This means that you must craft different stories for different possible selves (and the various audiences that relate to those selves). Sam chose to focus on start-ups as the result of a process that began with examining his own experience. He realized that he had felt most alive during times he described as ‘big change fast’ — a bankruptcy, a turnaround, and a rapid reorganization. So he developed three stories to support his goal of building a work life around ‘big change fast’: one about the HR contributions he could make on a team at a consulting company that specialized in taking clients through rapid change; one about working for a firm that bought troubled companies and rapidly turned them around; and one about working for a start-up, probably a venture between its first and second, or second and third, rounds of financing. He tested these stories on friends and at networking events and eventually wrangled referrals and job interviews for each kind of job. June’s experience teaches a final, important lesson about undergoing change. We use stories to reinvent ourselves. June, like Sam, was able to change because she created a story that justified and motivated such a dramatic shift. When did you last pause to ponder your life story? The chances are that you have been too busy handling the present challenges to consider what has led you to this point. Dealing with immediate priorities is understandable; however, there may be lessons from past experiences that, when brought to mind, can help you make better decisions now.

Lucy Hartman’s story is a good example of the education plot, which recounts change generated by growing insight and self-understanding. It was a mentor, her executive coach, who let her glimpse a possible new future, and she continued to learn in her master’s program and by coaching others. In her version of events, the more she learned about the human side of enterprise, the more she realized her desire to work in and contribute to this area.RSPCA Preston: Dog found dumped and emaciated among the animals looking for a home in time for Christmas What might you startdoing differently to enhance your wellbeing, boost personal growth and improve your professional satisfaction? But people are impenetrable for particular reasons (because they have something to hide, for example), not because of their natural separateness. One result of this false epistemology was a huge inflation of the faculty of imagination, generally known as Romanticism. This meant that in an age when the arts were increasingly marginal, mere commodities on the market, they could claim morally privileged status. They were now the paragon of imaginative sympathy, and what could be more precious than that, not least in the brutal early decades of industrialisation? Yet feeling your way into someone else’s mind won’t necessarily transform your view of them, or modify an external judgment of what they do. Tout comprendre isn’t always tout pardonner. This may have been true for George Eliot, but not for Jane Austen, who tartly remarks in Persuasion that one of her characters would have saved his parents a lot of trouble had he never been born. Feeling what it is like to be a serial killer may deepen one’s repugnance, not temper it with mercy. Sympathy is no basis for an ethics. You don’t need to know what it feels like to be starving to give a sandwich to a beggar. Finding him repellent doesn’t make the act any less virtuous. It might even make it more so.

You can practice your stories in many ways and places. Any context will do in which you’re likely to be asked, ‘What can you tell me about yourself?’ or ‘What do you do?’ or ‘What are you looking for?’. Start with family and friends. You may even want to designate a small circle of friends and close colleagues, with their knowledge and approval, your ‘board of advisers’. Their primary function would be to listen and react again and again to your evolving stories. Many of the people we have studied or coached through the transition process have created or joined networking groups for just this purpose.Sophie named her daughter Manon. As she grew older, Manon looked nothing like her parents. She had darker skin and frizzy hair, and the neighbors started to gossip about her origins. Certain forms — love stories, war stories, epics — are as old as narrative itself. There are stories of being tested and stories of being punished. When it comes to describing transition and reinvention, it can be helpful to present the story in a vessel familiar to most listeners. Of the time-honored approaches, two to consider are the maturation (or coming-of-age) plot and the education plot. All good stories have a characteristic so basic and necessary it’s often assumed. That quality is coherence, and it’s crucial to life stories of transition. These emotions are fed by our story. They do not care if the story we are telling is true, helpful, or even based on what is currently happening.

Tell your story to yourself—and make sure you tell the right one. If you’re having trouble constructing an honest yet positive life narrative, here is an exercise to help you. Just ask yourself these three things: That time you were laid off, for example, is it further proof that your career’s going nowhere? Or is it the best thing that ever happened, liberating you to find work that suits you better? There is a question I ask clients to discover how they are making sense or meaning of their experiences. When you’re in the midst of a major career change, telling stories about your professional self can inspire others’ belief in your character and in your capacity to take a leap and land on your feet. It also can help you believe in yourself. A narrative thread will give meaning to your career history; it will assure you that, in moving on to something new, you are not discarding everything you’ve worked so hard to accomplish.In Things that Bother Me (2018), Galen Strawson argues with a brisk Oxfordian common sense that there are narrative people and non-narrative ones. Some of us see our lives as a story and some of us don’t. He might have added that there are those who have some narrational days and some non-narrational ones. There are also ‘transients’, who don’t consider that the self they are now was there in the past or shall be there in the future. Virginia Woolf and Bob Dylan occupy this slot, along with Strawson himself, who believes that ‘as a whole human being’ he exists continuously over time, but that his self, by which he means the way he experiences himself to be now, is not the same as his self at the age of ten. He also thinks it is obvious that it isn’t. Contrasted with transients are endurers, who feel themselves to be continuous over long stretches of time – they include St Augustine and Graham Greene. The difference also works at the level of entire cultures. If you can carve your own path to the grave these days, it is because grand narratives of this kind have crumbled and can no longer constrain you. Journeys are no longer communal but self-tailored, more like hitchhiking than a coach tour. They are no longer mass products but for the most part embarked on alone. The world has ceased to be story-shaped, which means that you can make your life up as you go along. You can own it, just as you can own a boutique. As the current cliché has it, everybody is different, a proposition which if true would spell the end of ethics, sociology, demography, medical science and a good deal besides. At first glance, it’s not obvious why stories of transition should present any problems at all. Almost by definition, they contain the stuff of good narrative. The protagonist is you, of course, and what’s at stake is your career. Only love, life, and death could be more important. And transition is always about a world that’s changed. You’ve been let go, or you’ve somehow decided your life doesn’t work anymore. Perhaps you’ve reached an event or insight that represents a point of no return — one that marks the end of the second act, a period of frustration and struggle. In the end, if all goes well, you resolve the tension and uncertainty and embark on a new chapter in your life or career. She’s always forgetting things. They’re irresponsible, lazy, and inconsiderate. He never considers how his choices impact me. If they really loved me, they wouldn’t do this kind of thing.