It took me two attempts to pass my drivers license when I was 18. Then, barely three months since I had been driving legally, I received five traffic fines in the post. Five! The thought struck: what kind of fool fails his first attempt at getting a license and then wraps up five fines in 3 months of driving? Clearly, it was a fool who was a terrible driver! My confidence dropped as the implications of my road hazard status sunk in. And this was happening just when I was meant to be enjoying the freedom of the open road …

Coming to see yourself as a terrible driver is pretty easy when faced with the evidence. One easily forgets the instances where I displayed characteristics of being an excellent driver (e.g. dodging a kid that runs into the road). While the driver's license saga is unique, the process we go through when encountering personal problems is much the same – events happen that have a meaning ascribed to them. These meanings have value judgments on our identities, and before you know it, you've taken on board the identity of those judgments. This is how some problems become so dominant in our lives and we end up taking on the identity of the problem.

And so, problems seem to have this way with us – they tend to dominate our identities, and instead of the problem being the problem, we come to believe that we ourselves are the problem. It is this insight that is one of the fundamental positions a Narrative Therapist will take.

Over the last few decades, one sees how the convergence of Postmodernism, Post-structuralism and Psychology have converged to birth Narrative Therapy. Often dubbed the 3rd Wave in psychology, Narrative Therapy notices how we make sense of our world and understand reality through words – it becomes a discursive event. Founders Michael White and David Epston made profound shifts in the psychological world by showing how externalising a problem in the context of a client's story introduces new options for recovery.

Problems tend to create a dominant story in our personal storys', thus subjugating alternative stories that may speka of a different reality. The narrative therapeutic process is one then that aims to reposition the alternative stories in a clients life such that a new story can be authored.

Narrative Therapy is best at home in the therpaist-client relationship but has clear and tangilbe value to add in organisations as teams and leaders try to get to grips with their identities and the problems they face.