Leaning into our clients’ stories - and learning to trust them

(4 min read)

Imagine you’re a career professional working with a mid-20s client. With a BA in literature and a recently completed teaching credential, they come to you for career help, unsure of what to do next. Sure, they have ideas – teacher? geographer? politics? – but they’re uncertain about all of them. Plus, they say they’re feeling pressure from parents, and need a job to pay rent. What do you do?

Do you give them an interest inventory? A personality test? StrengthsFinder? Skip all that and just help fix their resume? Instead, you decide to ask them to tell you a story and see what happens when you place more value on personal narrative than assessment results.

I ask a question during our Holistic Narrative Career Professional (HNCP) professional certification training: “Do you use client stories or a narrative approach in your work?” Most hands go up. “I like to hear client’s stories,” one says. “Stories are valuable input,” another adds. But when pressed, career professionals admit their narrative approach is informal and inconsistent. What’s more, some might take notes, but clients don’t benefit from these because the practitioner files them away and they are forgotten.

We found that trainees were not using stories in a systematic way to gather and organize client desires, strengths, personal qualities, interests, influences and assets. Organizing story insights into a holistic, actionable and client-owned “Clarification Sketch” is a story-listening approach that sidesteps the need for traditional assessments – though integrates those results when available. The HEROIC-g narrative framework from OneLifeTools was created to fill that gap.

How the narrative approach works

A growing body of research and publications support our narrative method moving into evidence-based practice: seven journal articles and four textbook chapters, and two outcome studies - including “Another story to tell: Outcomes of a single session narrative approach, blended with technology” (Stebleton & Franklin, 2020). Our research finds that taking a narrative approach results in significant increases in clients’ clarity, confidence, optimism, organized thinking and two measures of career exploration.

Here’s how it works in an initial session, as discussed in the article. The career professional uses a flexible structure to guide the hour to accomplish seven tasks:

1. Elicit the client’s presenting question and initial career possibilities;
2. Explore career and life wants and dislikes;
3. Introduce the narrative clarification-and-exploration framework;
4. Begin to use Online Storyteller to populate the client’s Clarification Sketch with initial items;
5. Reflect together with the client on one or more client experiences or stories while adding more content to Clarification Sketch;
6. Generate new and context-sensitive possibilities;
7. Recommend next steps.

An innovative working document, Clarification Sketch, shown in top image, is the holistic mosaic into which the practitioner gathers and organizes client desires, strengths, personal qualities, interests, influences and assets.

Every initial session includes the client sharing at least one story or narrative with the career professional. A client story may be any experience such as a job, role, volunteer opportunity or trip, among other activities. In initial sessions, the career professional elicits a story that the client feels good about, with the intention of increasing positive client affect, thus invoking Fredrickson’s (2001) “broaden and build” phenomenon. To gather and organize elements from client stories into a Clarification Sketch, open-ended questions are used such as: “What did you like about this story? What skills and knowledge did you use? How would people have described you? What interests were revealed? What possibilities come to mind as you reflect on this story?”??

The benefits of storytelling and storylistening

Using these open-ended questions, while simultaneously adding content to the client’s Clarification Sketch, builds practitioners’ storylistening skills. This approach provides immediate and valuable feedback to the client in a holistic and growing mosaic; clients find this not only satisfying, but then can turn these ideas into actionable possibilities. As one client cited in the article said, “I liked that by the end of the session I recognized that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I can see the possibility of having clarity with my career path and that made me feel confident moving forward.”

Most clients reported that the initial session exceeded their expectations, and many mentioned how different it was from expectations because it was narrative and structured. Several clients also shared that they found Online Storyteller helpful in mapping out career conversations.

The rate at which clients return after an initial session for a paid program of five to eight sessions has reached 85% in some months, with the majority of months reaching above 50%, in our CareerCycles practice, where we’ve served over 5000 career clients.?

How can AI enhance a narrative approach?

Can AI optimize the value of narrative client data? Our experiments with a custom Online Storyteller GPT show promising results using real client data (anonymized data with client consent). Online Storyteller AI Assistant - OST.AIA - expands client possibilities, synthesizes client strengths, and recommends customized inspired actions. Holistic narrative data as an input optimizes results compared to using as input client resume or LinkedIn profile.?

Embedding narrative tools into services, programs and courses

Thousands of career professionals trained in this narrative framework and related tools use them to help individuals like the mid-20s client mentioned earlier, and to support groups from 3 to 300.? Here are four success stories of organizations and career professionals who have learned the narrative practice, earn HNCP, and embedded the tools in their work:

1. Saint Mary’s University. Karen Schaffer and her team in Halifax, NS, have been using narrative approach to support individual students.?
2. Conestoga College. The team of career professionals and professors in Kitchener, ON, has embedded narrative tools into Career Development courses across campus.??
3. University of Toronto. For 5+ years, cohorts of grad students have explored non-academic career possibilities through the OPTIONS program which embeds the narrative tools?
4. Individual practitioners like Erica Mattison in Boston and Susan Mulholland in Dublin use these narrative tools in their practices.??

Consider the tools you have been trusting to help clients. Are they still the best tools today, given the increasing need to take into account context and lived experience? If you answered “no,” or “not sure,” we encourage you to consider trying and trusting systematic, structured and evidence-based tools to work with clients’ stories. If you trust the story, you are trusting the client to forge the path, with the narrative approach as the guiding light.

References

This article is adapted from a CareerWise blog post “Learning How to Trust Our Clients’ Stories” (March 2020) by Michael J Stebleton & Mark Franklin?

Franklin,M. & Stebleton,M.J. (2020). Another story to tell: Outcomes of a single session narrative approach, blended with technology. Canadian Journal of Career Development 19(1)

Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American psychologist, 56(3), 218.