Welcome, fellow creatives, to Annie Macmillan’s world of narrative coaching.
I use folk tales and archetypes as narrative prompts.
I work individually, and in group settings, online.
Explore your life situations in subtle and powerfully transformative ways, bringing you closer to the authentic YOU.
From our initial interaction, we will look at a pertinent folk tale or other bibliography source of your choice to work along side your present challenges, questioning and exploring resonances to realise hidden truths.
To take a simple illustration, take a school experience of spiteful comments, ungenerous treatment and cold shoulders:
We might explore, for instance, Cinderella, not as a victim in her story, but, through resonant experiences, begin to recognise her as the heroine who rose beyond her sisters’ unfounded slights.
For Cinderella donned three different ball gowns, (which you may be in the process of doing right now, but do not realise). Each ball gown is more complicated and ingenious than the last. She incrementally left behind her social conditioning and prepared to take on co-running a Kingdom, and so lived her true potential. (And she probably still buffed up the brass occasionally?)
Or how to bring a whole truth to diversity as in the recording opposite, ‘Old Turtle and the Broken Truth’.
Or in the middle of globally tangled chaos, how can we be with the hope of a new and coherent earth emerging? Recording below…
Author: Sharon Blackie
From her book: The Enchanted Life 2018 September Publishing (with permission)
Narrator: Annie Macmillan 8 minute listen
Explore with me as a growth companion
who listens
listens deeply
who is independent of your daily world so has no preconceived notions of how things ‘should’ be
who offers gentle challenges to arrest present conundrums and reinvent them
who is non-judgemental
who believes in you just the way you are
who taps into your particular creative way of being, learning and working
How do we calm perceived tempests?
What is emerging?
A Grandmother’s Story Cupboard on Substack
https://anniemacmillan.substack.com/
My facilitated workshop:
Our Lives Through Fairy Tales
A four-part online program opening up that area of the mind that bridges the left and the right sides of the brain, leading to insights about the participant’s situation. Through folk tale, art images, free writing, poetry, metaphor, meditation and discussion, leading to looking at writing or image making a significant part of your life journey in folk tale fashion.
The present workshop, which finishes mid-December, is now closed.
Contact me at macmillan.annie@gmail.com for dates in 2025
Look forward to being with you.
Recording from the book:
Old Turtle and the Broken Truth story by Douglas Wood 2003 Scholastic Press
Narrator: Annie Macmillan 16 minute listen
I took a very scenic route through my career…
I began my English life as the daughter of a corporate manager, trained as a catering manager, perfect for entertaining as the wife of a corporate manager and went with my new husband to Africa.
There we brought up two beautiful children, while I caught up on my academic education by correspondence, and experienced the colonial life in Zambia and Zimbabwe, visiting such places as South Africa, Mauritius, and the United States.
But I became more and more restless, and when we moved back in England, opted for a very unconventional Post Graduate Diploma in Humanistic Psychology.
The content was almost entirely experiential.
I realised this was my way of learning. I absorbed and experimented, and wrote through personal folk and fairy tales…
And to process all that I garnered about myself with others, I continued writing and writing and writing, and eventually wrote about a storyteller and put many of the personal folk tales into one long story…a reflection of my experiences, inner and outer (Soul medicine)
After Australia, and now on my own, I tried once again to ‘fit in’ to social convention: Distinction in Creative Writing MA, a pass in Children’s Book Illustration diploma.
Then ill health and a deterioration in mental health intervened…
I literally dug my way out of that depression…making and making and making lino cuts, then Japanese wood cuts…gouging and cutting and image making…(Soul medicine)
My next breakthrough came after lockdown when I signed up for online Psychosynthesis Coaching training, purely to experience (there’s that word again!) the subtlety of Assagioli’s approach to the whole person: mind, body, emotions, spirit.
And all that experiencing from Humanistic Psychology flooded back as if it was yesterday!! The group dynamics, the creative dance and psychodrama, the fun exercises to create receptive listening, and most of all, the teaching tales…
And then, low and behold (as in all good fairy tales), along came…
2024 Finding Yourself in Fairy Tales: A Narrative Psychological Approach.
Leader: Dr Sharon Blackie
Author of ‘When Women Rose Rooted’, ‘This Enchanted Life’, ‘Hagitude’ and many fascinating and well choreographed online courses.
https://sharonblackie.net/
with Pacifica Graduate Institute, California
www.https://www.pacifica.edu/
…and all my years of searching have finally found credence, my personal experiences had words and a tribe!!
How do we recognise learning tools?
The more formal learning:
2023-4 Foundations of Team Coaching (Online and in Person)
2022-3 Holistic Coaching Practitioner Programme (Online)
Psychosynthesis Coaching Ltd
https://www.psychosynthesiscoaching.co.uk/
2015 Children’s Book Illustration diploma
Cambridge School of Arts: Anglia Ruskin University
2012 MA Creative Writing
University of Newcastle
1992-4 Post Graduate Diploma in Facilitation Styles
(Group Dynamics and workshop design)
University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
How do we break a mould?
Since our inner health is about balancing all our faculties, here is a potent way to align body, mind and spirit as the process brings them all into play. The invitation is to move beyond the present, acceptable mental parameters or ‘edges’.
I like to call this process the Lore of Edges.
‘Lore’ refers to social values, mutually accepted over generations,
as opposed to
Laws established and enforced by the state.
Both can become outmoded.
Social lore has a little more ‘wiggle room’ to evolve. This requires the willingness to play with those parameters, those edges….
New ports of entry
To continue this voyage of discovery, the sound of a thinking partner’s voice or seeing their face will take you a step closer to your goals. Please contact me below for a free 30 minute chemistry session on Zoom