Smorgasbords, Cracked Pots and Potholes: The Role of Chronotopes in Shaping Coaching Conversations

Abstract

Drawing on interviews and authoethnography, this paper argues that chronotopes offer a novel approach to deconstructing the dialogical exchange between coach and coachee. Chronotopes shape coaching conversations through specific language use. Chronotopes are aesthetic, literary devices referring to timespace that configures different contexts. While there are a multitude of chronotopes, the 'Travel', 'Pragmatic' and 'Romantic' chronotopes are focused on in this paper. These are present in the language of coaching, articulated in concepts including maps, tools and feeling. Critically, these chronotopes dynamically interact, creating opportunities for new coaching vocabularies that enable coach and coachee to escape from a monological time-space.