Why creative careers need a story.
Why autobiographies make it to the best sellers list and CV’s don’t
You are not a number. You are not the results of a test nor are you a set of goals or an action plan, and neither is your career. The only thing that comes close to encompassing the richness and complexity of you and your career is a story.
Welcome to the third in this short series of blogs and how to make your creative career more meaningful. In the first of the series, we looked at how personality and personal preferences play a part in your career’s development. These represent the first wave of career theory; how to match people with jobs. In the second, we looked at adaptive characteristics which represent the second wave of career theory; how you engage with your career and work. And in this blog we’ll be diving into the most recent third wave of career theory, Career Narratives; the story of who you are and who you are becoming.
Ask someone what they do and they may give you a title but most likely they’ll tell you the story of their career so far. This is especially true for creatives. When was the last time you handed someone an actual cv?
Story-telling is one of the most ubiquitous parts of our human experience, and they are also the universal language of careers. We use them to describe where we’ve come from, what we’re dealing with, and where we’d like to go. So how can you work with the story of your career to make it more meaningful, productive and fulfilling?
Getting lost in your story.
The stories we create about ourselves, or our personal narratives, are what we use to create meaning, unity, consistency and coherence in our careers.
Often when we feel lost or stuck in our careers it’s because we’ve lost track of where we are in the story. It’s like turning to the next chapter in a book only to find that it’s missing; how can we move on? Where to next? What happens? Or we might find ourselves suddenly plucked from Chapter 2 and dropped into the final chapter without having any sense of the learning or experience our character would have accrued to get there… You might have worked as a visual artist as part of a Collective in a shared space for a number of years, when you’re suddenly asked if you’d take on the job of running the Collective and you feel out of your depth dealing with this new position. Or maybe you’ve been writing for years and suddenly win an award for your work that catapults you into the highest levels of your profession, but still feel undeserving. These are examples of a chapter missing in your personal narrative, and the story no longer feels consistent or makes sense. We might feel lost or like an imposter in someone else’s story.
Given the unpredictable nature of creative careers we can expect to get lost more than a few times along the way.
The why and how of adapting your career story.
Every time you tell the story of your career it changes slightly. In fact it’s always changing, as you are. You have a dry period professionally and feel disconnected from your work, your story will reflect that, but if I meet you a week later when work for the next six months has suddenly appeared, your narrative will shift to accommodate that too:
Story 1: I’m a writer who’s had some success I guess but I feel like it’s been more a struggle than the dream I had in mind.
A week later…
Story 2: I’m a writer and it’s a crazy kind of job; highs, lows and long periods of solitary work, but I love it and I can’t see myself ever doing anything else.
The factual truth remains the same for this writer but the new event has shifted their subjective experience and with it a new interpretation is needed to make their career story feel consistent. Our career stories are always open to adaption in this way and we don’t need to wait for pivotal moments of success or failure to re-draft them. In fact there is much evidence to suggest that re-drafting them may pre-empt or lead to pivotal moments of success.
One of the biggest shifts in our thinking that enables this is how you position yourself within in your story. Listen to enough people talk about their career narratives and you’ll spot them talking from different positions within their story.
Some talk from the position of a secondary character. They may speak to you about an industry that doesn’t value them, that they feel outside of. They may highlight ‘lead characters’ in the form of successful peers that seem to be getting all the industry focus. Their narrative is one of a secondary or subsidiary character. One with little or no influence over the plot. You can imagine the knock on effects this narrative has on how approach their own career development.
Some talk from the position of the lead character. They will talk to you of the struggle they feel against the bigger figures in their story, the struggle to get noticed by larger institutions or influential key figures. There is a narrative of agency but also one of constant struggle.
Some might speak from a position of an extra. Simply watching the story unfold from the wings. There is a sense of great disconnection from their arena of work and their potential within it. Theirs is a narrative of victimhood, often of being left out or left behind.
But some talk about their careers from the position of an author. They seem to have a clearer sense of the overall themes and plot. Even when unexpected characters and events jump into their scenes, they find ways of integrating them into their wider narrative. They will speak of the pandemic and how they had to change tack quickly but found a way of adapting their practice to ensure they were still doing some of their own work. They will share how they’ve changed their approach to finding work in light of what they found was no longer working. There is an orientation of curiosity, innovation and acceptance that comes with this position of author. When have you taken this position in the past? How did it feel? What did you do as a result?
We will often find ourselves in any one of these positions living out any one of their associated narratives at various points in our careers. As these stories are subjective we can shift position whenever we notice that doing so might serve us better.
So, which position are you currently in and what’s the narrative you are telling yourself about your career? What other narratives are possible? What might a more useful narrative and more a useful position be?
Using Career Narrative to construct a more meaningful career.
The use of story and personal narratives in career development has become well established over the last 20yrs. Career theorists such as Mark Savickas have demonstrated how practical and effective ‘narrative’ is in helping people navigate their career/lives in ways that are ultimately more meaningful and fulfilling. Narrative is especially important in creative careers as we are always in the position of constructing it. Unlike the company person of old who’s career narrative was essentially constructed and deconstructed by the company they worked for, we must manage the constant shifts and changes by creating our own narratives and with them our own sense of coherence and consistency.
While there are many ways of using narrative for career development the following are some examples I have found to be particularly effective when working with creatives on their careers:
Role Models: Savickas theorised that in our role models we often seek out people who have successfully overcome challenges that we foresee ourselves facing at present or in the future. Who were your role models when you were 10? What was it about what they did, what they stood for, and how they faced challenges that you admired? What do you think your younger self was looking to develop in themselves through their admiration of these role models? Who are your role models now? What do they tell you about the challenges you see yourself currently facing in your career and the potential solutions or ways of meeting those challenges that you envision being useful for you?
Personal Motto’s: What’s your personal motto? When someone asks you what advice you’d give to someone starting out in your line of work what would you say? “Try again, fail again, fail better” or “Be nice to people on the way up as you’ll meet them on the way down” or “Slow and steady wins the race”. These are more than just common phrases or cliches when they come in response to the question ‘what’s some advice you need to give yourself right now in facing the next chapter in your career?’ Here, these become intuitive guidance, rich in wisdom and specifically relevant to your situation. It has been my experience over hundreds of hours of coaching that the best advice for a creative to hear is their own motto.
Future Possible Selves: When working in a narrative way with creatives I often suggest writing down several possible futures to test them out. Literally drafting several new chapters in their career story to see which ones feel most engaging and consistent with where they’re coming from, and where they want to go to. This allows people the opportunity to really imagine several options in great detail and can make clear very quickly what the narrative of the next needs and which narratives are of little or no use at all. Our imagination is a powerfully useful thing especially when employed in this way. It can save you a lot of time perusing paths and ideas that never really felt right to begin with.
Best Possible Self (BPS). The BPS is an intervention used in positive psychology aimed at improving self-efficacy and personal well-being. It involves free-writing about a version of your best possible self in an ideal situation that you have worked hard to achieve. This can highlight the ways and means of moving forward in your career. It can also create a clear idea of the person you are aspiring to become: spotlighting the values, behaviours and ways of being that you hold most meaningful in your own life/career development. Studies have shown the BPS to be successful in developing self-efficacy and subjective wellbeing. This exercise helps us to address the ‘who am I becoming?’ question that lies at the heart of your career narrative.
It’s not where you’ve been it’s where you’re going: A wonderful use of personal narrative for career development is outlined in Laura Huang’s book ‘The Edge’. Laura skilfully describes how practically beneficial it can be to construct your own career narrative leading from where you are now to where you are going. Typically when we are asked to introduce ourselves we talk about our narrative from past to present. Once you’ve identified where you’re going in your career you can begin to reply to the same request by sharing your narrative about your future from where you are now to where you’re going. This has several benefits. 1. It is exciting. We are drawn to hearing about what comes next in someone’s story. We like thinking about the future and we are excited by a well drawn vision of what could be. 2. It’s a way of helping people connect to where you are and where you want to be. They may decide that want to join you on that journey in some way. It could also spark an idea about how they might be of help.
Consider the following interaction and use of personal story telling:
A: So what do you do?
B: I’m a visual artist. I paint mainly. Well that’s what I trained at but I’m not doing much at the moment. I’m doing a bit of design work for an online magazine which is okay, it pays the bills. And you?
Or…
A: So what do you do?
B: I’m a visual artist currently working in design and oil on canvas. I’m fascinated by how basic design has become in our world and I’m really interested in how we can bring more of the richness of the great renaissance artists back into our modern world. I’m currently developing a body of work around those themes, and I’m interested in seeing how I can bring that richness of texture back into the world of film, industrial design and architecture.
A. Wow, that sound great. I agree with you on things becoming more basic. You should talk to my friend Peter, he’s an architect and he’s always talking about this very thing. I think he’d be interested in your work.
Sharing your career narrative in this way requires taking the time to think about it in depth. Identifying an ideal trajectory and practising sharing that story with others. The benefits are that people can connect with what you’re passionate about, good at, and with your goals. This can often open many doors that would otherwise stay firmly shut.
Becoming more aware of your career narrative, how it influences you, your work and those around you is a key skill in modern career development, especially for freelance creatives. As a career coach working regularly in a narrative way I’ve seen time and time again how powerful it is when someone shifts position from a subsidiarity character to the author, or when they’ve taken the time to really explore which narrative is no longer working for them and construct a better one that fits with their own personal themes, plots and ultimately, where they want to be.
As creatives there is so much that falls outside of our control but the story we choose to construct for ourselves about who we are and who we are becoming is always one we are in the position of author.
(If working with narrative and story feel like a useful way of engaging with your own careers development or for making sense of where you are and where you want to be you can get in touch here for a free 1hr session. Availability is dependant on my capacity at the time).