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).

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.

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.