What a Career Coach Can Learn from a Playwright: Expressive Dialogues for Identity Development

Abstract

Society is inside of man and man is inside society, and you cannot even create a truthfully drawn psychological entity on the stage until you understand his social relations and their power to make him what he is and to prevent him from being what he is not. The fish is in the water and the water is in the fish. ARTHUR MILLER Writing expressive dialogues can be used to assist individuals in developing their career identities-that is: stories that are needed to help people position themselves in relation to the current labour market. Writing expressive dialogues entails having written conversations with various parts of us-much like a playwright does with his charactersand making developmental gains in the process. In Dialogical Self Theory (DST) terms, it means talking to and with various I-positions on the page, perhaps forming coalitions, discovering counter positions, and innovating and integrating the self (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010, p. 228-234). And as the playwright Miller suggests in the above quote, the creation of identity is an interactive process between self and others. Expressive dialogues as a writing exercise, which primarily cultivates the dialogue within the self (i.e. the internal dialogue), is part of the "career-writing" method,

Dialogical coaching: An experiential approach to personal and professional development.

“…This article has centralized chairwork in dialogical coaching. Although the strength of this procedure lies in its immediacy, flexibility, and growing empirical support, chairwork is not the only means to facilitate dialogical practice: Imagery, expressive writing, and surrogate objects offer alternative mediums for symbolizing, expressing, and dialoguing with I-positions (Lengelle, 2016;Schwartz & Sweezey, 2019). It must also be reiterated that chairwork is a potent tool for bringing about change.…”

Writing the Self for Reconciliation and Global Citizenship: The Inner Dialogue and Creative Voices for Cultural Healing

“…"Writing the self" refers to the work of using creative, expressive, and reflective forms of writing to work on identity formation: the process of going from a first (i.e., destructive, distressing, victim-laden) to second (i.e., life-giving) story through a process of engaging with feelings and progressing through the cognitive steps of sensing, sifting, focusing, and understanding (for an elaboration see Lengelle & Meijers, 2009;Meijers & Lengelle, 2012). In dialogical self theory terms, it is making use of a variety of writing exercises in order to express I-positions (i.e., what is important to me), and to broaden and deepen I-positions (i.e., when/how this is important and in what other situations is it important), in order to eventually develop meta (i.e., permitting overview of positions and their relationships) and promoter positions (i.e., organizing and giving direction to other positions) (Lengelle, 2016). The development of meta and promoter positions ultimately makes leaving I-prisons possible.…”

“…DST also describes how the "external positions" of the world in which we were and are socialized and which formed our identities have become internalized selves and sometimes become I-prisons. The work of writing the self is about allowing the contradictions and the conflicting inner voices to be heard and talk to one another in a felt way (Lengelle, 2016). This becomes a starting point for more democratic internal and external dialogues in terms of creating "third positions" or the "Third Space" (Bhabha, 1990), where "hybridity and globalization are closely allied .…”