This entry will probably be the concluding post in my series about life-story interventions that guide career choice. My goal has been to explore tools and assessments that employ stories/narrative to assist users in discerning what they want to do (or do next) in their careers. Two came from print books. Two were online but not currently publicly available (I explored them to show possible approaches to this kind of intervention.) Only today’s featured tool is an online assessment available to the public (for $29.95, which covers a subscription that gives users a year to work on the tool). I’m sure other life-story interventions exist out there, and I’ve love to know about them. Yvette Hyater-Adams’s Transformative Narrative Portrait, about which I’ve written before, is related but deals less with career choice than with having users re-story unhelpful habits into new and thriving stories that move toward a desired vision.

Today’s concluding tool, True Path, from Turning Points, communicates mixed messages about its purpose. As you can see from the graphic above, True Path is marketed as a branding tool. In another place on the site, users are urged to “click the button to find your True Path.” User testimonials on the site suggest that True Path was most helpful to them in guiding them to determine what they wanted to do in life and career.

I’ve explored the components of True Path but haven’t actually entered any information for myself. As far as I can tell, the final output of the tool is simply an aggregation of all the information the user has entered, and it is up to him or her to put it all together and interpret it. A $199 premium package is available that includes a coaching session, resume versions, cover letters, a career biography, a Linked In profile, and an elevator pitch.

True Path’s components are a mix of narrative and non-narrative:

• In Qualities, users choose from a list of personal qualities those that apply to them.
• The Values section has users rank a list of values based on their importance to the user.
• In the Three Things section, users describe three enjoyable things they’ve done in their lives, three things they’ve done they’re proud of, and three things that have been challenging.
• The Skills section refers users to assessments that specifically help users identify their skills.
• The Typology section is an assessment-within-an-assessment and is in the Jungian/Myers-Briggs vein.
• In Turning Points, we come to the first story-based section, in which users list at least five events that have played a significant role in shaping their lives.
• Success Stories, obviously, is another storied component, this one asking for at least four stories of successes that have played a major role in shaping the user, who also has the ability to add more stories anytime during his or her year’s subscription. Seven followup questions help users identify themes and patterns in their Success Stories.
• The Meaning of Work section asks five questions about how users feel about work.
• In Interests and Experience, users pick from a list career fields in which they have experience and/or interest.
• The Network section offers links to online networking sites, such as LinkedIn.
• The My Brand section asks users to create a personal branding statement. (I’m not sure it offers enough guidance in how to do so).

I have no doubt that True Path is an excellent tool to prepare job-seekers for networking and interviewing, as well as crafting resumes and cover letters. Finding a career path through this tool seems — at least without more guidance — like a murkier proposition, as does developing a personal brand.

One very nice feature of True Path is that users are invited during each step to ask for assistance.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Here’s one more followup on New York Times columnist David Brooks’s project to collect stories from folks older than 70, a series he’s calling “The Life Report” …

Brooks has synthesized the lessons offered by the life stories/essays he received:

• Divide your life into chapters.
• Beware rumination.
• You can’t control other people.
• Lean toward risk.
• Measure people by their growth rate, not by their talents.
• Be aware of the generational bias.
• Work within institutions or crafts, not outside them.
• People get better at the art of living.

You can read Brooks’s full elaboration on these lessons here.

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A few weeks ago, I posted about New York Times columnist David Brooks’s request for stories from folks older than 70, a series he’s calling “The Life Report.”

Yesterday, Brooks summarized the responses he’s received. He also has been running an essay a day on his blog. Some of Brooks’s observations:

Born in the 1920s and 1930s, most of them learned work habits in an age of scarcity and then got to explore opportunities in an age of growth. Unlike later generations, many of the men went through a phase in which they did physical labor in a factory, even if later they went on to become professionals.

Many of the women were born with limited aspirations and only saw their horizons expanded with feminism. By middle age, people of both sexes were moving freely, assuming there would be a decent job wherever they settled.

Some of my correspondents were influenced by the social revolution of the ’60s.

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A few months ago, graduate student Joseph Palmisano asked me to be a subject-matter expert for his master’s-degree project, an online, narrative-based career tool.

In fact, it has been my involvement with Joseph’s project that has inspired this current series. He turned me on to Lisa Severy, whose similar project I profiled in the previous segment of the series.

Like Severy’s Joseph’s tool is beginning its life as a project as opposed to an actual product the public can use. While Severy’s didn’t survive after her research ended (though many aspects were rolled into the True Path assessment on the site Turning Points), Joseph hopes to approach his employer, a publisher, about turning it into a product. He has given me permission to write about the project.

Like Severy’s project and virtually any narrative-based career assessment, Joseph’s project is “designed to take a constructivist approach to career assessment, whereby:

• Subjective life and work experiences and feelings are viewed as a whole within a lifelong development framework.
• An individual is guided to author a meaningful future career story that is integrated with life themes and a preferred way of being.
• The expected outcome is client-driven change based on a deeper understanding of self-identity and growing complexity of the world of work.”

The steps, or “chapters” in Joseph’s version, which he has named “Constructing a Life that Works,” taken from the title of a research paper on narrative career consulting by Campbell and Ungar. His target audience is mid-career changers, who “will write a future career story integrated with the other aspects of their lives in collaboration with a career counselor.” I can’t be absolutely sure, having not seen Severy’s project, but my impression is that Joseph’s model places greater emphasis on working through the chapters with a counselor.

The seven chapter story exercises cover the following tasks. In each chapter, “Collaborating with the career counselor” consists of emailing a self-assessment to counselor and reflecting on feedback and guidance:

Self-Assessment

• Describing career indecision and reasons
• Collaborating with career counselor

Chapter 1: Early Recollections

• Writing about childhood memories
• Identifying life themes
• Collaborating with career counselor
• Elaborating on chapter story and life themes

Chapter 2: Role Models

• Writing about role models
• Identifying life themes
• Connecting themes of chapter stories
• Collaborating with career counselor
• Elaborating on chapter story and life themes

Chapter 3: Values

• Identifying values
• Identifying life themes
• Connecting themes of chapter stories
• Collaborating with career counselor
• Elaborating on chapter story and life themes

Chapter 4: Interests

• Writing about interests (work, hobbies, other activities)
• Identifying life themes
• Connecting themes of chapter stories
• Collaborating with career counselor
• Elaborating on chapter story and life themes

Chapter 5: Career and Adult Life Roles

• Writing about work and adult life-role experiences
• Identifying life themes
• Connecting themes of chapter stories
• Collaborating with career counselor
• Elaborating on chapter story and life themes patterns

Chapter 6: Future Career Story

• Combining chapters into future story
• Using Web-based sources on the world of work
• Collaborating with career counselor
• Elaborating on future career story

Chapter 7: Action Plan

• Drafting action steps and timeframe
• Documenting potential barriers, solutions, and compromises
• Identifying support resources
• Collaborating with career counselor
• Finalizing plan

I note two especially interesting aspects to the tool. In the “Early Recollections” chapter, Joseph talks about the concept of “preoccupation:”

Some early memories made a greater emotional impression than others, due to your sensitivity to them. These memories became a preoccupation or struggle that you, often subconsciously, continue to relive and attempt to turn into motivation and strength. With repetition, you will hopefully take another step towards mastery.

It seemed to me that a user would need some guidance about which early recollections to focus on as it’s hard to imagine that just any recollection is relevant to this “preoccupation” and themes that inform one’s career. Asked my earliest recollection, for example, I always cite the time my sister, age 1, picked up a honeybee and handed it to me (age 3), whereupon, the bee stung me. It’s hard to see preoccupation and career themes in that memory.

Joseph takes his cue from Mark Savickas, a pioneer in narrative career counseling. “Savickas suggests,” Joseph says, “that the client will share what s/he believes are significant memories, which will result in identifying their preoccupation.” Maybe I just don’t remember enough about my childhood (one of the hazards of being as old as I am).

The other interesting piece is Joseph’s approach of integrating a nomothetic assessment into an otherwise idiographic one; in a chapter that encompasses elaborating on life-career themes, Joseph has the career counselor determine the client’s RIASEC type based on the client’s writings. RIASEC is an acronym for the career-related personality types developed by psychologist John L. Holland. The letters in RIASEC stand for: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional. The client takes his or her RIASEC type into consideration in drafting his or her Success Formula. Typically, RIASEC would be derived from a multiple-choice-type assessment. I’m rather fascinated that counselors could derive the type from the client’s narrative instead. I’m also slightly uneasy that the narrative doesn’t stand on its own in Joseph’s approach, and the more reductive RIASEC approach is introduced. Combining the approaches, however, is novel, and I’ll be interested to see how it plays out.

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Have a heaping helping of story goodies with your stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie …

Michael Margolis has been running a series this week emphasizing how entrepreneurs can better tell their bio stories:

• The Power of Storytelling: From Hauling Trash and Addiction to Stardom
• The Key Ingredients of a Good Bio: How to Get Others to Believe In You
• Storytelling to Land Better Job and Business Opportunities
• 3 Case-Studies of Good Bios that Create Results

Karen Dietz is offering two terrific worksheets for free download:

• Story Gathering Guide: An excellent guide to asking your customers to tell stories about using your product or service.
• Core Stories Worksheet: Another superb tool, one that would benefit job-seekers as much as entrepreneurs.

“Marketing lab” Hammond Hill offers an attractive, reader-friendly white paper, B2: Building the Brand Story for Both Side of the Brain, for free download. The paper describes B2, “branding for both sides of the brain, creating brand characters and stories that appeal to the left brain (analytic) and right brain (intuitive) in us all.” B2 …

elicits a brand character that is dynamic and speaks to us, while being true to who it is. It uncovers the authentic brand character so that people connect with it on a fundamental level where both emotion and experience live to form an instant recognition.

For lifestory, journaling, and memoir folks, Marelisa Fábrega offers an amazing collection — A Plethora of Writing Prompts for Creative Writing and Journaling — 17 writing-prompt resources with examples from each.

And finally, a terrific short piece from Thaler Pekar, 3 Ways You Can Apply Narrative & Story, in which the three ways are identity, expertise, and engagement.

In between feasting, giving thanks, watching football and parades, curl up with some of these tasty resources. Happy Thanksgiving to all!

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November 25 is the third annual National Day of Listening, a national holiday started by the acclaimed oral history nonprofit organization StoryCorps in 2008. It is a day when families are encouraged to give the gift of storytelling to their loved ones, leaving a legacy that’s likely to be treasured more than any gift you could purchase. It is an effort to encourage all Americans to honor a friend, a loved one, or a member of their community by interviewing them about their lives.

This year, National Day of Listening is especially emphasizing giving thanks to teachers.

National Day of Listening participants are encouraged to record their National Day of Listening interviews, using equipment that is readily available in most homes — from cell phones to tape recorders to computers or even pen and paper. StoryCorps has created a free Do-It-Yourself interview guide with equipment recommendations and interview instructions available online.

“The idea of listening during the holiday season has clearly resonated with people across the country,” says StoryCorps founder and MacArthur “Genius” Dave Isay. “The National Day of Listening, which coincides with Black Friday, provides a meaningful alternative to holiday consumerism and proves that simply listening to one another is the least expensive and most meaningful gift we can give.”

“Life review is an important activity that hospices use with the patients and families they care for at the end of life,” says J. Donald Schumacher, NHPCO president and CEO. “So StoryCorps’ National Day of Listening is something we strongly support and we’re pleased to be a national partner.”

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As part of my exploration of life-story-based career interventions, I came across an academic paper, “Analysis of an Online Career Narrative Intervention: ‘What’s My Story?’” by Lisa Severy, director of career services at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who created a narrative online intervention as part of her dissertation project. (You can find the paper, published in The Career Development Quarterly, if you have access to library databases.)

The intervention no longer exists for others to use since Severy created it just for her research. However, she tells me, a number of the intervention’s components were rolled into an assessment that is available on the Web (see graphic at bottom of this post; more about that later).

Narrative/story-based career interventions and assessments are not exactly a booming trend, but they are an emerging form that is attracting attention in the counseling community and among job-seekers. Severy noted in her 2008 paper that many more volunteers than expected signed up to participate in the online career narrative intervention, suggesting strong interest in this type of narrative career exploration.

The approach springs from constructivist career development, which, Severy writes, “assumes that individuals organize themselves and the world around them into categories based on their own experiences and refiection on those experiences. In turn, “narrative career counseling is a type of constructivist model emphasizing language, discourse, and theme development,” she writes. This approach “involves the writing and revising of a coherent personal and professional narrative through exploration, experience, and refiection. By creating personal career narratives, clients are empowered to make career transitions in accordance with the overarching, long-term career constructs, Severy continues.

Advantages include using the clients’ own language rather than relying on “norm reference, reflecting diversity of human experience.” In this way, the intervention is an idiographic approach that focuses on clients’ individual behavior and uniqueness — as opposed to nomethetic forms of assessment that look at skills, values, and traits.

In fact, nomethetic forms have been criticized as reductive in that they, as Severy notes, “reduce clients to a particular set of traits.” In contrast, “the narrative process invites clients to expand their experience, explore options, and create opportunities that fit into their changing constructs of careers.” Severy’s online system did not compare “responses of a norm group or with an established set of criteria,” nor did it use an algorithm to generate outcomes.

The other advantage of the narrative approach is that it “encourages long-term strategic transition management rather than one-time decision making that can create a cyclical pattern of quick choice followed by crisis,”

The major disadvantage is that narrative assessment/intervention requires a lot of time and effort by both counselors and clients. Severy noted a “troublesome” number of participants who did not complete the intervention, though she doesn’t specify what percentage failed to finish.

Severy’s project was designed “to help clients reflect upon their construct of career, including life themes of success, influence of others, interests, and values.” To do so, participants experienced eight online activities:

1. Narrative Themes: Early Childhood Recollections
2. Narrative Themes: Autobiography
3. Narrative Themes: Role Models
4. Values Checklist: What Do I Really Want?
5. Interests: Choosing a Genre
6. Significant Others: Casting Your Characters
7. Personal Mythology: What Role Will I Play
8. Action Steps: What Do I Do Now?

Severy compared the tool to “an online guided journal.”

Here’s how Severy described her research results:

Results indicate that participants using the online tool exhibited less career indecision and more certainty after completing the online tool and in comparison with participants who did not complete the activities.

As I mentioned, Severy’s project did not live on in its original form as something that folks can experience today; however, around the same time she was completing that project, she got involved with a company called Turning Points, and many of the activities in Severy’s system got folded into Turning Point’s online tool, True Path. As you look at the True Path screenshot below (larger version here), you can see the similarities. I have asked for the opportunity to test/review True Path but have not yet had a response; if I do, I’ll update this post or write a new one.

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The first time I came across Hanna Phan’s presentation resume, or Présumé™, I admired it as terribly clever and creative but decided against writing about it because it doesn’t truly tell a story.

But the next time the Présumé™ came over my virtual transom (at right is a slide from it), I decided to give it a second look and determined it was worth writing about because

• Hanna’s story about how it came to be is compelling.
• Even though it doesn’t tell a story, there is no reason other job-seekers can’t tell stories in their Présumés™, especially now that SlideRocket has unveiled ready-to-use presentation resumes available for customization.

Hanna details in her backstory that she had deployed traditional job-search methods for months without success:

I received a number of phone calls and interviews, but not a single call back. It was discouraging. I felt vulnerable and defeated but another part of me didn’t want just another job. Each time I thought of punching in and out, busying myself with status meetings, ending my day just to start all over again — well, it just made me tired.

Inspired by a Seth Godin podcast, Hanna concluded that “the problem with a resume is that it doesn’t scream, ‘This is ME! I’m creative, energetic, full of life’ etc. and there’s no visual way to express what you want to say to someone through a piece of paper.”

Instead, she decided to “explore other ways to tell my story — the story of why I wanted to work for a certain company.”

That company turned out to be SlideRocket, whose own product she deftly used to craft a “love letter” to the company. She tweeted the address for the slideshow to SlideRocket CEO Chuck Dietrich, who immediately wanted to interview her. Ultimately, she was hired as a product manager.

My analysis of Hanna’s Présumé™ is that it indeed does a great job of providing a glimpse into her personality — that she is, in fact, “creative, energetic, full of life etc.” She also does a superb job of describing why she wants to work for SlideRocket. In neither case, in my opinion, does the presentation reach the level of story, but it does offer story elements, especially the element of character.

Dietrich didn’t cite Hanna’s story as what inspired him to interview her, though he noted that her presume told him a lot about her. “While the way Hanna reached out to me certainly got my attention,” he wrote to me in response to my question about the biggest single factor in consider her for employment, “what sealed the deal was her creative use of SlideRocket to show not only that she was passionate and hungry for the job, but that she had the skillset and entrepreneurial spirit to be successful in the role. Just as a picture is worth 1,000 words, her Présumé was worth an entire interview. It brought so many facets of her as an individual to life in a way that typed words on a page simply could not.”

SlideRocket offers its own slideshow introducing the Présumé™ concept.

SlideRocket’s Présumé™ section offers three Présumé™ templates as a starting place for job-seekers.

Presume has free and premium levels of service, as well as a free 14-day trial in which premium features are offered.

I would love to see some job-seekers truly use the presume as a story vehicle. Hanna perhaps didn’t need to go full throttle with telling her story because she effectively demonstrated her passion for her prospective employer’s product by using that product effectively. For others, story may be the element that engages their next employer.

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Career columnist Liz Ryan, long a supporter of storytelling in the job search, has included storytelling on a list of five new skills job-seekers need:

“I have a strong work ethic and get along with all kinds of people” is about as compelling as “I had cereal for breakfast” — but, worse, it’s not even believable. Anyone can claim these characteristics, and nearly everyone does. To get a hiring manager’s attention, tell a brief and powerful story that demonstrates what you get done when you work: “When our big Q4 product release was delayed a month, I put together an outbound-calling campaign that kept our accounts from bailing and got us $450,000 in preorders” will let a hiring manager know some of the good things that happen when you showed up, saw, and conquered.

Oh yes, so much more engaging and credible.

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Denis Ledoux has been offering loads of free goodies for November’s National Life Writing Month.

The latest is a free download, Who Will Read Your Book?.

The guide includes a detailed form that enables authors to truly understand whom they’re writing for.

Ledoux’s own audience is lifewriters/memoirists, but the handout could be used for virtually any kind of book.

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Too bad I didn’t learn about this tool sooner as TODAY is the deadline for entering a contest based on the tool (but there’s no deadline for just using it).

Google and American Express have created a tool to make it easier for small-business owners to create a short video telling their story.

The graphic below illustrates the process.

Those who can meet today’s deadline are eligible to win a $5,000 ad campaign and the chance to be featured on YouTube’s home page on Nov. 25.

The video I saw that called my attention to this tool was not especially storied, but I appreciate the integration of story in the sample below:

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Continuing to explore some recent encounters with ways of using life story to make career choices …

“… [T]o view your life as ‘nothing but the facts” is to miss an opportunity to for a marvelous adventure,” writes Laurence G. Boldt in Zen and The Art of Making A Living, “a conscious encounter with the universal energies and dilemmas of the human experience.”

Boldt devotes a chapter in his book to helping readers identify some of these universal energies and how to “consciously, constructively, and artistically engage them on the way to creating your life’s work.” The chapter is about …

… encouraging you: first to experience your life as myth, as a story of the individual encounter with the universal; second, and as a part of the first, to learn to recognize the universal or archetypal energies; third to develop your own creative relationship to those energies.

Myth, archetype, and symbol are the ways to approach “soul mysteries,” Boldt says, though his chapter deal primarily with the latter two elements, archetypes and symbols. (Archetypes are the raw material of myth, and symbols are is vocabulary, Boldt writes.)

Boldt presents four archetypes:

• Hero: Seeker of the Grail … Decider of Roads. Decision-making is an essential part of life.
• Magician: Showman … Shaman. Imagination is an essential part of life.
• Warrior: Horseman … Swordsman. Aggressive energy is an essential part of life.
• Scholar/Student-Sage: Child … Old Wise One. Learning and teaching are essential parts of life.

He acknowledges more archetypes than these but says these have been especially useful for creating life’s work.

The rest of the chapter delves more deeply into these four archetypes. In turn, the archetypes lay the foundation for the rest of the book and the themes of the Quest (Hero), the Game (Magician), the Battle (Warrior), and School of Life’s Work (Scholar/Student-Sage).

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I think I’ve posted most of the entries in the Story of Stuff series; yesterday, I started seeing The Story of Broke being shared. When I went to view it on YouTube, I noted that it many critical comments were posted. I’m sure at least some of them are from folks who disagree politically with the video’s message; I don’t know enough about economics to question the facts presented.

Notice I said facts. I don’t think the Story of Broke actually tells a story. What do you think?

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I write a lot about using story in the job search, but narrative is also useful in figuring out what career to pursue.

I’ve experienced a recent convergence of exposure to several interventions — both online and offline — that ask users to create their life stories as a way to identify themes that may guide them in choosing a career, or choosing their next career move. I’d like to devote this and several upcoming blog posts to these narrative interventions.

The first comes from my recent project to identify the 15 most indispensable career books for A Storied Career’s parent site, Quintessential Careers. I found two books that include large chapters on life-story creation.

One is Work with Passion by Nancy Anderson. Her chapter, “Write Your Life Story,” asks readers to write their autobiographies, preceded by some warm-up exercises.

Anderson emphasizes writing the autobiography over, say, speaking it into a tape recorder, because writing uses all the senses and, she contends, makes “thoughts, feelings, and experiences more real.”

The pre-autobiography warm-up exercises include:

• How I See Myself
• How Others See Me
• My Balanced Self

In each of these exercises in turn, users answer a series of questions, some of which are listed here:

How I See Myself

• Do I see myself as unique or special?
• How do I feel about my personality?
• Do I like what I see in the mirror?
• Do I like my hopes, thoughts, goals, aspirations?
• Do I appreciate all the good things I do and say each day?
• Do I do my work well?
• What makes me angry?
• What makes me happy?
• What makes me sad?
• What makes me feel powerless?
• If I were character in a novel, who would I be, and what would the story’s theme be?

How Others See Me

• What picture do others have of me?
• Is that picture based on what they’ve told me or what I think they think of me?
• Who likes to be around me?
• Who avoids me?
• Do people see me as optimistic, depressed, cautious, adventurous, funny, competent?
• Do people trust me?
• Do they think I’m sincere?
• Do they tell me how they think and feel about me?

My Balanced Self (when all parts of one’s personality form a unified whole)

• Is my balanced self different from how I see myself and other people see me?
• What would I change so I am consistent in words deeds and actions?
• What similarities are there between the balanced me and person I am now?
• What action do I need to take to bring balance to my life?

The autobiography begins, not surprisingly, with earliest memories and follows this outline:

• Parents and grandparents
• Birth through junior high school

Preschool years

Early socialization

Junior high school

• Senior high school, college, life in my 20s

The time of choice

Young adulthood

• Life as an adult

My life today

Anderson provides questions as prompts for each of these topics. She also offers several sample stories. She does not provide much analysis or tools for the user to analyze his or her own autobiography, but she asserts that the autobiography-writing process provides clarity. Presumably, it also serves as the foundation for much of the rest of the book.

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A couple of recent articles by career practitioners have focused on storytelling.

My colleague Sharon Graham continues her excellent series on career storytelling with Advancing your career through effective storytelling (see others in the series here). Sharon focuses on developing your personal career branding story, a “central story [that is] is an introduction of yourself.” A highpoint of the post is her collection of suggested uses for the personal career branding story — professional events, a career transition when you want to tell people what you’re looking for and what you can bring to the job, leaving a voicemail for a hiring decision-maker, and answering an interview’s question, “Why should I hire you?”

When I wrote Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get Jobs and Propel Your Career, the career-branding story was one of the concepts I struggled the most with. What’s the best way to develop a career-branding story, and what does it look like? I have my own ideas, which I wrote about in the book, but I’d like to see Sharon’s. As powerful as her post is, I’d love to see some examples.

Nevertheless, Sharon drives home a couple of crucial points about career storytelling:

• “If you want to captivate listeners, now is the time to begin organizing your career achievements and successes into stories.” I cannot emphasize this point enough. Careerists should constantly track accomplishments. My workbook accompanying Tell Me About Yourself offers beaucoups exercises on identifying accomplishments and composing stories about them.
• “You must also be prepared with multiple compelling stories that connect to your personal career brand. … The key to telling effective stories is preparation and practice.” I concur with the quantity + quality approach Sharon implies. Different job prospects require different stories. (Again, my workbook gives practice in adapting stories to various jobs/employers.) And preparing an arsenal of accomplishments-based stories is one of the best ways to boost a job search, especially the interviewing phase.

Which brings us to the second article — Peter Newfield’s take on a story formula for job interviews. Peter adds several elements to the standard Situation (or Problem or Challenge) —> Action —> Results formula (in both Tell Me About Yourself and the accompanying workbook, I list many variations on this structure.):

1. The strong opening. (Newfield describes the opening as a “teaser preview of the story’s big punchline,” recalling Annette Simmons’s smart technique of using a teaser to gauge how much story the interviewer wants to hear. Her sample teaser is: “”I prefer to lead in a collaborative manner. But if a group needs it I can be directive enough to go fast. Like the time my group’s budget was cut 30% and we had one day to decide how to deal with it.” Since it would be a rare interviewer who would not want to hear the details of that story, it would serve nicely as an opening teaser.)
2. Positioning.
3. Problem statement.
4. Failed solutions.
5. Your solution.
6. Objections.
7. The proof.

Newfield acknowledges that this seven-part story might take a while to tell, but says you can deliver it in three minutes. Unfortunately, I am convinced that three minutes is too long for an interview story. Two minutes should be the absolute max, and even that is pushing it.

I love this point, though:

Think you can tell a good story for an interviewer if you typed it out across two double-spaced pages in a Word doc first, to get the story down in this format (which also serves as a way to practice it in advance)?

I’ve done some research on how the act of composing (storied) interview responses in writing helps cement them in your brain and prepare you for interviews. Just be aware that you need more than one story. You can get by with fewer than you might think (as few as three), but up to 20 is even better.

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Today (11-07-11) is Job Action Day 2011, the fourth annual such event. This year’s theme is: “Skill Up, Start Up, Speak Up.” The “Start Up” aspect of the theme refers not only to tackling unemployment during the recession by starting a small business, but also developing a whole new mindset of being the CEO of one’s own career — having a portfolio of portable skills, a great network, flexibility, a project-mentality; not sitting at the computer visiting job boards, but getting out there and meeting people, knocking on doors, taking ownership of their career path.

Michelle Pyram, a Certified Professional Coach, whose practice is called Be Accountable. Execute the Dream, turned her career around after a major setback by adopting just such a “start-up” mentality. Here is her story in her own words:

[Reinforcing the Job Action Day 2011 “Skill Up, Start Up, Speak Up” message is a group of bloggers dedicating blog posts on or around Job Action Day 2011 to the event. Scroll down to see their blog posts listed.]

In 2009 in the midst of the economic crisis, I lost my job as a human resources manager at a major cosmetics and fragrance company. It was my dream job and I was devastated at this news. However, hindsight is always 20/20, and I realized that this was by far the best thing that ever happened to me! Before I lost my job, I came to a point where I would wake up every day feeling as if I needed more time to figure things out, understand this thing called “life” and answer questions about my own career path. But while I was trying to figure out “life” I was spending my time on personally unfulfilling tasks that did not allow me the time to really understand what mattered most to me. I couldn’t find my passions or discover my true purpose.

I eventually hired a coach to help me with my transition and it was by far the BEST investment I ever made. By working with a coach, I realized what was really holding me back from realizing my true potential. Often times we are all victim to our own inner critics, limiting beliefs, assumptions, and interpretations. In addition, we may not even know it until we are really able to put a mirror in front of us. It was then I had to realize that I was not a victim of circumstance but instead the creator of my destiny. My talents are meant to be seen and not meant to be dormant. Discovering this truth about myself was the turning point for me, and I created personal and professional changes that I never dream were possible! From that day, I enrolled in a rigorous coaching certification program with 350+ hours of coursework to focus on a new chapter as a career and life coach. Besides, it was the perfect transition from my career in human resources!

Then I started to realize that almost EVERYONE around me was scratching their head about their own lives and careers. For many their dreams remained dormant and their story sounded like this:

• “I hate my job but I am too afraid to leave…”
• “I have this great idea but I think I will fail at launching it, so what will everyone think…”
• “I have a passion for ______ but I’m too _____ and it will not work…”
• “I don’t know what my passion is or where to even start…”
• “I have too much responsibility on my plate and I don’t have time for myself to…”
• “My gut is telling me I have the potential to do so much more…”

Once I began to live life to my fullest potential, several people started asking me — “How did I do it?” How can you create all that you want in your life and career without wasting a lifetime? So I created ‘Be Accountable, Inc.’ to show my clients how! The most touching moment for me as a coach was facilitating a group coaching session I entitled as “Be a Better You” for a group of professional women competing in a pageant. I couldn’t believe how many “ah ha” moments came up for the group and the raw emotions that came with it. Then the phone calls and text messages poured in that evening and the sincere “thank-yous” on the plane really touched my heart on the way home. It was then I knew this was my purpose… Today, I service clients by aiding them in life and career transitions, including career switchers, high potentials, professionals experiencing unemployment, and entrepreneurs.

Currently, I have a career that I not only love but I feel more balanced and conscious about “my wants” in life. I have my own coach that holds me accountable to ensure the execution of my own dreams so that I can live my best life. Now you can too…

More Job Action Day Bloggers:

• Quintessential Careers Blog, Job Action Day 2011: Skill Up, Start Up, Speak Up.
• Career Doctor Blog, #JobActionDay11: Speak Up: It Takes a Village to Turn a Jobs Crisis Around.
• Quintessential Resume and Cover Letter Tips Blog, #JobActionDay11: Skill Up, Start Up, Speak Up: Expert Tips to Fire Up Your Job Search.
• A Storied Career, #JobActionDay11: A Start-Up Story of Triumphing Over Job Loss
• Deborah Brown-Volkman, The Career Coach’s Job-Seekers Urged to “Skill Up, Start Up, and Speak Up” for Fourth Annual Job Action Day.
• Susan Guarneri, Career Assessment Goddess, The Start-Up Mindset: 10 Tips to Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
• Maggie Mistal, Career Advice Blog, Job Action Day: 3 Actions Jobseekers Can Take To Bridge the Skill Gap.
• Nancy Miller, Job Action Day 2011, Life Work News, Skill up for Employment.
• Hannah Morgan, Career Sherpa, Start Up: Building A More Stable Career.
• Miriam Salpeter, Keppie Careers, Job Action Day 2011 — How to confidently drive your career bus where you want to go.
• Meg Guiseppi, Executive Career Brand, Today is Job Action Day 2011!
• Deborah Shane, Deborah Shane Toolbox, Raise Your Career Metabolism, Bring Your A+ Game and Develop More Magnetism.
• Wendy Terwelp, Rock Your Career, Job Action Day: Start Up — How to Network.
• Tim Tyrell-Smith, Tim’s Stategy, Start Focusing On New, Creative Networking Ideas

See http://www.jobactionday.com/2011-Job-Action-Day.html for the complete, updated list of Job Action Day 2011 blog posts.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

These goodies from practitioners have caught my eye recently:

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In Stories Matter: How to Power Up Your Activism, Thaler Pekar shares personal stories from her own history to illustrate the power of stories in activism. She noted to me that she doesn’t often share stories so personal. They powerfully illustrate the article’s premise.

Thaler also also offers a piece in her blog that frames Occupy Wall Street as a sensemaking exercise: Making Sense of Occupy Wall Street. Her final paragraph is striking:

From action will come audience, and from audience will come message. Out of what seems like chaos, insight will occur. Occupy Wall Street is making sense out of complex experiences.

On StoryFountain, Richard House has launched a series, “From Storytelling to Narrativity,” in which he will “profile the opinion-formation process, explain the ‘horizontal axis’ of Narrativity, present a theoretical basis for understating the persuasive power of Storytelling, and show how four of the great public issues of our time are being presented by our leaders.” The horizontal axis of storytelling? It is …

… all about conscious intention — how we wish to influence people; what we want them to do. This is the axis of Narrativity. This means the way a story is deliberately presented by the teller, and the way it’s understood subjectively by the audience. Narrativity is, if you like, the “public affairs” branch of Storytelling.

The vertical axis is storytelling:

Storytelling, which can delve down through myth to the unconscious to mankind’s social and spiritual origins, forms the vertical axis of our quest. But understanding the origins and psychological power of the stories we tell people and how they work, is only part of the story.

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Four story-related books (disclaimer: I haven’t read them): In StoryBranding: Creating Stand-Out Brands Through the Power of Story, author Jim Signorelli (according to the book’s publisher) “shows how the principles of story can give brands more meaning In six clear steps, Jim Signorelli shows marketers how to develop brand-planning documents that have much more punch than traditional creative briefs. Signorelli includes sample ‘I AM Statements’ and ‘StoryBriefs’ that dramatically illustrate how his StoryBranding approach can develop brands that customers will insist on buying relative to competitive alternatives.”

The upcoming book, The Non-Profit Narrative: How Telling Stories Can Change the World, from Portnoy Media Group chief storyteller Dan Portnoy, shows how non-profits thrive by telling great stories. You can read a preview chapter of the book.

The premise of Post-It Note Diaries: 20 stories of youthful abandon, embarrassing mishaps, and everyday adventure is best understood in the words of editor and illustrator Arthur Jones (note a preview chapter is also offered):

The origin of Post-it Note Diaries starts a few years ago when I was working at painfully boring office. I was hired to design banner ads and supermarket coupons but the company was over-staffed so I spent most of my time pretending to be busy. To fend off the boredom, I started covertly writing stories in Microsoft Excel documents and illustrating them on Post-its. I found 3 inch yellow pads of Post-its to be perfect little sketchbooks and I could swipe hundreds of them at a time from the supply closet without anyone noticing. Eventually I started reading these work stories in public — at bars, bookstores and art galleries. To accompany my performances I projected a slideshow of my Post-it Note drawings behind me. It was a little like narrating a comic one panel at a time or presenting a hand drawn lecture. Months later my friend Starlee Kine and I took that format and expanded it into the Post-it Note Reading Series. Each show was an experiment, where both established authors and non-writers could present stories over a backdrop of my Post-it drawings. Post-it Note Diaries is an extension of the Reading Series. It features some stories that are old favorites and some new work by some of my favorite writers and performers. Admittedly it’s a book that’s hard to explain— part non fiction anthology, part graphic memior — but it’s easy to figure out once you open it. To best understand exactly what Post-it Note Diaries is, read the first chapter by humorist John Hodgman and everything should start to make sense. — Arthur Jones editor & illustrator

Monoculture: How Our Era’s Dominant Story Shapes Our Lives, is, according to reviewer Maria Popova, “a provocative investigation of the dominant story of our time and how it’s shaping six key areas of our lives: our work, our relationships with others and the natural world, our education, our physical and mental health, our communities, and our creativity.” A further explanation from the author:

The governing pattern a culture obeys is a master story — one narrative in society that takes over the others, shrinking diversity and forming a monoculture. When you’re inside a master story at a particular time in history, you tend to accept its definition of reality. You unconsciously believe and act on certain things, and disbelieve and fail to act on other things. That’s the power of the monoculture; it’s able to direct us without us knowing too much about it.” ~ F. S. Michaels

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

I’m continuing to receive lots of communications from Denis Ledoux of Soleil Lifestory, marking National Lifewriting Month.

Tonight at 7 Eastern is his first of three teleclasses for memoir writers, “Write the First Draft of Your Memoir: Getting Started and Keeping Going.” To register for the free class, call 207-353-5454 or e-mail.

Denis is also offering a PDF “Where Do I Start Guide” for memoir writing, along with these November memoir-writing/activity prompts:

November 6: Organize a lifestory party to which you invite your siblings. Have a free exchange of memories.

November 7: Tell a story to your child or grandchild about one of your grandparents.

November 8: Tell a friend or relative the back story of an object in your house. Write the story down.

November 9: Write in a journal about today. Include salient details that will make the day vivid when you reread this entry years from now.

November 10: Write a 3-to-5-page story about something in your life you have not spoken to many people about.

November 11: Volunteer to write five pages of a relative’s lifestory.

November 12: Find your memorabilia (diplomas, newspaper articles, certificates) and write at least 50 memories that come to you.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

When I first read this article about funeral celebrants, I didn’t get what the big deal was. It talked about “a growing trend at funerals: celebrants, whose aim is to make funerals more personal and meaningful while officiating the services.”

It seemed to me that part of funeral officiants’ role has always been to deliver a personal eulogy if possible.

But as I read on, I learned that this breed of celebrant helps “families that are not affiliated with a church and who do not want a religious service.”

I also learned that celebrants are trained by the likes of the Celebrant Foundation and Institute and In-Sight Institute and that they offer storied ceremonies for occasions other than funerals. From the Celebrant Foundation and Institute (which calls these practitioners Life-Cycle Celebrants):

Celebrants officiate at and co-create personalized ceremonies such as weddings, marriages, commitments, renewal of vows, baby welcomings and adoptions, coming of age, step-family tributes, new dwellings, birthdays, graduations, survivor tributes, job transitions, memorials, funerals/end of life tributes, divorce, special achievements and civic and corporate events.

Storytelling is part of the curriculum for those training to be celebrants, and these practitioners sit down with families to gather stories for the ceremonies at which they serve.

Celebrant Foundation and Institute Charlotte Eulette international director affirms what I’ve always believed about why personal storytelling has exploded in recent years:

After Sept. 11, 2001, she said, “people in America wanted something personal, and death became something to be embraced.”

I’m excited to learn of a new way folks can integrate storytelling into a career field.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.