Career Literacy: 3 of 5 MindShifts (Compelling Career Stories)

“I love how you can take my content and turn it into a simple/compelling story!” enthused my return client risen to Fortune 250 Group Product Manager. “I use your approach whenever talking with senior executives.”

This is a great example of the power of our next mind shift—not only are stories helpful when Acquiring work, but At work as well (In 2022 another client rose to AWS Sr. Manager using SCAR story). But, a story may not be what you think it is. We are mostly far better story Consumers than story Tellers. For one thing, a story shouldn’t be a *telling (aka wo/mansplaining, lecturing), but another action entirely. An action that engages our listeners’ competencies: emotional & logical.

Verbal or written story is about making the invisible visible with words, of course, but The critical piece of architecture usually remains unnoticed. And this is that in a story about our own career, we play two roles – the first is as the character of ourselves – and all the strategic, efficient and unique action or approach we take. But the other role is even more important – and as mentioned, even more invisible – and that is the role of the Narrator – the story *teller.

Unless you have taken creative writing, you may not be aware that story always starts with Narrative Point of View – this is the Narrator, the one telling the story - and there are three categories of perspective:

• 1st person or my "limited" point of view ("Call me Ishmael" Moby Dick)
• 2nd person or their point of view ("You are not the kind of guy who would be at place like this at this time of the morning." Bright Lights, Big City)
• 3rd person or the "omniscient" point of view. ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." A Tale of Two Cities)

In our career stories, we, like business journalists (see Bloomberg Tech or BusinessWeek), get the biggest bang (most rapidly) from using the 3rd person POV in our career stories – at least in setting up the context we face.

Storytelling is all about bringing your listener to a specific place & time by painting out the context you faced –the who-what-when-where and especially the stakes, the why, of a precise situation. And would you believe this can and should be done in a single sentence up-front? Hint: if you haven’t been doing this, you haven’t been storytelling.

Have you been describing the context of your “stories”? Adding in the vital complications you faced? If not, then perhaps now you see that your *stories have really just been a single character’s dialogue and your listeners may not have been grokking what you’ve done because you have not told them the actual story stakes. ?

Imagine how your listener feels if / when you say, “You don’t know what I’ve seen, you just have to believe me.” Perhaps they are wondering, why can’t you show me what you’ve seen? And if you can’t, then perhaps you won’t be able to persuade & influence others the way we need this talent to. To influence others, we simply must be able to share our context with them.

Further, my clients usually find hidden, helpful results as they outline the contexts outside the firm (markets, regulation, disease or disaster incidence), and also inside (tech, processes, team, culture, leadership).

So, for 2023, consider if you’ve been sharing the Real stories (SCARs) of your background, the situational context & ops complications – and yes you can get context on a resume. That’s another trick. Mind-shift 4.

Welcome to 2023! Let’s all become more context-rich storytellers together this year. Humanity needs to grok all the context we can asap. ;)

Ready to see where your stories could take you in 2023? https://calendly.com/stacirealedge/dream-job-consult

Haas Alumni Network (HAN) 美国哈佛大学 Girls in Tech - Washington, D.C. ideas42 #resume #interviewtips #careercoach #leadershipdevelopment #stories