Reflexivity in life design interventions: Comments on life and career design dialogues

•Narration develops from structuring the past to projecting some future prospects.•Counselees become more self-determining.•Operations involved in the interventions allow a passage from emotion to cognition.•Dialogical counseling stimulates the use of cognitive processes of interpretation.

Papers published in the Symposium on Reflexivity in Life Design Interventions show that narrative innovation develops from a focus on structuring the past to increased engagement in projecting some future prospects. Counselees are energized by the interventions: They become more self-determining. All operations involved in the interventions (basically: telling someone about different life elements identified by the person as important because they are emotionally invested) allows a passage from emotion to cognition (or more precisely: a passage from a felt - emotional - temporal continuity to an expressed temporal continuity), which determines a meaning of life for the concerned person (or a meaning of a fraction of his/her life). The dialogic interactions at work in counseling interventions appear to be the fundamental factor that fostered reflexivity and led to these changes: the situation of dialogical counseling - because of its specific characteristics - stimulates the use of cognitive processes of interpretation, which appear to be the key factor determining the changes.