Coaching practices for Fiction Moral Development
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Fiction Moral Development, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I treat each choice as its own isolated thing
- I can’t always go find someone doing something noble in my actual day, but I can lose myself in a story
- There’s one moral failing of mine
- I notice almost all my stories end the same way
- I only ever judge my choices by whether they worked out, so when a shortcut or a small dishonesty pays off I let it slide as a win
Practices that may help
- View your life as a narrative, not a sequence of choices
Ask: what story am I living, and does it reflect the character I am trying to build?
Virtue Ethics, Made Practical - Use great moral literature as an elevation source
Read fiction, biography, and history that places exceptional human virtue at the center.
Elevation: The Emotion That Lifts You - Name and wrestle with your besetting weakness
Identify the one recurring moral failure and choose a practice that confronts it daily.
The Eulogy Virtues: Building a Life of Character - Spot redemption and contamination sequences
Find the patterns in how your stories of setback and success tend to end.
Narrative Identity, Made Practical - Track character, not just outcomes
Evaluate your decisions by who they made you, not only by what they produced.
Phronesis: Aristotle’s Practical Wisdom - Be skeptical of clean lessons extracted from messy outcomes
When a story produces a neat takeaway, ask whether the lesson is actually in the data or in the narrative shaping.
The Narrative Fallacy: Why We Can’t Stop Making Stories - Ground ethics in love and compassion, not rule compliance
Let care for others — not fear of violation — be the engine of your moral conduct.
The Perennial Philosophy, Made Practical - Know your two selves (Adam I and Adam II)
Distinguish the self that wants to build and achieve from the self that wants to be good.
The Eulogy Virtues: Building a Life of Character - Apply the outcome equivalence test
Ask: if the same harm resulted from action vs. inaction, which would you prefer? Divergence reveals the bias.
Omission Bias — Why Doing Nothing Feels Safer Than Acting - Noticing and extending compassionate impulses
When you feel a spontaneous impulse toward compassion or fairness, act on it rather than suppressing it.
Confucian Self-Cultivation: The Mencius Approach
Related concerns
- Virtue Ethics At Work
Virtue ethics, developed by Aristotle and extended by thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre, holds that ethics is primarily about who you are rather than which rules you follow or which outcomes you produce. The practical core: identify the virtues a flourishing human being needs, and train them through deliberate habitual action — because character is what you repeatedly do, not what you occasionally decide.
- David Brooks Road To Character
Find a person — living or historical — whose eulogy virtues you admire and study how they built them.
Choose a character role model and study their biography
- Fairness As Action Principle
Apply the same standards of fairness to yourself that you would to someone you respect.
Be Fair: include yourself in the fairness you extend to others
- Macintyre Narrative Ethics
Ask: what story am I living, and does it reflect the character I am trying to build?
View your life as a narrative, not a sequence of choices
- Moral Beauty Journal
Record moments of moral beauty you witness — in others and in yourself — to train your attention toward virtue.
Keep an elevation journal
- Moral Exemplar
Select a specific person whose character in a specific domain you want to internalize, and study how they act — not just what they say.
Choose and study role models deliberately
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.