In early 2008, while rushing to another client appointment, I faced a 'transformational moment' - an existential dilemma had hit me face on. 'Why am I doing this?' I asked the steering wheel, which had become my best friend as I now figured I was spending as much time in my car as anywhere else.
I realised that with around thirty years experience in the career, employment and recruitment industries, I was disenchanted with my work. In part, this was due to an increasing skepticism about the usefulness of career assessments (or, as most of my clients continued to call them, 'tests') to assist a person going through a career change. In large part, though, I did not get any lasting satisfaction from my efforts, which is not good for anyone working in my field - passion is an essential ingredient for any work, but for me, it is essential to role model it to others.
My sense was that most of the time I was not dealing with the whole person, that I was engaging with my clients in a very transactional way - I got their resume sorted, and they paid me money, I helped them to develop negotiation skills to get a pay rise, and they paid me more money. I am pretty sure all these things I did were useful, because a lot of my clients returned, or referred other clients to me. I also felt, if I was honest, that I was better than good at my job, and I had the luxury of being able to work independently, far away from workplace politics (which had led to me leaving paid employment) - one of my intrinsic motivators. But on that pivotal day, with the radio playing a song that contained the words 'I can't go on this way', I found myself wondering why I was still doing this work after all this time.
In a fight or flight response, I thought about driving off into the sunset, calling the client to cancel, something important had come up. I couldn't do it - I am too responsible for that. But I knew at that point I could not continue doing things the way I had been doing them.
Using narrative was not new to me. I had always loved a good story, and I had some developed some good techniques through analysing and critiquing a wide range of stories across various media as an adult undergraduate at Monash University. I had also been using it in my work over the years. My best times with clients were when they told me stories that were meaningful to them, and I found that they became more fully engaged as well. Usually, these involved a 'punctuation point' (or several), such as a husband announcing the marriage was over, leading to a domino effect on my client who was involuntarily required to rethink her whole life (her house was also the business headquarters, he was moving in his new girlfriend to take over the bookkeeping, oh, and by the way, the business was in financial ruin so there would be no maintenance). No job, no home, no partner, she had to move the kids out of their private school, but that seemed the least of her worries.
Quite often, it is a punctuation point that leads a person to seek out a career counsellor, so starting from that point makes sense. Although it seemed like I was taking a big risk, I was determined to drop any process-driven way of working. I was also putting myself in the learner's seat all over again. I found myself no longer starting a session with the question 'What can I do for you today', asking clients if they would like to spend their time with me telling a story about their life.
At first, apart from feeling I was asking for payment fraudulently, I wondered if there was anything special in what I was doing. Was I letting myself and my clients down, simply by getting them to tell their stories? It all seemed too easy - people were paying me just to talk. I quickly realised there was more to it than that, people started thanking me, telling me I had really helped them, more than they had ever done before. Sure, some ran away, not wishing to continue the session, frightened off by apparently confronting questions. I asked a woman in her thirties who had not worked for a while, and who wanted to do something completely different to the hospitality work she had done in her former life, to tell me how she had changed over the past eighteen years. In an unexpected twist, she turned the tables on me, asking me to tell her how I had changed.
Considering she was paying for the session, I complied, and found I had a lot to say. When I had finished, I asked her the same question again. She cut the session short and left.
This was a valuable lesson. I realised I needed to be up front about what I was doing, which meant that I had to have some words to say about my method. Did I have one? Or was it all instinctively organic? This forced me to think hard. I felt quite alone, there was no real precedent. There were notable people doing work in narrative counselling, including Michael White in South Australia, but when I drilled down, it was still just a formula. In the career industry, people in the US and Canada - Mark Savickas and Norm Amundson, for example, both of whom I had heard speak - were doing excellent work, but I quickly realised that in narrative work, the tools and methods really have to be one's own. I wanted to be able to describe something that was not limiting, not formulaic, but which was marketable as a tool.
My quest led me, through a great many conversations and much self-examination, to arrive at the conclusion that what I was doing was actually assisting people to change their careers through stories about change. So I could have called this technique 'change stories' but transformative narrative sounds better, don't you think?
A transformative narrative contains:
- A transformation point: this is a pivotal moment in time in which a key life decision is made- usually, there are two ways (or perhaps more than two ways) to go from there. One way will most likely lead to a significant change, while another will involve activities that reinforce the known, the status quo. We usually think of the second action as 'doing nothing', which creates a false sense of security - it is false, because nothing ever stays the same. Which only goes to show that it is not change we are afraid of, it is stepping out of our own comfort zones. But what is this really? It is the difference between making the most of a bad job and finding one that is wonderful. It is the difference between staying in a difficult relationship instead of leaving it and becoming self-reliant. Whichever is chosen, as long as an actual, thought-through decision is made, this is a transformation point and can become the beginning of a transformational narrative.
- Indicators of how the person was changed by this event/transformation point and how their life has been enriched by this change (this does not necessarily mean the transformation is a positive one - more about that in a future post). The changes will be both internal/intrapersonal and external/extrapersonal.
- Actions that are different to those before, whether or not the actual situation has changed. New actions/behaviour patterns/responses will occur in more than one aspect of a person's life.
- A sense of forward movement, including evidence of overcoming barriers, hurdles, roadblocks, negative thoughts and feelings
- Effort - reaching into previously untapped resources, and utilising external resources in a new way or for the first time
- Uniqueness - the story has universal appeal but at the same time expresses the uniqueness of the protagonist
- Surprise - often, transformative narratives contain things that are normally taboo, however this will be less 'confessional' in nature and more in the vein of 'confident honesty'
- Reflection - the ability of the protagonist to be able to understand and tell about his or her journey.
- Power - the sense that the story will empower the protagonist, and others, and will persist (or be replaced by an even more powerful narrative)
- Voyeurism - others will want to read or hear the story, they may even hunger for it
Past examples include points in time when the person went through a significant career transition, relationship, to leave a course that didn't suit them. It could also be a choice to stay in a job or relationship rather than leave it, but with new understanding of it. It might be about choosing to become a vegetarian, a priest, or an environmentalist.
Present examples relate to a dilemma that the person is working through, and is being told as a transformative narrative at the same time
Future examples are used to equip a person to make the best use of happenstance, or 'unexpected/surprise moments', by grabbing opportunities that might otherwise be missed or passed over through lack of readiness.
