What's Your Story?: A Journal for Everyday Evolution

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For starters, keep in mind that, in a job interview, you don’t establish trust by getting everything off your chest or being completely open about the several possibilities you are exploring. In the early stages of a transition, it is important to identify and actively consider multiple alternatives. But you will explore each option, or type of option, with a different audience. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So, throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbour, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover. – Mark Twain, writer, publisher and lecturer. What was the challenge, or series of challenges, that came along to threaten your strength and peace?

Everyone has a unique story that explains how they have come to be where they are in life at this moment. Taking time to examine aspects of your life story can provide an insight that you can use to advance new possibilities and deal more effectively with challenges. It is an enabling approach that allows you to be more resourceful in planning a better future. It can work well as a team-building exercise too. Here’s how to do it: I don’t mean where you grew up, went to school, got your first job, etc. I mean what’s your STORY? What narrative have you constructed from the events of your life? And do you know that this is the single most important question you can ask yourself? But Sophie never faltered. The nurse had explained that the artificial light used to treat jaundice could affect hair color. Even more, Sophie loved Manon. She knew the story of her life: her cries, her coos, her first words. It’s a typically fascinating “switched at birth” tale. But here’s where it takes an unexpected turn.Many have a great story in certain times of their lives in which they feel pride, enjoy success and experience happiness. It is easy to let these memories slide when life becomes tough as the bad experiences can cloud the good. This exercise taps into the resourcefulness that comes from deep learning about what enables successful outcomes. The insights gained allow you to do more of what works well on purpose, thus enabling you to build resilience and plan for a brighter future. You’ll know you’ve honed your story when it feels both comfortable and true to you. But you cannot get there until you put yourself in front of others — ultimately, in front of strangers — and watch their faces and body language as you speak. For one woman we know, June Prescott, it was not simply that practice made for polished presentation — although her early efforts to explain herself were provisional, even clumsy. (She was attempting a big career change, from academe to Wall Street.) Each time she wrote a cover letter, interviewed, or updated friends and family on her progress, she better defined what was exciting to her; and in each public declaration of her intent to change careers, she committed herself further.

Additionally, stories of transition present a challenge because telling them well involves baring some emotion. You have to let the listener know that something is at stake for you personally. When you’re in a job interview or when you are speaking to relative strangers, that is difficult to do. Sophie named her daughter Manon. As she grew older, Manon looked nothing like her parents. She had darker skin and frizzy hair, and the neighbors started to gossip about her origins.Once upon a time, an 18-year-old Frenchwoman named Sophie Serrano gave birth to a baby girl, who suffered from neonatal jaundice. June’s experience teaches a final, important lesson about undergoing change. We use stories to reinvent ourselves. June, like Sam, was able to change because she created a story that justified and motivated such a dramatic shift. Let’s return to that networking event and all the drab stories (actually, nonstories) people told. If transition stories, with their drama and discontinuity, lend themselves so well to vivid telling, why did so many people merely recount the basic facts of their careers and avoid the exciting turning points? Why did most of them try to frame the changes in their lives as incremental, logical extensions of what they were doing before? Why did they fail to play up the narrative twists and turns? Everyone these days is on a journey, which can lend some provisional shape to lives without much sense of direction. Humanity was also on a journey in medieval times, but it was a collective expedition with an origin, well signposted stages and a distinct destination. The Enlightenment notion of progress was more open-ended: to imagine an end to human self-perfecting was to deny our infinite potential. This creed was inherited by some 19th-century thinkers – ironically, since the dominant model of development at the time was evolution, which is random, littered with blind alleys and lengthy digressions and heads nowhere in particular. That time you were laid off, for example, is it further proof that your career’s going nowhere? Or is it the best thing that ever happened, liberating you to find work that suits you better?

Lucy Hartman’s story is a good example of the education plot, which recounts change generated by growing insight and self-understanding. It was a mentor, her executive coach, who let her glimpse a possible new future, and she continued to learn in her master’s program and by coaching others. In her version of events, the more she learned about the human side of enterprise, the more she realized her desire to work in and contribute to this area. Make a plan and start with just one small thing to bring about, and take it from there. Then consider the action you (and your team) will undertake as a result in three areas: Unfortunately, the authors explain in this article, most of us fail to use the power of storytelling in pursuit of our professional goals, or we do it badly. Tales of transition are especially challenging. Not knowing how to reconcile the built-in discontinuities in our work lives, we often relay just the facts. We present ourselves as safe—and dull and unremarkable.When did you last pause to ponder your life story? The chances are that you have been too busy handling the present challenges to consider what has led you to this point. Dealing with immediate priorities is understandable; however, there may be lessons from past experiences that, when brought to mind, can help you make better decisions now. That’s not a necessary compromise. A transition story has inherent dramatic appeal. The protagonist is you, of course, and what’s at stake is your career. Perhaps you’ve come to an event or insight that represents a point of no return. It’s this kind of break with the past that will force you to discover and reveal who you really are. Discontinuity and tension are part of the experience. If these elements are missing from your career story, the tale will fall flat. It was only when Sophie’s husband accused her of giving birth to another man’s baby that she went for paternity tests and discovered that her husband was right (sort of). The baby, then aged 10, wasn’t his, but she wasn’t Sophie’s either. She belonged to another set of parents, who had been raising Sophie’s biological daughter in a town several miles away. When you’re in the midst of a major career change, telling stories about your professional self can inspire others’ belief in your character and in your capacity to take a leap and land on your feet. It also can help you believe in yourself. A narrative thread will give meaning to your career history; it will assure you that, in moving on to something new, you are not discarding everything you’ve worked so hard to accomplish. Opening - Start your story with an interesting main character and decide where the story is going to take place.

To tell a life story that emphasizes such juicy elements as transformation and discontinuity is to invite questions about who we are and whether we can be trusted. No one wants to hire somebody who’s likely to fly off in an unexpected direction every six months. So we downplay the very things that might make our stories compelling. To earn the listener’s trust, we make ourselves appear safe — and dull and unremarkable. All good stories have a characteristic so basic and necessary it’s often assumed. That quality is coherence, and it’s crucial to life stories of transition.

Tell your story to yourself—and make sure you tell the right one. If you’re having trouble constructing an honest yet positive life narrative, here is an exercise to help you. Just ask yourself these three things: