What's the story?

This week I have been preparing a workshop for the International Career Conference in Wellington, New Zealand on 20 November. The topic of this workshop is about using narrative, or story, to assist people to create career change.

I have always loved stories. An avid reader when I was young, I literally devoured books, continually exhausting my parents with requests for new paperbacks. At eleven, I started saving my pocket money to buy them myself: Anna Karenina and the two volumes of War and Peace were the first on my list(this was obviously my Russian phase). Before that it was the English classics, such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Shakespeare took hold of me at around 12, followed by sci-fi (everything John Wyndham wrote), detective stories (Agatha Christie - who else?) and the poets - Robert Frost, TS Eliot and Banjo Patterson etc. saw me through to fifteen or so. Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Albert Camus (L'Etranger) and other assorted French writers caught my attention a bit later (part of my appetite for anything French. I must have been an unusual child.

These days I rarely have time to scan a page or two of a feature in the weekend magazines (although today I managed to read a piece on James Packer's life from last week's paper from beginning to end, each paragraph increasing my belief that the world really has gone mad, one person with all that wealth to squander on not just one luxury cruiser, but two, and of course then there is the stable of jet planes, houses in all the right places, la-de-da!).

I digress. But, like most people I guess, with each year that passes I seem to be able to find less less time (and inclination) for reading huge tomes (except for the years spent as an undergraduate in my early thirties). The fact is, I have been provided with stories aplenty to maintain my interest, real life ones which are really so much more fascinating, and yes, stranger, than fiction.

The stories I am talking about are truly remarkable - stories of escape from war torn regions and senseless torture, of starting life all ovaer again in alien countries with absolutely nothing, often not even a photo of the loved ones they had left behind, or who had perished. I've heard people talk about how they have bounced back and reinvent themselves after injuries and illnesses, financial ruin, disgrace and shame (eat your heart out, James Packer), in ways that are more than a match for the fictional characters that pervaded my youth.

Many of these stories have been told by people who have come to me as career counselling and coaching clients, some as government employment services clients, so I can't relate any of these here. Others are private clients, whose confidentiality I must also respect. But they are stories of adventure, crime, passion, anguish, death and despair, and above all, victory.

I am sorry that I have missed so many marvellous opportunities to document at least some of the stories I have been so privileged to hear. Hopefully one day I will get to write a work that incorporates some elements from them. The world certainly could do with some real life role models - everyday people doing extraordinary things, to rekindle our faith in humanity if nothing else.

Lately I have been doing a lot of thinking about the link between story, narrative and career. I have been thinking that, for each person, there is the story about their life and career, and there is another story that sits in the background, that actually drives us, tells us what is important, and guides us as we make important decisions. A lot of the time, when we make a choice about something, in the final countdown we say we decided on instinct. I am wondering whether this instinct is actually something that is primal, deeply rooted in our psyches.

Telling stories is part of who we are, our human-ness. Modern life has robbed us of the power of the story, through corporatisation, socialisation and taboos that tell us what we can and can't say, verbally and on the page or screen. To a large extent, we have lost our instinct, our roots, and we don't even realise it because in this high-paced world we do not allow ourselves the time to reflect and explore the inner recesses. Everything is show, our careers are all show. If you disagree, and think your career reflects the person you truly are, let me know!