Whilst mindfulness has become a popular practice in the West (Brown and Ryan, 2003; Kabat-Zinn, 2003, 2005), mindful agency is a relatively new concept. Mindful agency is defined as “a positive learning disposition that involves a strong sense of autonomy, authenticity, competence, intentionality and self-awareness in observation, management and regulation of the motivational, cognitive, emotional, and social processes that an individual needs to be able to engage in effective learning in order to achieve his or her own learning goals” (Wang and Peng, 2017). The original concept of mindful agency was coined by Deakin-Crick et al. (2015) in their reanalysis of 15 years' data derived from the project of learning power using Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory (Deakin-Crick et al., 2002a,b, 2004; Deakin-Crick and Yu, 2008). The construct of mindful agency is associated with three factors: (1) managing the process of learning, (2) managing the feeling associated with challenge, and (3) agency in taking responsibility for learning purposes, processes, and procedures. Mindful agency demonstrates significant positive correlation with creativity, curiosity, sense-making, optimism, and hope measured in the learning power model (Deakin-Crick et al., 2015). Early scholars suggested that mindful agency conceptually integrates various learning dispositions and capacities, such as meta-cognitive strategies (Veenman et al., 2006; Vrugt and Oort, 2008), emotional intelligence (Varela et al., 1991; Fredrickson, 2001; Fredrickson and Losada, 2005), self-efficacy (Bandura, 1982, 1986, 1994; Zimmerman et al., 1992; Zimmerman and Schunk, 2006), and hope theories (Snyder et al., 2002).

Wang and Peng (2017) extended the notion of mindful agency by explicitly connecting agency theories (Carter and Sealey, 2000; Hazel et al., 2008; Bown, 2009; Gao, 2010; Adele et al., 2011), hope theories (Snyder et al., 2002), self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 1985, 2000; Koestner and Losier, 2002), flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Engeser et al., 2005), mindfulness (Langer, 1993, 1997, 2000; Brown and Ryan, 2003; Kabat-Zinn, 2003, 2005), and acceptance and commitment therapy (Hayes, 2004; Hayes et al., 2006). Further, they revised the comprehensive psychometric tool and identified a five-dimension structure of mindful agency by exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis using two different cohorts of Chinese undergraduate students. The five factors of mindful agency involve learning methods (the ability to adopt different methods accordingly and flexibly in various learning activities), emotional regulation (the ability to regulate negative emotions when facing obstacles and challenges), awareness of planning (the ability to be aware of and adopt appropriate strategies when approaching particular tasks), openness to experience (being open and acceptive to various learning experiences, acknowledging them as natural parts of the learning process), and learning engagement (deep immersion, active participation, and profound intrinsic motivation in learning). Empirically, significant results have been found that mindful agency is positively correlated with creativity, particularly with fluency and originality (Wang and Hu, 2016), positively correlated with academic emotional regulation ability (Wang and Zhang, 2016), and learning strategy regulation ability, mediated by self-efficacy (Wang and Ar, 2016), and negatively correlated with academic procrastination, mediated by self-regulatory ability (Wang and Yu, 2016).

Mindful agency is an emerging and important concept of positive learning disposition. We have been developing various coaching interventions to help students to enhance their mindful agency over a number of cohorts. The framework of the coaching program reported in this study integrated narrative, mindfulness, and positive psychology to develop mindful agency in the undergraduate students. The narrative coaching addressed mindful agency's central component, i.e., the sense of ownership and responsibility in one's learning. Narratives enable individuals to forge new connections between their stories, identities, and values in order to generate action and embody new options (Drake, 2007, 2010; Law, 2007; Stelter and Law, 2010; Kerr et al., 2013; Stelter, 2013). In mindfulness-based coaching, we adapted Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR, Kabat-Zinn, 1990) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT, Segal et al., 2012) into a series of activities that were suitable for undergraduate students. It would exert impact on how individuals perceive their learning experiences from different perspectives, regulate and manage emotions when they face challenges, and flexibly respond to different learning occasions. The positive psychology coaching (Seligman et al., 2006; Biswas-Diener, 2012), as a strength-based intervention, would help students to explore their core values, resources and motivations when they are engaged in learning. In summary, the mindful agency coaching program was designed to support participants' self-directedness and intrinsic motivation in learning, help them to develop a sustained, non-discriminatory observation of momentary experience, promote the awareness of their own thoughts and emotions, reduce their emotional and behavioral reactivity, and encourage a non-judgmental and non-attaching attitude (Passmore and Marianetti, 2007; Spence, 2008; Cavanagh and Spence, 2013). Thus, the students would develop mindful agency. The quantitative measurements of the effectiveness of the coaching program are reported elsewhere.

This study aims to understand the development of mindful agency and how students perceive their growth from their experiences during an innovative intervention program. Compared to other qualitative research methods, such as grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Fassinger, 2005) or interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith and Osborn, 2015), narrative analysis enables us to better understand how individuals make sense of themselves (self-identity) and of their lived experiences through their stories (Polkinghorne, 1995). Narrative analysis approaches have been extensively used in educational and psychological studies (e.g., McAdams et al., 2006; Hiles and Cermak, 2008; Mangione et al., 2013; Moss and Pittaway, 2013; Murray, 2015). These studies had in common with our study that we explored a holistic picture of how different experiences, realities and self-identities are constructed, deconstructed and re-constructed, and discovered and explored students' learning identities more effectively. The novelty in our study was that we used students' personal reflective writing as evidence to see if there existed any change during or after the coaching program.

There are a wide range of narrative analysis approaches. We adopted the narrative-oriented inquiry (NOI) (Hiles and Cermak, 2008; Hiles et al., 2009) as our research method. It provides us with a more formal structure and detailed procedure for the analysis, and captures the meaning in relation to the key issues to understand participants' identity positions (IP), as exemplified by the work of Law and Basil (2016). Six interpretive perspectives are used in NOI: sjuzet—fabula (essential), holistic content, holistic form, categorical content, categorical form, and critical narrative analysis. The approach makes distinction between fabula (a sequence of events that occurred, i.e., what are told in the stories) and sjuzet (i.e., the way in which the stories are told by different narrators). By analyzing the sjuzet carefully (e.g., terms, tones, words, phrases, and other forms of expression that students used to express or indicate their individual thoughts and emotions), we could see how the participants construct the meaning of events happening in their lives, thus revealing their values and identity positions (see Law and Basil, 2016). We used students' personal reflective writing as narrative data to obtain an in-depth knowledge of participants' learning attitudes and sense-making processes beneath learning-related activities. Besides, reflective writing is regarded as an effective transformative pedagogical strategy that can be applied in variety of educational settings to support students' sense-making of their experiences and improve self-awareness and learning agency (Moon, 1999; Babcock, 2007; Hume, 2009; Barney and Mackinglay, 2010; Waston, 2010; Knight, 2011; Hyland-russell, 2014). Moreover, narrative tone is a key concept in the narrative analysis which is concerned with the overall emotional flavor of the narrative (Murray, 2015) with three primary structures of narratives (i.e., progressive, regressive and stable) (Gergen and Gergen, 1986; McAdams, 1993; Crossley, 2000). We identified the narrative tone by analyzing the emotional thread of the whole segments and any emotional changes as the story unfolded.

The participants were recruited by responding to an advertisement on the mindful agency coaching via posters, emails, websites, text messages, and snowballing among undergraduate students in a university located in East China. There were 99 undergraduate students who initially signed up. There were 70 students (Female = 60, Male = 10, Mean Age = 20, SD = 2.4) who completed the whole coaching program, and 29 students who withdrew at different stages in the coaching.

The participants were asked to join in an 8-week group-based mindful agency coaching program (see Table 1 for details). The program included 4 bi-weekly sessions of 3 h each. The coaching was designed and delivered primarily by the first author, a Chartered Psychologist and Licensed Coaching Psychologist, with the help of four research assistants. All the participants were provided a notebook that was intentionally divided into two columns. The left column was for note-taking of spontaneous ideas, opinions, feelings, and answers to questions during the workshops. The right column was for reflective notes on their most important learning activities and the associated emotions between workshops, offering additional self-discovery. The journals could be created in any form—some participants wrote texts in both Chinese and English, and some integrated texts and pictures.

Seventy participants' personal reflective journals were collected immediately after the coaching program. The journals were returned to the participants who would like to claim their journals after the completion of data analysis.

This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of Ethics Guidelines of Research Ethics Committee at East China Normal University with written informed consent from all participants. All participants voluntarily joined in the mindful agency coaching and gave their written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (Inc, 2009). The research protocol was approved by the Research Ethics Committee at East China Normal University. English pseudonyms were used in order to protect participants' identities. All the narrative data was kept confidentially and only used for research purposes. Given the nature of narrative analysis (co-authorship), researchers, and participants shared the ownership of the stories that generated from the analysis.

Owing to the limited length of this article, here we provide an example of the analysis from one participant (called Susie) to show how fabula (i.e., a sequence of events that occurred) and sjuzet (i.e., the way in which events are told) served as integrative accounts of her everyday life and development of mindful agency (see Table 2). As presented in the table, fabula consisted of Susie's school activities, including attending classes, joining in the choir, and practicing singing. Sjuzet did not emerge from the narrative texts directly, instead, it consisted of the words and phrases that revealed feelings, deep thoughts, and self-identity positions, based on the coding frame in NOI.

The perspective of holistic-content established the links across all participants' shared stories and combined them as a whole. Four researchers in our team read through all the journals, and selected 13 episodes that covered participants' common experiences and associated feelings in their narratives during the workshop and daily activities sequentially. Then we organized these episodes and weaved them into an original meta-story, which consisted of character, plot, prelude, and coda in a typical story. The pseudoname Linda was used as the character.

As the meta-story demonstrates, participants reported that they perceived mindful agency coaching as a self-enhancing experience. These are common changes during the process. The four workshops linked their experiences together and improved their mindful agency in terms of increasing self-acceptance, self-esteem, self-awareness, and reflexivity, adopting multiple perspectives of viewing oneself in relation to others and things in their environment, paying more attention to the positive aspects and managing distractions. They became more focused and mindful in their own learning and more patient and loving toward others.

The perspective of holistic-form focused on the structure of the overall narrative, the plot that was threading through fabula. Firstly, the fabula was summarized in short phrases. Second, we clarified the settings of certain events occurred. Third, we organized the fabula chronically according to participants' journals. Fourth, we established links between different events in different settings. We provide an example in Table 3. Cathy's Fab1 reflected everyday learning activities without mindfulness to Fab4, her low efficiency during study such as distraction in Physics class, procrastination when doing homework and so on. This story was interpreted by her failure to regulate negative emotions and strong competitive tendency when comparing herself with others, and so to the point of making herself feel irritated and regretted when reviewing before the final exam. In viewing the holistic structure of narratives, we could see how particular events and experiences were connected and what kind of relation that these events represented.

This section shows the critical analysis of each participant's narrative and presents the segments that are different from or supplementary to the meta-story. According to Hiles (2007), our narrative identities are grounded on a series of inter-related identity positions. We can identify the multiple identity positions of each narrator from the unfolding reflective stories (Law and Basil, 2016). Although the participants shared common experiences in their stories, they positioned themselves with respect to their own sense of self in the context of change and growth as learners and overcame a series of challenges that came along with the change.

The extent of the mindful agency development varied in different individual participants. Taking learning engagement as an example, Yale could concentrate on his current task for a long time after the coaching, while Ivey succeeded in excluding the distraction but still multi-tasked sometimes. Although participants' previous learning status varied before the coaching, they seemed to achieve an inner balance by using distinctive learning strategies throughout the mindful agency coaching program. For instance, Zoe used to be easily distracted in learning, and the mindfulness practice helped her to become more focused and improve her learning efficiency; while Cathy used to be overburdened, and she became a learner who knew how to combine exertion and rest with mindfulness-based methods. Winnie was a student enrolled in liberal art and she implemented mindfulness approach into reading and writing and achieved a state of flow. Ivey used positive reinforcement to link positive stimuli and learning activities in order to become more motivated to learn Japanese. Moreover, Winnie and Ivey enhanced their awareness of planning with to-do lists each day, alleviated procrastination and increased their learning efficiency; they felt a sense of contentment and autonomy.

Some segments from individual participants were different from the meta-story. For example, Yale and Donner still viewed themselves as perfectionists after the mindful agency coaching; however, their tone became more optimistic and they were willing to accept this characteristic, as Donner wrote:

According to Ma and Zi (2015), there are two types of perfectionism: negative perfectionists are closely related to fear of failure, high objective and strict norm; positive perfectionism has strong relationship with positive self-evaluation and self-expectation. The perfectionist disposition can be beneficial if students learn to embrace this characteristic and transform it into a positive type.

Participants integrated the methods and strategies learned in the coaching program, transferred them to their daily schedules and developed their own learning strategies, for example:

By using these mindfulness-based strategies such as mindful breathing, students were able to immerse themselves in the present tasks and concentrate on their study for longer time. Sometimes they experienced the typical flow state (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Engeser et al., 2005) when they were totally absorbed into the tasks, forgot about the elapse of time, decreased a sense of self-consciousness, improved efficiency in performance and achieved desirable outcomes in their study. Some participants developed a sense of autonomy, self-discipline, and commitment by making to-do lists every day and following them through. This strategy helped students to alleviate procrastination and associated negative feelings such as shame or guilt, and fosters the ability of time management.

Positive emotions, such as happiness, contentment, or joy, could strengthen students' self-efficacy, self-confidence, and trust in the strategies they used (Paul and Heather, 2000; Fredrickson and Joiner, 2002). Mindfulness was proposed to enhance awareness and broaden the scope of cognition to facilitate amplifying positive emotions (Tugade and Fredrickson, 2007; Hülsheger et al., 2013) as well as reappraisal of adversity (Garland et al., 2015). In mindful agency coaching, participants developed the ability of emotional regulation and management through two approaches: savoring positive experiences and accepting difficult experiences.

By perceiving, acknowledging and embracing negative emotions, the participants became more at ease with themselves. This attitude served as a protective factor for students from overly self-demand and self-critics when they did not fulfill expectations. By clearly differentiating “being mode” and “doing mode” (Kabat-Zinn, 1990), participants expanded their learning repertoire, became more reflective, and made conscious efforts to achieve higher learning goals.

The students became more aware of their goals, resources, and learning conditions. This could pave the way of becoming more able to make strategic plans of their study instead of being passively pushed by deadlines or other external forces. One participant wrote that she learned to select appropriate tasks according to her current condition:

In addition, participants were better at time management and task organization with an increased awareness of planning. In the coaching program, participants were coached to observe themselves, monitor learning processes, adjust their own conditions and set proper goals for themselves. Writing reflective journals might also help the students in developing this awareness. Participants were asked to note down detailed experiences of critical moments in learning on a daily basis, e.g., when they were in their best mood, when they felt their energy was low, what their most important learning activity was, how they felt about it. The increased awareness of planning and self-regulated learning processes would lead to higher achievement (Eilam and Aharon, 2003).

Participants demonstrated a greater sense of acceptance and non-judgmental attitude to various learning experiences, more appreciation of others as who they are, and more patience in listening to different opinions. For example, Yale referred in his journal that he used to impose his own thoughts on others when he talked to people, and he hardly realized it. After he has developed mindful agency, he was more able to acknowledge different opinions and perspectives.

Research evidence has shown that mindful agency is positively related to curiosity and openness (Deakin-Crick et al., 2015), and mindfulness can reduce habitual responding to unconsciously acquired preferences by promoting a non-reactive and non-judgmental disposition (Whitmarsh et al., 2013). Participants in our study developed this sense of curious, non-judgmental attitude via guided instruction on mindfulness-based practice. Although formal practice of mindfulness usually takes 8 weeks (e.g., MBCT or MBSR) and our students only exercised for a short period of time each day (over the 8-week coaching program), they were encouraged to integrate mindfulness-based method into their everyday life and make personally tailored schedule. This could benefit a sustaining, long-term plan to develop mindfulness attitude and disposition.

Moreover, it seemed that participants have developed a balance between “being critical” and “being acceptive.” In higher education, one of the key educational goals is to develop students' critical thinking and reasoning, which often refers to the ability to challenge others' or one's own ideas and thoughts (James, 1987; Walker and Finney, 1999; Behar-Horenstein and Niu, 2011; Ghanizadeh, 2017). However, being able to trust and welcome authentic experience is missing in the larger educational picture. We addressed that an attitude of allowing and embracing experience is as important as healthy skepticism in thinking. Developing mindful agency might be a way to obtain that balance. Being self-aware can be extended to become aware of and respect others emotions, gaining social intelligence, and achieving social competence (Goleman, 1998; Law, 2013a,b).

Participants enhanced their dispositions on concentration and engagement in learning throughout the coaching program. They were able to focus on their current learning tasks for a longer time, reduce mind wandering, and discipline themselves (refrained from playing mobiles, website browsing, using social media, or other distractive behaviors).

There were two obvious benefits in this: first, it could help students to improve their learning efficiency and academic achievement by allowing more effective study time. Second, it could foster students' self-efficacy by successfully experiencing self-management and self-discipline. Mindful agency coaching might have a positive impact here that mindfulness could improve us in a deepened capacity for meaning-making and greater engagement with life (Garland et al., 2015) and positive psychology coaching could enhance engagement and flow in activities (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Seligman et al., 2006).

In general, we found that participants perceived themselves as more autonomous, resilient, and self-determined learners throughout mindful agency coaching. The coaching program clearly has a positive impact on each dimension of mindful agency described above. Simply put, students have changed in this process. One participant, Zoe, wrote about the change in becoming a “happier learner”:

We wondered what exactly was underpinning the transformation. Perhaps these two phenomena for the awareness and awakening reflect the underlying changes. Awareness was greatly addressed in almost every activity in the coaching and reflective writing. When participants' awareness was broadened and expanded to themselves and others as well as to their learning environments, they could mindfully reappraise their current condition and improve it. We could see the evidence from students' stories that they obtained an enhanced awareness in self-observation from a reflective distance (critical, yet accepting), gained self-knowledge, understanding their values and motivation in learning, and self-enhancement, being willing, ready, and able to grow in their own learning journey. The increased awareness helped participants to identify their inner strengths and resources, which can be best described as having a sense of awakening. Awakening referred to the fact that participants were not “receiving” these attributes from the coaching program; they have already had those qualities within them, waiting to be unearthed via the process of coaching. In this sense, the coaching process can be described as “co-mining” with the coach and coachee. Mindful agency coaching supported the students to explore their hidden, potential, inner strengths, polish their existing skills, discover, and appreciate their internal and external resources, and become a kind of learner that they wanted to be. Thus, awareness and awakening are interdependent and interrelated, where an increased awareness would lead to an enhanced state of awakening and this awakening would further foster individuals' awareness, forming a virtuous circle (Pagnini and Langer, 2015; Donald et al., 2016).

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.