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. Begin by establishing a specific timeframe to represent the past, present and future. (For example, the last 12 months and the coming 12 months). Draw this timeline on a sheet of paper.You can examine different timelines from your life in subsequent exercises to further enrich this process. A meeting was arranged for the two mothers and their daughters. Sophie saw that her biological daughter looked just like her in a way that Manon did not and never would. 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.

It is not the blood that makes a family,” Ms. Serrano told The New York Times (where I read this story). “What makes a family is what we build together, what we tell each other.” 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. Many have a great story in certain times of their lives in which they feel pride, enjoy success and experience happiness. It is easy to let these memories slide when life becomes tough as the bad experiences can cloud the good. This exercise taps into the resourcefulness that comes from deep learning about what enables successful outcomes. The insights gained allow you to do more of what works well on purpose, thus enabling you to build resilience and plan for a brighter future. 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.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. It’s a typically fascinating “switched at birth” tale. But here’s where it takes an unexpected turn. 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. 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.

Any veteran storyteller will agree that there’s no substitute for practicing in front of a live audience. Tell and retell your story; rework it like a draft of an epic novel until the ‘right’ version emerges. 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. Self-authorship, an idea Shakespeare denounces in Coriolanus, is a fantasy of self-governance in a world where the markets decide who shall starve and who shall grow fat. Brooks’s complaint, however, isn’t only that the idea of narrative has been trivialised, but that some of the tales are malevolent and oppressive. If this is a bleaker, more disenchanted book than Reading for the Plot, it is largely because of Donald Trump, even though the former president isn’t granted the dignity of a mention. It begins with a quotation from Game of Thrones: ‘There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.’ One assumes that the story Brooks has in mind is a chronicle of America Lost and America Regained, a stolen election and a deep state, paedophile conspiracies and the storming of a citadel. Life-giving fictions have yielded to noxious myths – myths, the book warns, ‘may kill us yet’. You’ll know you’ve honed your story when it feels both comfortable and true to you. But you cannot get there until you put yourself in front of others — ultimately, in front of strangers — and watch their faces and body language as you speak. For one woman we know, June Prescott, it was not simply that practice made for polished presentation — although her early efforts to explain herself were provisional, even clumsy. (She was attempting a big career change, from academe to Wall Street.) Each time she wrote a cover letter, interviewed, or updated friends and family on her progress, she better defined what was exciting to her; and in each public declaration of her intent to change careers, she committed herself further. Opening - Start your story with an interesting main character and decide where the story is going to take place.

Declare yourself” to your colleagues at work. Doug Conant, the much-admired former CEO of Campbell Soup and founder of Conant Leadership (and one of my favorite people), is an introvert who’s not inclined to schmooze and self-disclose. So he scheduled “Declare Yourself” meetings, one at a time, with each of his direct reports. The purpose of these meetings was to tell his employees his story: how he liked to work, his management philosophy, and the things and people that mattered to him most. (We at Quiet Revolution are partnering with Conant Leadership to develop a “Declare Yourself” tool that you can use with your colleagues. Stay tuned on that.) But she felt no connection to this other girl. It was Manon she had nursed, Manon whose nightmares she’d soothed, and Manon whose stories she knew. This other daughter looked just like Sophie—but what did that even mean, when she didn’t know her stories? The other mother felt the same way. There is a question I ask clients to discover how they are making sense or meaning of their experiences. It was only when Sophie’s husband accused her of giving birth to another man’s baby that she went for paternity tests and discovered that her husband was right (sort of). The baby, then aged 10, wasn’t his, but she wasn’t Sophie’s either. She belonged to another set of parents, who had been raising Sophie’s biological daughter in a town several miles away.

Everyone has a unique story that explains how they have come to be where they are in life at this moment. Taking time to examine aspects of your life story can provide an insight that you can use to advance new possibilities and deal more effectively with challenges. It is an enabling approach that allows you to be more resourceful in planning a better future. It can work well as a team-building exercise too. Here’s how to do it: Coherent narratives hang together in ways that feel natural and intuitive. A coherent life story is one that suggests what we all want to believe of ourselves and those we help or hire — that our lives are series of unfolding, linked events that make sense. In other words, the past is related to the present, and from that trajectory, we can glimpse our future. 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. 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.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? Can you think of an early part of your life when you felt strong and happy? If you had a difficult childhood or other challenges that prevent you from identifying this starting place, try thinking of the time when you were still cradled in the womb.