Career Narratives – why the stories we tell about our careers matter

Career Narratives

Career narratives are the stories that we tell ourselves about our careers or our professional lives. In many ways they are made up. They capture our rationalisation and explanation of the past, our interpretations of the present and our projections into the future.

These narratives are powerful tools for making sense of our experiences at work. They tell the story of our working lives, often finding causal links and explaining why and how things have happened. Baked into them are often stories and moments that shape or reinforce certain underlying beliefs and explanations of cause and outcome in the workplace. For example, they will often include stories about risk taking, about failure, about challenges overcome, about relationships built, about our levels of agency, about what makes us happy and about what is outside of our control.

Obviously, these stories aren’t just sense making tools. They also, by shaping our sense of how the world works (how we see it), affect our behaviours in the moments we are in (what we do) and the outcomes we have in the world (what we get).

Luckily, once we start to recognise the power of career narratives, we can start to explore the narratives we currently have and potentially modify them to create better outcomes for ourselves and others.

Crafting a Career Narrative

We often hold a career narrative subconsciously, not even being aware of the stories we tell ourselves about the world of work or time impacts those stories have on how we navigate in the world.

To create or craft or capture your career narrative, there are a few things you can do. You might want to start by creating a “career lifeline” (the link is to the Open University, but we think the activity is actually originally from Berkley) as a way to get some of your thoughts in order. From there you might want to:

Reflect on Experiences:

Reflecting on the significant experiences in your career, potentially the peaks and troughs in your career lifeline. What were these key moments? What makes them stand out? What lessons have you learned from these (and other) moments? How these experiences have influenced your skills, values, and career aspirations. What truths about the world do you believe as a result of them?

Identify Themes and Patterns and Challenge them:

Are there any patterns that emerge? What themes do you notice? Is that a consistent pattern of beliefs that is helpful or otherwise? Are there beliefs that are not serving you well? Are there patterns that lead you to good outcomes, or patterns that lead you to bad outcomes? Are there event beliefs that you didn’t know that you held?

Sketch out your Career Identity:

Use your reflections to define try and sketch out what you think your career identity is. What makes you unique? What matters to you? What do you stand for? What do you aim to achieve? How does this all link with your values and career goals.

Craft a Coherent New Story:

Look back over your career through the lens of your recent analysis. What is the coherent, engaging and helpful story you choose to tell about your career now? What stories do you tell about relationships? What are your stories about failure? What are your stories about learning and growth? What are your stories about conflict? What are your stories about agency and control? What are your stories about what makes you happy?

Adapt and Share:

Practice telling your story to yourself and others, tailoring it to different contexts and audiences. The more you tell these stories of your career and how you approach different situations, the more you may be able to change how you see the world, to change what you do, to change what you get from the world.

It’s probably also worth considering our Dual Process thinking as we speculated that some of the power of story telling is that it shapes our system one thinking. It might also shape some of our underlying personal values, or at least help bring them closer to the surface of our thinking so that we behave more in line with them.

We think this connects with ACT and CBT too. And you can check out Stephen Covey’s “See-Do-Get” cycle as well, which is very related to this.

When thinking about storytelling, it’s also always helpful to reflect on the hero’s journey.

We’ve not done many podcasts on these subjects, but this one exploring storytelling and organizational change might be of interest:

We think that so many things like this go back to the same core point. The way we understand the world shapes how we experience it and behave in it, which affects the outcomes we achieve.

All too often we think that we experience an objective truth about the world. In reality, though, we just happen to hold a set of beliefs that are shaped by our past experiences. Our truth is just the best explanation that we have at a moment in time of the way things work.

Once we know this, once we know we create and project our sense of the world, then we can start to take actions and make changes that alter our rules about how the world works. Sometimes this is referred to as changin our underlying beliefs, sometimes something else. But at it’s core, we’re trying to change the mechanics that we believe shape cause and effect in the world. And we think this is possible, and can lead to good outcomes.

We also think that changing our stories about our careers and the world can help us do this.

Savickas, M. L. (2005). The theory and practice of career construction. In S. D. Brown & R. W. Lent (Eds.), Career development and counseling: Putting theory and research to work (pp. 42-70). John Wiley & Sons.

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