Coaching practices for Macintyre Narrative Ethics

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Macintyre Narrative Ethics, 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 work on my character all in my own head, by my own standards, and it stays abstract and unproven
  • I’ve chased my own success for years and gotten a lot of it, but it’s started to feel hollow and self-enclosed
  • Something messy happened and out popped this neat little takeaway, the moral of the story
  • My whole story is achievement, achievement, achievement

Practices that may help

  1. 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
  2. Narrative Identity, Made Practical
    Dan McAdams’ narrative identity theory holds that identity itself is a personal myth — an internalized, evolving story that integrates your past, present, and imagined future into a coherent sense of self. The structure and tone of that story (whether it moves toward redemption or contamination, agency or communion) predicts psychological well-being, and the story can be deliberately revised. Evidence is primarily observational but robustly consistent.
  3. Embed your virtues in a practice community
    The virtues needed for excellence in any serious practice (craft, sport, relationship) are real virtues — find the practice that calls them out.
    Virtue Ethics, Made Practical
  4. Write your generativity chapter
    Articulate what you want to contribute to the world — the chapter that makes your story matter beyond yourself.
    Narrative Identity, Made Practical
  5. 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
  6. Balance agency and communion themes in your story
    Check whether your life narrative is weighted toward self-expansion (agency) or connection (communion).
    Narrative Identity, Made Practical
  7. Revise your life narrative when it limits you
    Identify and reauthor the story you tell about your past that constrains what you believe is possible.
    The Life Crafting Intervention: Scripting Your Future Self
  8. Track character, not just outcomes
    Evaluate your decisions by who they made you, not only by what they produced.
    Phronesis: Aristotle’s Practical Wisdom
  9. Test your actions against the common good
    Ask whether what you’re about to do serves or damages the common good — not just your interests.
    Sympatheia — the Stoic Practice of Universal Interconnection
  10. Virtue Ethics, Made Practical
    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.

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