For so many of us, our career just… happens. Maybe we spoke to a careers advisor at school and decided on a path. Perhaps we’ve had moments of striving for a particular promotion or a specific career change. But outside of those moments, we’ve just gone with the flow. We get told we’re good at something, so we do more of it. There’s an opportunity that pays more, so we take that. A manager we liked goes to a new company, so we follow.
The result of this, often, is that our work life drifts away from us, and we can’t quite make sense of when, where or how that happened. This might show up as acute discontent, where our employment is totally misaligned with our personal values. Or it might just be a feeling on ennui, where we know we need to be doing something different, even if we’re not sure exactly what “different” means.
The solution, I believe, is to reclaim your story. That means making sense of your own career and finding the words to help others understand it the same way you do.
This works because those moments where it felt like your career just “happened” weren’t actually coincidence and happenstance. Rather, in those moments, your lack of a story about yourself made you a character in someone else’s. When you can’t describe what you do, how you do it and why it’s valuable, other people will form their own opinions, and you’ll be at their mercy. There are warning signs that this is happening. Your CV is just saying what you think others want to hear. Your LinkedIn profile doesn’t look any different to anyone else’s in your industry. When you go to performance reviews, interviews or work events, you don’t know how to answer questions about yourself.
Career storytelling is finding the words.
Practically, it’s a structured process, taking two to six weeks, which begins with a conversation to make sense of your career so far, and clarify who you are at work. This is followed by a full suite of professional documents which commit that thinking to writing. Your CV, LinkedIn profile, online bios… everything now feels like you.
The documents feeling authentic is important, but the writing is just the mechanism. By working through your career sentence by sentence, choosing every word, and watching yourself appear on the page, you articulate your values, priorities and accomplishments. And this makes you feel more like you, too. You walk into interviews with a story about who you are and what you want. You make career decisions from a place of certainty rather than guesswork. You stop trying to be your manager’s version of you, and start actively moving your career in the direction you want it to go.
And, though this is harder to quantify, the opportunities that come to you start to look different. People remember a story. You stop being a resource that can plug a gap, and start being the perfect person for opportunities you actually want.
If you’ve recognised yourself in any of this, let’s talk. The first step is a short call to see whether this is the right kind of work for you.
