Here's an article I recently wrote for Quint Careers:

If you're confused about what to do with your career -- or what to do next with your career -- and you haven't gained insight from taking assessments , there is another way. You can learn more about yourself, gain insight into the best career for you, and plot out how to get there through creating stories.

A small but growing collection of research, for example, has looked at using story and narrative in career counseling. “Psychotherapy is based on the premise that we each create our own life story from the time we are born,” wrote Jack Maguire in The Power of Personal Storytelling. Career counselors are increasingly using narrative approaches to encourage clients to build their career stories.

Authors Christensen and Johnston suggested in the Journal of Career Development that developing narratives can significantly help individuals to know what to emphasize in their career planning. They proposed that counselors perceive clients as both authors and central characters in their career stories, which they are “concurrently constructing and enacting.” Constructing their career story, the authors said, enables clients to discover connections and meaning in their careers that they might not have otherwise. When individuals imagine their desired future stories, they facilitate their belief that their storied, envisioned future will play out in reality. The authors' research indicated that, indeed, clients who could tell these future stories tended to be “more effective in bringing those plans to fruition,” while Maguire characterized the narrative-therapy process as revising or replacing negative stories with positive ones.

Instead of answering the question traditionally explored in career counseling, "Who am I?" by listing traits such as interests, skills, aptitudes, and values, narrative approaches articulate the job-seeker's preferred future. Larry Cochran, who has devoted an entire book to the use of narrative in career counseling, notes that the narrative approach emphasizes “emplotment,” which refers to how a person can cast himself or herself as the main character in a career narrative that is meaningful, productive, and fulfilling. Plotting out a career story can also help a person conceptualize the steps needed to attain his or her desired career, remind the narrator of career goals, and enable him or her to stay on track in achieving the envisioned career.

Following are a number of approaches to exploring your career desires and passions through storytelling. Considerable overlap exists among these story exercises, so don't feel you need to use all of them. But pick a couple that resonate with you and use them to examine meanings, themes, and patterns in your career to date, as well as to plot out how to attain your career dreams.