adult development

Why “Don’t Get Lost in the Story” Requires Conceptual Clarity

Within coach education and professional discourse, coaches are frequently cautioned against “getting lost in the client’s story.” The intent is to reduce rumination, prevent unproductive venting, and keep coaching oriented toward learning, goals, and accountability. In practice, however, this guidance is often treated as a rule—minimize story, redirect quickly—rather than as a discernment skill. As a result, coaches, particularly those early in their development, may prematurely interrupt or reframe narratives before understanding what function the narrative is serving.

This prolegomenon begins from a different premise: narrative is not merely content that delays action. Narrative is a primary human medium for meaning‑making. In cultural psychology, meaning is constructed through language and narrative within cultural contexts rather than extracted as objective fact (Bruner, 1993). In personality and developmental psychology, narrative identity is understood as an internalized and evolving life story that provides coherence and purpose (McAdams & McLean, 2013; McAdams, 2017). If coaching aims to support agency, insight, and growth, then coaching must be able to work skillfully with clients’ meaning‑making narratives—without collapsing into either avoidance or immersion.

The ethical and cultural implications are significant. In many cultural contexts, storytelling functions as epistemology: how people communicate lived experience, values, belonging, and social identity. A coaching stance that reflexively constrains narrative can inadvertently privilege narrow norms of efficiency over culturally grounded ways of knowing and expressing experience. Accordingly, this prolegomenon establishes a conceptual foundation for engaging narrative with rigor, discernment, and ethical clarity.

Defining Narrative in Coaching: Meaning‑Making, Not “Details”

For the purposes of this prolegomenon, client narrative is defined as the client’s structured meaning‑making account of lived experience through which identity, values, emotion, culture, and context are expressed. This definition distinguishes narrative from several frequently conflated phenomena:

• Narrative is not gossip or hearsay—secondhand speculation about others that is unanchored from the client’s lived experience or coaching aims.

• Narrative is not accountability shifting—repetitive storytelling that displaces agency without inquiry into influence, choice, or responsibility.

• Narrative is not "unbounded" processing—repetition that fails to generate new awareness, meaning, or possibility.

This distinction matters because narrative is never neutral; it always performs a function. Coaching competence is demonstrated not by avoiding story, but by discerning what the story is doing in the moment.

The Construct: Developmental Narrative Holding

Developmental Narrative Holding refers to the coach’s capacity to engage, contain, and work with client narratives as meaning‑making structures—without collapsing into problem immersion, collusion, or loss of accountability—while supporting insight, agency, and growth.

The construct resolves a false binary embedded in much coaching folklore: either the coach “honors the story” (risking stagnation) or “moves the client out of the story” (risking bypass of meaning, identity, and context). Developmental Narrative Holding proposes a third stance: hold the narrative long enough to discern its function, then intervene based on that function.

Contextual expressions of the construct. The construct appears differently depending on context, without becoming a different theory. For example:

• Narrative Discernment emphasizes coach training and mentoring, focusing on helping coaches recognize narrative function in real time and make purposeful choices about when to deepen, challenge, or redirect story.

• Contextual Narrative Engagement emphasizes culturally responsive practice, treating narrative as a legitimate epistemological site where lived experience, social identity, and worldview are communicated.

Narrative Function at the Prolegomena Level: Context or Constraint

This prolegomenon operationalizes narrative at the level of function, not technique. The central distinction is between narrative as developmental context and narrative as limiting structure.

Narrative as developmental context. The client's narrative functions as developmental context when it supports integration and meaning‑making—helping the client organize experience into coherence, contextual awareness, and increased agency. Narrative identity research frames life stories as integrative structures that connect reconstructed past and imagined future to provide unity and purpose (McAdams & McLean, 2013; McAdams, 2017). Adult development theory suggests that growth involves shifts in how individuals make meaning, not merely changes in behavior (Kegan, 1983).

Conceptual indicators that the client's narrative is serving development include expanding coherence (the client can articulate what the experience means), increasing agency (the client can identify choice or authorship), and deepening contextual awareness (the client can locate experience within relational, institutional, or cultural systems).

Narrative as limiting structure. Narrative functions as a limiting structure when it stabilizes identity or coherence at the expense of growth. This may include repetitive loops without new insight, rigid identity claims, chronic blame frames, or persistent accountability drift. From a meaning‑making perspective, such narratives often reflect an organizing system that protects the self from complexity rather than expanding perspective (Kegan, 1983).

Disruption becomes appropriate not because story exists, but because the narrative’s function has shifted from meaning‑making to constraint.

CRC as Contextual Narrative Engagement

The Culturally Responsive Coaching (CRC) curriculum, developed by Dr. Dawn Reid, PCC, is an applied coaching education approach that explicitly integrates culture and social identity into the coaching relationship. CRC trains coaches to manage bias, incorporate social identity and culture into the coaching process, and understand how coach and client worldviews shape the coaching experience. It emphasizes trauma‑informed inquiry and “challenge with care,” enabling coaches to engage narrative without dismissing or invalidating culturally shaped experience (Reid, 2025).

Within this prolegomenon, CRC is not positioned as a separate theory of coaching. Rather, it serves as a concrete example of Contextual Narrative Engagement: an applied framework that treats narrative as a legitimate site of cultural meaning‑making and trains coaches to discern when narrative should be deepened for awareness and when it should be disrupted in service of agency and accountability.

Cultural Identity Framework: Why Hays (2001) Matters

To support contextual narrative engagement, this prolegomenon draws on Pamela Hays’ work on cultural complexity and multidimensional identity. Hays (2001) emphasizes that identity is complex and contextual rather than one‑dimensional, supporting the claim that narrative frequently carries culturally shaped meaning and social identity dynamics. Hays (1996) provides the foundational articulation of the ADRESSING model as a structured way to attend to overlapping identity factors.

Used together, these works support both depth and structure: the 2001 text provides a comprehensive framework for understanding cultural complexity, while the 1996 article offers a concise, operational model for identity awareness that can inform coaching discernment without collapsing into assessment or diagnosis.

Ethics, Competence, and Professional Boundaries

Developmental Narrative Holding does not replace coaching competency frameworks; it clarifies how competence is enacted in story‑rich moments. Ethical coaching requires honoring client lived experience, maintaining appropriate boundaries, and supporting accountability. Developmental Narrative Holding specifies a disciplined stance toward narrative: engage story as meaning‑making, discern its function, and intervene based on whether narrative is expanding or constraining awareness and agency.

CRC supports this stance by explicitly training bias management, sociocultural identity integration, and trauma‑informed inquiry in ways that preserve dignity while sustaining coaching purpose (Reid, 2025).

Implications for Coach Training, Mentoring, and Supervision

Because narrative avoidance is often mis‑taught as best practice, coach education, and coach supervision benefit from explicitly developing narrative discernment. Training can emphasize narrative as meaning‑making rather than distraction; mentoring can assess how coaches remain present with story while making purposeful shifts; and supervision can explore how culture, systems, and identity shape what clients can say, imagine, and claim as possible.

Conclusion

The coaching caution against “getting lost in the story” is best understood as a warning against unskillful engagement, not an indictment of narrative itself. Narrative is a primary human mechanism for meaning‑making and identity construction (Bruner, 1993; McAdams & McLean, 2013; McAdams, 2017). Developmental Narrative Holding provides a prolegomena foundation for engaging client stories ethically and effectively by discerning narrative function and intervening accordingly. CRC exemplifies Contextual Narrative Engagement by training coaches to treat culture and social identity as integral to coaching outcomes while preserving professional boundaries and accountability (Reid, 2025).

References

Bruner, J. (1993). Acts of meaning: Four lectures on mind and culture. Harvard University Press.

Hays, P. A. (1996). Addressing the complexities of culture and gender in counseling. Journal of Counseling & Development, 74(4), 332–338.

Hays, P. A. (2001). Addressing cultural complexities in practice: A framework for clinicians and counselors. American Psychological Association.

International Coaching Federation. (2019). ICF Core Competencies. https://coachingfederation.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/icf-cs-core-competencies-2019.pdf

International Coaching Federation. (2025). ICF Code of Ethics. https://coachingfederation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/icf-ethics-code-of-ethics-2025.pdf

Kegan, R. (1983). The evolving self: Problem and process in human development. Harvard University Press.

McAdams, D. P. (2017). Life‑story approach to identity. In Encyclopedia of personality and individual differences. Springer.https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_530-1

McAdams, D. P., & McLean, K. C. (2013). Narrative identity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), 233–238.

Reid, D. C. (2025). CRC course description v2: 4‑week culturally responsive coach training [Course description]. Reid Ready Life Coaching, LLC.