The Career Stories Method follows eleven steps to find your ideal career and discover your awesome self in the process.
The book walks you through the entire method, and each step has activities for you to do. The first step is to make your career stories cards. I explain the whole method, plus provide over 30 prompts in the book on how to access these personal work stories. I first spoke about career stories cards in my TEDx talk.
Step 1: Make Your Career Stories Cards
You start the method by examining your favourite career moments for 7-10 days. This process of coming back to the same questions and prompts for a week or more allows you to access stories you may have forgotten and rewrite your career story. By the end of this first step you will:
- know your top three to five skills/strengths
- be able to express it in one sentence
- trust that the skills you identified are the work that makes you most joyful
You can also try this free course, where I lead you through the seven most popular career stories prompts.
Common Obstacles with Career Stories Method: Step One
While I trust this exercise and do it with every client, it can be hard for some people to do because of negative bias, negative self-talk, and low appreciation for the work you’ve done.
Obstacle One: You can’t think of anything positive
This exercise is related to meditation training in the “nurture positive” area. Sometimes when you haven’t had the opportunity to work in ideal places, it’s hard to think of a time you were happy. Or, you might be so used to complaining and only seeing the negative, that you have to develop the skill of recognizing positivity first. If this is you, I highly recommend a metta meditation practice. Do these meditations for a week or two and then come back to the cards.
Free meditations to nurture positive:
This meditation technique, which was created by Shinzen Young, helps you to evoke and notice positive emotions.
If you find it hard to conjure up positive emotions, it might be that you need a technique to turn away from stress first. Here’s a guided practice for that:
Obstacle Two: You feel the work that makes you happiest is not important enough
This is a hard one because you’ve started this process to land the work. But, here’s what to remember: the career cards stage is stage one, it’s where you start. The first step is not figuring it all out, it’s figuring out one piece. Don’t put so much pressure on yourself to figure out something as complicated as your life’s dream in just a few days with some index cards.
The clarity will come over the next few steps, not step one. That’s like never skating in your life, and thinking you’ll be Olympic level after one lesson. Nope. But, you’ll know the foundations.
If the story you have been telling yourself and others about your work is not landing you ideal roles, it means starting from the beginning. Digging into those memories to find glints of delight. Right now, you just need to find them. Don’t worry yet about how you’ll market them, celebrate that you know how to find them.
When I did this work, the stories I came up with were not resume-worthy, but that’s not their job right now. The stories are to help you know what you’re awesome at, we can refine the message later.
Accept your happiest work moments without judgment, this is the quickest way to career success.
Want to do the whole Career Stories Method? Awesome. Get the book here.
