Active Narratives inform both my one-to-one work and workshops—for example, in The Fearless Presenter?, in work with phobias, and when exploring what may be keeping someone stuck. It offers a way of exploring how the stories we carry influence how we see ourselves, respond to experience and approach change.

Active Narratives can be explored through one-to-one work, where there is space to focus on your own experience and what matters to you. It has also developed as a workshop in its own right: a shared space for exploring the narratives that have helped shape us, noticing what they make possible or difficult, and considering what we may want to carry forward.

Each exploration begins with your own experience rather than a fixed method. Depending on what matters to you, it may draw on some of the following:

• Awareness: The past can shape not only how we understand ourselves, but how we live. The stories we carry can quietly disorganise everyday life, influencing our choices and how we act and react from moment to moment—often outside conscious awareness. Exploring them may bring some of these patterns into view, along with strengths and possibilities that have been difficult to see.
• Choice & Agency: Awareness opens up the possibility of choice, but it does not tell us what to choose. Recognising a familiar pattern can leave us uncertain about what else we could do or which direction to take. Together, we explore what greater agency might look like in practice: considering different responses, what they might lead to and how they sit with what matters to us.
• Mindfulness in Practice: Mindfulness brings awareness into everyday life. Even a brief pause—the space between one breath and the next—can help us notice what is happening within and around us before we respond automatically.
• Examining Familiar Beliefs: Some stories become so familiar that they begin to feel like facts. Exploring how they formed, how they have been reinforced and whether they still fit can make room for a broader, more compassionate understanding.
• Writing the Next Chapter: The past can influence our future, but it need not determine it. We cannot rewrite what has happened or control everything that comes next. We can, however, take a more active part in how the story continues—bringing greater awareness and intention to the life we are living now.

You do not need to know what the next chapter of your life should be.
If you’d like to explore what may be shaping the one you’re living now, why not begin with a conversation?