Being excellent at something you don’t enjoy is one of the stickiest career traps there is. You’re good enough to keep getting promoted. Pay is going up. Recognition grows. Yet somehow, without quite deciding to, you’ve built a career around work that drains you.
A few weeks ago, Stu articulated this perfectly – he’s an excellent interpersonal communicator, but jobs involving extensive communication run down his social battery. He’s a natural fit for customer service roles, but they don’t fit him. Maximum proficiency, minimal enjoyment.
Stu found better work, but others aren’t so lucky. A lot of people find themselves in unstimulating but comfortable work, particularly when they’ve reached a level of pay or recognition for their skills which would be hard to match starting over in a new career.
As is so often the case, we can find a beautiful expression of this common psychological state in fiction. In One Boat by Jonathan Buckley, the protagonist (Theresa) reflects on how, despite feeling like she hasn’t actively shaped her career, she now earns a comfortable living in contract law:
The career is the vehicle in which I am being carried. I steer, but the propulsion is not mine. It’s like gravity. Skiing down the mountain, taking one of the lines you have to take if you want to stay upright. The lines present themselves. Swerve here left or right – and you make the choice without thinking. Something like that. I am proficient, and so I don’t fall, but I am not in charge.
This quote is insightful because – like so many in this position – Theresa isn’t feeling any immediate call to change. Her career isn’t the dominant concern in her life. She’s not wallowing in despair; she’s just spending most of her waking hours doing something she can do but doesn’t find meaning in.
Here’s what matters, though: competency is not destiny. You can be proficient at something and still choose a different path. The question isn’t whether you can rewrite your story; it’s how.
This might seem a biased recommendation from a career storyteller, but stick with me and I’ll show you why it works: you should start by writing your CV and LinkedIn profile.
Why Write First?
The unique power of narrative construction is that your documents shape how others see you, but they also shape how you see yourself. By going through your career history and finding the right framing and story throughout, you’re not just creating a better CV and LinkedIn profile, you’re methodically and purposefully creating a new image of yourself which carries forward into interviews, networking, even day-to-day career decisions and task prioritisation.
When we write, we take time. We choose the right words, we polish, we finesse. We naturally consider how our writing might resonate with a potential reader. Most importantly, we make things real by finding the words to bring them into existence. That’s why journaling is so much more powerful than just thinking about something. Committing to ponder something rarely supports progress. But looking at a blank page (or an outdated CV) and working on it until it’s right is a finite task with a clear end point. It is a complicated and difficult task, and one you have to think deeply about, but the finished product is a concrete confidence-booster and a de facto map for your future.
Most people treat their CV and LinkedIn profile as purely functional documents. They are something to be filled with buzzwords and highlights only when faced with the close prospect of unemployment. They land us an interview, which turns into our next job, and then we forget about them until we urgently need them again.
I invite you to see them differently. Rather than viewing your documents as a place to conform and blend in (“results-oriented professional with a passion for blah blah blah”), you should use them to find the most accurate way to express yourself. This approach turns your documents into an active part of your career development, supporting and guiding you toward a more fulfilling path, instead of staying rooted in your current situation.
By using CV writing as an exercise in testing and inhabiting different aspects of your professional self, you can sculpt something new and beautiful from the unassuming grey clay of your present career.
I’ve seen this work for so many people, but I appreciate that if it’s a new idea, it might seem a little intangible, so let me show you what it looks like in practice. We’re going to overhaul a career story in three steps: make your own frame, expand the story and tell it your way.
Make Your Own Frame
The first part of owning your career story is understanding where the old story came from in the first place. In One Boat, Theresa’s comes from other people’s expectations:
The parents listened and did not discourage or dissuade. Inevitably I followed the straight path, obediently, law-abidingly. For me, the decision had involved self-questioning and self-doubt. Everyone else, looking on, saw the working-out of predestination, like watching from above as the young woman made her way through the twists and turns of the labyrinth’s single corridor. We feel that we are deliberating between equal possibilities, while people wait for us to make the choice they know we will make.
This brilliantly articulated paragraph shows how we can default to other people’s stories and perceptions of us, even as we agonise over decisions. When other people have an idea about us, it can become the path of least resistance – our own individual indecision becomes, by default, a decision to follow the direction that others assume we will take.
For Stu, it’s a little different, as he found himself drawing an equivalence between interpersonal skills and customer service jobs:
I am, for better or worse, skilled at interpersonal interaction; this has at times been seen as an excellent fit for customer service roles, particularly those that are customer-facing. I have sat behind many counters and handled thousands of transactions, queries and requests from the public.
Somewhere along the line, his ability to talk with people has been framed not as a supplement to his writing ability (on clear display here, as in all of his posts), or as a part of a broader scope of responsibilities (say, being able to present complex information clearly in boardrooms or speaking engagements). Rather, it has been boxed up as being “good at customer service”. This isn’t his story; it’s that of an employer with a need for customer-facing employees.
By identifying the wrong frame, you can start to find the new one. If, like Stu, you’ve been told you’re good at “customer service”, what is it you’re really good at? Reading people? Defusing tension? Making complex things simple?
Going beyond skills, what lights you up? And which tasks do you switch off and glide through with no passion or interest at all?
Are there things that you enjoy and are good at that you don’t currently use at work?
All these questions move you away from the frame of your parents or employers, or the general workplace assumptions that we all fall into, and toward something more unique, compelling and truthful.
Expand the Story
Once you’ve claimed your own frame, it’s time to start making demands. What does “good work” look like for you? What do you need and want from your work? What do you know you definitely don’t want?
This is where Stu’s “social battery” comes in. He’s an excellent communicator, but he doesn’t solely want to speak to people all day. So now his story grows from seeking roles where he’s purely a communicator, to using his communication skills in gathering requirements and enthusiastically collaborating with his clients as an independent copywriter.
To add my own story here, this is the step in the process that made the biggest difference for me – I was full-time employed as a CV writer (something I clearly enjoy as I’ve made it my life’s work!), but couldn’t nail down why I was so miserable at work. One day, I stumbled across Edgar Schein’s Career Anchors, a framework of nine key drivers of job satisfaction that matter differently to each person.
I don’t claim the career anchors will be life-changing for everyone, but they had an immediate impact on me. I read the description of the Autonomy anchor and realised that was it. I love writing CVs, but I need to be able to do it in a way that works for me: I like to agonise over word choices and sentence structures, and be totally happy with every detail before I send something out. The company I worked for wanted me to work at pace and take a less perfectionist approach to drafting.
Suddenly, my story expanded, and I realised that I either needed an employer who would let me have ownership over my writing process, or I needed to strike out on my own.
In both mine and Stu’s case, the answer was leaving full-time work to start a business, but this isn’t the only way to expand the story. I’ve worked with so many people who felt completely stuck until they moved to a similar job in a different company culture, or a completely different job which rewarded the specific parts of the skill set that they enjoyed using. There are a thousand ways to expand or transform the story to fit your new narrative frame – you already know what you’re good at, so this is the time to think about what you want in return for those skills.
Tell It Your Way
This is where those documents come in. Open your CV (yes, even if it’s 10 years out of date) or look at your LinkedIn profile, and you’ll see it’s telling someone else’s story. The act of rewriting it is the first step to taking control of your story and attracting roles that you want, not just roles that you can do.
The best way to show you this is with an example:
You find yourself stuck in a middle management role that you find dull and difficult. You love solving problems and enjoy your ability to make a difference as you’ve obtained a certain level of influence over the strategy and direction of your part of the business. Unfortunately, you spend most of your days getting lost in individual performance management and trying to deliver on tasks that are more to do with tweaking internal operations than making a real difference to the company’s service offering and customer base.
Your CV might already say:
Managed a team of 8. Delivered a range of tasks and projects aligned to the company’s global vision.
By following CV advice online, or even (dare I say it) running it by ChatGPT, you improve this to:
Managed a high-performing team of 8. Restructured the team to handle more inquiries per hour, resulting in a productivity increase of 30%.
This is objectively a better CV bullet point. It is more specific about your contribution. It shows not just what you were tasked with, but what you achieved. It quantifies this achievement with an impressive number. But there is a problem – it speaks directly to the things that make you miserable. Using someone else’s frame and a limited version of your story keeps you firmly grounded in the story you’ve felt yourself growing away from.
So how about this:
Identified an opportunity to handle more inquiries. Reorganised an 8-person team with a rigorous focus on customer outcomes. Increased in the speed of inquiry resolution, serving significantly more customers per hour.
We’re getting closer! This accomplishment is no longer a productivity-boosting exercise. Now it’s a story with a beginning, middle and end about how you identified an opportunity to better serve customers.
Somewhat controversially, we’ve dropped a valuable metric – the 30% productivity boost – but what we’ve kept is a more values-aligned outcome, which is the impact that the work had on customers. Would it be better if we had a number for this, too? Yes, of course it would. The same number might even work with some reframing. But I’ve assumed here that they’re separate things so that I can show you a core principle of storytelling: the pursuit of being generically “good” rather than uniquely you runs the risk of leaving you stuck. After all, if your CV says you can boost productivity, you’ll keep getting offered jobs where they want you to boost productivity. If this isn’t what you want, then testing new angles on the story is the single most valuable part of the writing process.
Now let’s see if we can push this story even further in the direction we want. Let’s try:
Key Project: Transforming Speed and Effectiveness of Inquiry Handling
Conducted a deep analysis of inquiry resolution. Identified meaningful opportunities to improve customer perception of the business by handling inquiries more effectively.
Reviewed current processes and flagged six key areas for improvement. Broke each of these into clear, actionable steps. Laid out a specific and measurable route to change.
Supported a team of eight account managers through each phase, checking every implemented step achieved its objective.
Delivered a superior system for inquiry handling, which made a clear impact on customer sentiment, with team members reporting that customer interactions were consistently more positive and collaborative than they had been before.
Recognised by the Director of Operations for making a transformative impact on the customer journey, without requiring any additional resources.
This story now has depth and complexity. Even without the metric, it has specific outcomes. Most importantly, all the steps and outcomes are closely aligned with what you want to do more of (problem solving, meaningful change, continuously improving customer experience), and have moved completely away from what you want to do less of (performance management, productivity projects, internal rather than external impacts).
By changing the frame, expanding the story and telling it your way, you’ve transformed a classically “good” CV bullet point that keeps you on your current path into a compelling, nuanced story about the parts of the job that you like. Just think about the difference in the opportunities that each of these versions appeals to.
An important note: in this example, the bullet has gotten gradually longer with each iteration. This won’t always be the case – there are plenty of ways to add framing and depth whilst still being concise. I can’t go into every permutation and technique I use here, but I did want to mention that this isn’t the only way to do it. There are as many stories (and ways to tell them) as there are people, and the magic of storytelling is finding the one that works best for you.
You Are Not as Stuck as You Think
If your CV is telling the wrong story, start by changing one bullet point. One word at a time, you will create a new narrative – a story under your own creative direction, built on values and strengths that have genuine meaning and resonance, not someone else’s story that you fell into by mistake.
Competency may have gotten you where you are today. But it doesn’t have to keep you there.
