storytelling — A healthy lifestyle blog for professionals focused on nutrition, fitness, and self care.

Let’s start with some honest perspective: your first job may not be your dream job. However, keep in mind that your first job out of school or first position when starting a new career does not have to limit what type of professional you are five or 10 years from now. In fact, neither do the second or third jobs you may have. Obtaining some experience is a start, and what you do with it while obtaining it – and after you have it – are key factors in positioning yourself for the type of future career you desire.

Your professional brand develops with and through your experiences and reflection. Because you are largely in control of your own voice, the good news is that you get to develop and put forth the message. Regardless of where you start as a professional, consider each step in your career as a component of your personal brand. You get to choose what you do with the experiences you have by how you characterize and describe them to others. You can create messaging about your experiences on your resume, online professional profiles, and in your professional and personal interactions in the tone that best reflects the path you seek to pursue.

Telling your own professional story involves focusing your career path by changing the way you think and speak about it to others. To do this, consider these steps:

(1) Get clear about what career or direction you want. Even if striving toward clarity means defining two or three different career directions or positions that interest you, the important task here is to identify them. Written words are best because they help you visualize and be more precise and intentional in your descriptions. Practice describing these positions or researching job descriptions that might interest you. For example, type into a job search site various combinations of keywords that interest you, and see what types of fascinating jobs pop up. You might be surprised what creative positions are out there that just might be what you're looking for.

(2) Focus on transferable skills from your previous and current work. Consider your first research projects, client interactions, leadership opportunities, meetings, phone calls, etc. to add substance to your professional profile. Don’t forget internships and volunteer experiences! Come up with real examples of substantive work you have completed in which you acquired skills that you could use for another employer in a different context. Recalling precise examples helps you better prepare for a conversation during a networking happy hour or job interview about how you are now equipped to take on similar yet new challenges given the skill development you've been doing.

(3) Draft and share the messages you want to be heard. Considering your interests (from point (1) above) and transferable skills (from point (2)), come up with some key talking points that you wouldn't mind sharing with a friend, family member, or colleague about the new story you wish to tell about yourself. What are your new interests (point 1), and what skills are you building upon from your previous or current work to aim toward where you want to go (point 2)? Then, practice delivering that message about the type of professional you are and the one you want to become – even if the experience you have is not in the area in which you would like to grow. An honest yet creative approach will help you use each experience – even the not so glamorous ones – for your professional development.

Example: Let's say you have an interest in the health field, but your work experience is in marketing. Once you start writing and sharing your story (interest plus skills) with others whom you trust, people may start to think of you for an opportunity like serving on the board of a non-profit organization that needs your expertise to develop a branding campaign for a particular service they offer. From there, you can develop real, specific experience related to your desired direction.

As a professional, and especially as a young or new one, remember that you are always working for yourself by defining your accumulated experiences related to the ones you desire in a positive, confident way. Your everyday professional development is largely in your thoughts and words. You are ultimately responsible for the professional you become, so try not to rely on someone else to develop you into the professional you wish to be. Ensure that you meet your professional goals by identifying and promoting messaging that is true to who you are as a person and skilled worker to attract the career opportunities you most desire.

Be your own best advocate! Through personal storytelling, start aiming now for the types of experiences you wish to help define a better version of yourself for the future. After having practiced law now for over six years, please know that it only gets better from here.

First image above: Shutterstock.

As I was driving, I heard a whisper: the plan is that there is no plan.

No plan? I thought, what?! What is life without one?

I don’t know if I can even answer this question at this time, but at least I am now open to thinking about what that whispered advice means.

When things appear in patterns in my life, I tend to listen. I suppose it’s a way of getting my attention, and it’s the way I do legal research. It’s the way I validate a suspicion, a belief, or the answer to a question I have a hunch for. I listen to patterns.

But some patterns take longer to convince me. Especially those patterns that, if I were to believe them, would require me to make some serious life-altering shifts in my thoughts and behaviors. But those patterns, I’ve found, are the ones I need to listen to the most.

A recent trend in the self-care sphere is storytelling. It’s personal; it’s unique; and people can identify with genuine human stories about the glamorous and not-so-glamorous aspects of life. But I’ve found a sub-theme running throughout this recent storytelling trend, and that is the rewriting of stories’ ends.

When I was in first grade, my teacher advised my mother to buy me more erasers so that I would learn the value of rewriting, editing, and correcting mistakes in my grammar and penmanship. My mother told me this story as an adult several years later as I started my legal career. Instead of erasers, I was trying to become more comfortable with the idea of using “Track Changes” and the backspace button on my keyboard.

The thought of rewriting the ending to a story had never occurred to me. As a young woman, since the time I became literate, I was writing stories. And stories had a cadence: they had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Teachers always taught that the plot developed throughout, and that it was important to have an ending in mind once you started writing a story. Otherwise, you didn’t know where you were going.

I recently finished reading a book in which the premise is to prepare a person for long-term travel, but it focuses more on leaving time open for exploration and adventure. It minimizes sight-seeing lists and warns against the tendency of packing a schedule with too much. This has been the story of my life.

What’s a trip without a plane ticket, an itinerary, and a return trip home in which I’m looking at pictures of my experiences? What’s a story without a foreseeable ending?

Until tragedy hits, or we experience an unexpected turn of events, such as a job change, transition, or loss, or the death of a loved one, it’s difficult to imagine our much-anticipated story – or what we expect to be our life experience – ending any other way than how we had originally envisioned. We’re supposed to do this; we’re supposed to accomplish that. Expectations beget planned endings. Planned endings are comfortable. I’m confident when I know the ending to my story. Like everyone else, I like the control and assurance.

But when faced with unmet expectations or a drastic change in events, the ending is torn to shreds. It’s dismantled and frayed. It’s fragmented.

The problem with planned endings is that they are no ending at all. They’re a cheap, calculated confirmation that only includes our current worldview. This is because they lack the luster and brilliance of all that life has to offer if we were to consider it from different perspectives.

I can’t promise you a happy ending with whatever personal or professional challenge you may be facing. But if you knew that you could rewrite the ending to whatever struggle that may be, you might face that struggle head on with a sense of hope and encouragement that you might not otherwise have. You might embrace the opportunity to edit, erase, redline, and redraft your document again and again until finally you’ve stared at the beginning and the middle long enough and accepted it. And then, you just might rewrite an ending more beautiful than the one you had originally planned for yourself.

No matter what’s happened, your story isn’t over, and you still have an ending to write. Start writing.

First image above: Shutterstock.

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