Is Your Career Story Your Own?

By Katharine on March 23, 2011 Comments (0)

I write a lot about  storytelling in the job search, but story can play a role in other aspects of career, such as  career exploration through story.

Carole Pemberton examined another aspect — the idea of authoring your own life and career — in a  post from last year.

Pemberton notes, for example, that sometimes we adopt career stories that have been created for us — such as the young person whose parents urged him or her to become a doctor or lawyer. Or a similar young person who is expected to follow a given career path because that’s the path a parent followed. Or the person expected to take over the family business.

Certainly we are influenced by our parents’ paths. I know I was. I became a writer in large part because my father was a writer.

My sister has recently pushed my buttons by suggesting that my father wasn’t really a writer. He wrote and edited publications and promotional materials for gas-station dealers. He edited medical textbooks. He wrote many articles for horse magazines. He wrote a book on training horses. He taught classes in magazine writing. For my sister, these activities did not add up to his having been a writer.

I told her it didn’t matter because what was imprinted on my brain at an early age is the belief that he was a writer.

The irony, however, was that he was not passionate about writing. It was his day job; it was how he supported himself and his family. But his passion was horses — breeding, raising, training, showing, judging horses and running horse shows. He was never especially proud of me for following in his writer footsteps; he would have been far more proud of me if I’d become a horsewoman. Nor did he ever push me in any way to be a writer. [The photo above shows me (far right), my father, and my sisters in a “family class” at a horse show. We won first place, and I will always remember that event as a pinnacle in family triumph and harmony.]

So, for me, a parent was extremely influential, but I very much made my own choice. So, yes, I believe my career story is my own.

But Pemberton cites the work of Marcia B. Baxter Magolda, who for her book Authoring a Life “interviewed 35 adults over a 20 year period, and found that facing a career crossroad was a significant feature of her interviewees.” Continues Pemberton:

At some point, individuals began to hear an inner voice which told them that their needs were different from what they had come to believe. That voice was often suppressed because it opened up fears of disapproval, but at some point the individual had to make a decision.

To become the author of our own lives and careers, Pemberton believes we need to create our own authentic career narratives. “Sit down and write your career story so far, she writes ” — not as a CV story, but in terms of the following questions:”

• Think of the role models you were presented with in childhood and early adulthood and how they influenced your decisions about work?
• Has there been a point when you were challenged by something in life that changed your perspective on your career?
• If you have passed over a career crossroad, which road did you take and why?
• What has resulted from the road you chose?
• If you are currently at a crossroad, what is the tension you are caught between?
• How much of what you are doing now is guided by your own inner voice?
• If you are on a journey towards developing that inner voice — then when is it at its strongest, and when does it get drowned out?
• In a world where careers are constantly changing in response to global, economic, social and technological shifts, creating self authorship will become ever more important. A starting point is to take time to reflect on how well your career narrative is working for you, in order to check if a different story needs to be written.
• What aspect of your career narrative do you feel you have been in control of ?
• If you have reached the crossroad, what signs were there that were reaching that point?
• If you are at the crossroads right now, what are you noticing about what you are responding to that gives you clues as to what your inner voice wants you to hear.
• If you have started to listen to that voice how do you keep it from being drowned out by the ‘old story?’
• If you have begun to trust that voice, what does it enable you to do differently?