When you’re in the midst of a major career change, telling stories about your professional self can inspire others’ belief in your character and in your capacity to take a leap and land on your feet. It also can help you believe in yourself. A narrative thread will give meaning to your career history; it will assure you that, in moving on to something new, you are not discarding everything you’ve worked so hard to accomplish. What might you startdoing differently to enhance your wellbeing, boost personal growth and improve your professional satisfaction? Certain forms — love stories, war stories, epics — are as old as narrative itself. There are stories of being tested and stories of being punished. When it comes to describing transition and reinvention, it can be helpful to present the story in a vessel familiar to most listeners. Of the time-honored approaches, two to consider are the maturation (or coming-of-age) plot and the education plot. It was only when Sophie’s husband accused her of giving birth to another man’s baby that she went for paternity tests and discovered that her husband was right (sort of). The baby, then aged 10, wasn’t his, but she wasn’t Sophie’s either. She belonged to another set of parents, who had been raising Sophie’s biological daughter in a town several miles away.

But people are impenetrable for particular reasons (because they have something to hide, for example), not because of their natural separateness. One result of this false epistemology was a huge inflation of the faculty of imagination, generally known as Romanticism. This meant that in an age when the arts were increasingly marginal, mere commodities on the market, they could claim morally privileged status. They were now the paragon of imaginative sympathy, and what could be more precious than that, not least in the brutal early decades of industrialisation? Yet feeling your way into someone else’s mind won’t necessarily transform your view of them, or modify an external judgment of what they do. Tout comprendre isn’t always tout pardonner. This may have been true for George Eliot, but not for Jane Austen, who tartly remarks in Persuasion that one of her characters would have saved his parents a lot of trouble had he never been born. Feeling what it is like to be a serial killer may deepen one’s repugnance, not temper it with mercy. Sympathy is no basis for an ethics. You don’t need to know what it feels like to be starving to give a sandwich to a beggar. Finding him repellent doesn’t make the act any less virtuous. It might even make it more so. For starters, keep in mind that, in a job interview, you don’t establish trust by getting everything off your chest or being completely open about the several possibilities you are exploring. In the early stages of a transition, it is important to identify and actively consider multiple alternatives. But you will explore each option, or type of option, with a different audience. Make a plan and start with just one small thing to bring about, and take it from there. Then consider the action you (and your team) will undertake as a result in three areas: Let’s return to that networking event and all the drab stories (actually, nonstories) people told. If transition stories, with their drama and discontinuity, lend themselves so well to vivid telling, why did so many people merely recount the basic facts of their careers and avoid the exciting turning points? Why did most of them try to frame the changes in their lives as incremental, logical extensions of what they were doing before? Why did they fail to play up the narrative twists and turns? June’s experience teaches a final, important lesson about undergoing change. We use stories to reinvent ourselves. June, like Sam, was able to change because she created a story that justified and motivated such a dramatic shift.This means that you must craft different stories for different possible selves (and the various audiences that relate to those selves). Sam chose to focus on start-ups as the result of a process that began with examining his own experience. He realized that he had felt most alive during times he described as ‘big change fast’ — a bankruptcy, a turnaround, and a rapid reorganization. So he developed three stories to support his goal of building a work life around ‘big change fast’: one about the HR contributions he could make on a team at a consulting company that specialized in taking clients through rapid change; one about working for a firm that bought troubled companies and rapidly turned them around; and one about working for a start-up, probably a venture between its first and second, or second and third, rounds of financing. He tested these stories on friends and at networking events and eventually wrangled referrals and job interviews for each kind of job. What was the challenge, or series of challenges, that came along to threaten your strength and peace? Can you think of an early part of your life when you felt strong and happy? If you had a difficult childhood or other challenges that prevent you from identifying this starting place, try thinking of the time when you were still cradled in the womb. It’s a typically fascinating “switched at birth” tale. But here’s where it takes an unexpected turn. Unfortunately, the authors explain in this article, most of us fail to use the power of storytelling in pursuit of our professional goals, or we do it badly. Tales of transition are especially challenging. Not knowing how to reconcile the built-in discontinuities in our work lives, we often relay just the facts. We present ourselves as safe—and dull and unremarkable.

We’ve noted the challenge of crafting a story, complete with dramatic turning points, when the outcome is still far from clear. The truth is, as you embark on a career transition, you will likely find yourself torn among different interests, paths, and priorities. It wouldn’t be unusual, for example, for you to work all weekend on a business plan for a start-up, return to your day job on Monday and ask for a transfer to another position or business unit, and then have lunch on Tuesday with a headhunter to explore yet a third option. This is simply the nature of career transition. So how do you reconcile this reality with the need to present a clear, single life story of reinvention, one that implies you know exactly where you’re going?RSPCA Preston: Dog found dumped and emaciated among the animals looking for a home in time for Christmas But Sophie never faltered. The nurse had explained that the artificial light used to treat jaundice could affect hair color. Even more, Sophie loved Manon. She knew the story of her life: her cries, her coos, her first words. When did you last pause to ponder your life story? The chances are that you have been too busy handling the present challenges to consider what has led you to this point. Dealing with immediate priorities is understandable; however, there may be lessons from past experiences that, when brought to mind, can help you make better decisions now. Seldom is a good story so needed, though, as when a major change of professional direction is under way — when we are leaving A without yet having left it and moving toward B without yet having gotten there. In a time of such unsettling transition, telling a compelling story to coworkers, bosses, friends, or family — or strangers in a conference room — inspires belief in our motives, character, and capacity to reach the goals we’ve set. Declare yourself” to your colleagues at work. Doug Conant, the much-admired former CEO of Campbell Soup and founder of Conant Leadership (and one of my favorite people), is an introvert who’s not inclined to schmooze and self-disclose. So he scheduled “Declare Yourself” meetings, one at a time, with each of his direct reports. The purpose of these meetings was to tell his employees his story: how he liked to work, his management philosophy, and the things and people that mattered to him most. (We at Quiet Revolution are partnering with Conant Leadership to develop a “Declare Yourself” tool that you can use with your colleagues. Stay tuned on that.)