1: What's Your Career Narrative?

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[This transcript has not been edited and is provided as a service.

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] I need to work on my narrative.

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That's probably the most common thing I hear when people reach out to me when it comes to career advancement.

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They either use that exact language or they use something that's pretty similar, and I guess the question is what does that really mean?

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What does it mean when you say you have a personal narrative or there's a narrative about your career?

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It's more complex than just a nice story.

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There's a lot of meaning, experience and hopes and dreams baked into it.

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It's that complexity that probably led me to name my business career narratives in the first place.

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In this podcast, we're going to be taking a look at what it means to have a personal narrative, how you craft it, how you deliver it and how you live it.

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I'm Doug Lester, an executive coach and career strategist to MBAs and ambitious professionals.

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I've worked one-on-one with well over a thousand people, helping them craft compelling work-life narratives and advance satisfying, meaningful careers.

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When it comes to your career and your life, if you don't craft your own narrative, then someone else might do it for you and you might not like what they come up with.

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So let's work together on your narrative now.

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So what is a career narrative or your personal narrative.

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Sometimes I refer to it as a work-life narrative.

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In its simplest terms, it could be a story that you tell about yourself in networking or in interviews, but I think you know that when you've tried to prepare for those conversations, even a simple story about yourself can be hard to pin down and it takes a lot of work to get there and you're not always sure that you've gotten it right or that other people get it.

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Just a few weeks ago, a client came to me after an important interview and said I know I'm the right person for the role, but I don't think they get me.

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Ultimately, you want your narrative to contain the full arc of your career and life.

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When I went to business school, the most confident people, or the people who seemed most confident would say that they had a career and they had a personal life and that they were two separate things.

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Maybe it was my background working in mission-driven organizations right after college or the sneaking suspicion that they were just putting on the show, but it just didn't feel right to me.

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I wanted my career and my life to be interlaced, to be a whole.

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Most all of the people I work with today feel the same way.

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They, and I think you know there's no way to tease your career and life apart.

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There's always overlap and they create one cohesive narrative.

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So how do you create that cohesive narrative for yourself?

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How do you live it?

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How do you know it's right and that it's meaningful and compelling to other people when you're working to advance your career?

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That's what we're going to talk about in this podcast.

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I'm planning episodes that are long enough and thoughtful enough, I hope, to get to the heart of the matter, but not so long that you can't listen all the way through while you're walking your dog or doing the dishes, maybe commuting or grabbing lunch in between meetings.

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And I'm planning to give you at least one practical tip that you can apply to your own work-life narrative right away.

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I'll be talking about all stages of career development and management, including how you determine what's engaging and meaningful for you and will sustain you through an entire, likely varied career.

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I've helped more than a thousand people figure this out or at least gained some clarity in that area.

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Based on that self-assessment, we'll talk about how you figure out where you fit in the marketplace.

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You can think about that as how you find product-market fit and how you talk and write about yourself so that it's authentic and compelling to the people who hold the keys to your career advancement.

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Before I started working as a career strategist and executive coach, I was a consumer products marketer in healthcare, personal care and the beauty industry.

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I love helping the people I work with define a positioning for themselves and then figure out exactly the right words to use to describe it to their target audience.

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We'll also cover networking, recruiting and interviewing.

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Between my marketing and coaching careers, I worked as a senior associate at a top executive search firm.

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It's a long story that I'll likely cover in another episode, but I learned how the experts in networking create strategies that are time efficient and that work.

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I also got a look behind the curtain at the dynamics of executive search and decision making when it comes to choosing managers and leaders of companies and organizations.

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Finally, we'll talk about how, as a manager and a leader, you show up as the person you said you were in the recruiting process.

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Of course, it helps if the story or narrative you presented was authentic and personally meaningful to you, which takes us right back to the beginning, where you figure out what you want your narrative to be in the first place.

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The last thing I'd like to share about myself before leaving you with something to think about when it comes to crafting your own narrative, is that if you're an MBA graduate or an ambitious career-minded professional, I've walked in your shoes.

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I haven't always been a coach.

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I got an MBA from Morton and I worked my way up the corporate ladder for about 10 years, and I made cross-country moves twice as a trailing spouse, all that's to say.

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I understand just how complex a career and a life can be and how they can evolve, sometimes in ways that you don't even imagine.

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I have a full appreciation for the trade-offs and compromises that need to be made along the way and that affect the evolution of a personal narrative.

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There aren't any simple solutions when it comes to crafting a work-life narrative that's authentic and that can evolve as the world and your circumstances change around you, but we'll sort through it.

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If this sounds relevant and useful for you, I'd invite you to subscribe to the podcast, but before we close out this first episode, I'd like to leave you with some food for thought and a homework assignment, if you'll take it.

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I first started thinking about narrative when it came to career, when I was an executive recruiter, and I can remember exactly when One of my colleagues and I were talking and I just had a networking conversation with someone in the firm's network who was also on her radar screen.

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I mentioned that I had just spoken to him and she asked me a direct but ultimately kind of complicated question so what's that guy's story?

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There was a lot baked into that question and I did my best to answer it, given what I had learned when I had talked to this guy.

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And as I've thought about it more, I realized that she was actually asking three separate questions.

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The first one was what does this guy do as a recruiter?

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She was wondering what kind of role she might consider him for in the future.

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Job titles certainly help when it comes to figuring this out, but they don't always tell the full story, especially if you're thinking about transitioning into another type of work.

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The second question was what context would he be interested in or would he be the right fit for?

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Recruiters are always trying to figure out if seemingly compelling candidates are a good fit for their clients.

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Company size, culture, geography and a very long list of other characteristics can come into play.

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And the third question that she implied by asking what's this guy's story is what is the benefit or impact of his work?

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When recruiters like us were called in to fill a role, it was often because the client was at an inflection point.

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They were facing a challenge and they wanted candidates who had faced that challenge in the past and had helped an organization similar to theirs overcome it, preferably more than once.

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So now ask yourself the same question what's your story?

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Or, more specifically, what are the answers to these three questions what do you do, what context do you do it in, and what's the impact or benefit of your work?

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These may be some of the hardest questions you've ever had to answer, but if you can do it with some confidence, then you're on your way to crafting a compelling personal narrative.

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See you in the next episode and don't forget to subscribe.