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What's Your Story?: A Journal for Everyday Evolution

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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. All good stories have a characteristic so basic and necessary it’s often assumed. That quality is coherence, and it’s crucial to life stories of transition.

The baby spent her first days in an incubator under artificial light and was returned to her mother four days later. Unbeknownst to Sophie, it wasn’t her baby. It was another 4-day-old with jaundice. The nurse had switched the babies by accident. 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?What might you startdoing differently to enhance your wellbeing, boost personal growth and improve your professional satisfaction? 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. 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. Opening - Start your story with an interesting main character and decide where the story is going to take place. It’s a typically fascinating “switched at birth” tale. But here’s where it takes an unexpected turn.

I don’t mean where you grew up, went to school, got your first job, etc. I mean what’s your STORY? What narrative have you constructed from the events of your life? And do you know that this is the single most important question you can ask yourself? Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So, throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbour, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover. – Mark Twain, writer, publisher and lecturer. 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. For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.All of us tell stories about ourselves. Stories define us. To know someone well is to know her story — the experiences that have shaped her, the trials and turning points that have tested her. When we want someone to know us, we share stories of our childhoods, our families, our school years, our first loves, the development of our political views, and so on.

Sophie named her daughter Manon. As she grew older, Manon looked nothing like her parents. She had darker skin and frizzy hair, and the neighbors started to gossip about her origins. Everyone these days is on a journey, which can lend some provisional shape to lives without much sense of direction. Humanity was also on a journey in medieval times, but it was a collective expedition with an origin, well signposted stages and a distinct destination. The Enlightenment notion of progress was more open-ended: to imagine an end to human self-perfecting was to deny our infinite potential. This creed was inherited by some 19th-century thinkers – ironically, since the dominant model of development at the time was evolution, which is random, littered with blind alleys and lengthy digressions and heads nowhere in particular. Everyone has a unique story that explains how they have come to be where they are in life at this moment. Taking time to examine aspects of your life story can provide an insight that you can use to advance new possibilities and deal more effectively with challenges. It is an enabling approach that allows you to be more resourceful in planning a better future. It can work well as a team-building exercise too. Here’s how to do it: 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. You can practice your stories in many ways and places. Any context will do in which you’re likely to be asked, ‘What can you tell me about yourself?’ or ‘What do you do?’ or ‘What are you looking for?’. Start with family and friends. You may even want to designate a small circle of friends and close colleagues, with their knowledge and approval, your ‘board of advisers’. Their primary function would be to listen and react again and again to your evolving stories. Many of the people we have studied or coached through the transition process have created or joined networking groups for just this purpose.Any veteran storyteller will agree that there’s no substitute for practicing in front of a live audience. Tell and retell your story; rework it like a draft of an epic novel until the ‘right’ version emerges.

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