Seven Life Stories

This is one of the most powerful and insightful exercises. Not only does it offer input for every section of your Ideal Job Description, it provides you with complete and highly effective answers to most job interview questions!

Please email me each story as you complete it AND loop back to your Ideal Job Description document and capture new learnings in each section about what the story illuminates about what lights you up, reflecting section by section (e.g., What skills did I use in this story? What knowledge did I use in this story? Where was I and what was my environment in this story?, What was the feel/culture/experience of the working with the other people in the story? etc.)

Why seven stories? Because we want to scrape the bottom of the barrel of your memories. The oldies but goodies, and the “silly, this isn’t important” ones are often the stories that offer the most clarity and insight. One now senior executive’s most illuminating and influential story was about leading a beer and music festival fund raiser in college. Mining the components of this story helped the client get clear on key values and passions and helped them make a critical and highly satisfying choice between two big jobs.

Instructions:

Write seven stories about your life. Write stories about times when you had fun! You don’t need to have achieved something big – but each story should be about a time when you needed to accomplish something AND you enjoyed yourself.

Do not try to be brief.

If you absolutely can’t think of any experiences you’ve had where you enjoyed yourself and accomplished something, then try this: describe the seven most enjoyable jobs that you’ve had; or seven roles you’ve had so far in your life, such as; volunteer, citizen, parent, student,, athlete, etc.

In each of your seven stories include the following five parts in this order (using headings is useful):

1) The Goal: State what your goal was, what you wanted to accomplish

2) Hurdles: Note the hurdles, obstacles, challenges or constraints that you faced (self imposed or otherwise)

3) What I/we did: Give a description of what you did and with whom, step by step (how you set about to ultimately achieve your goal, in spite of the challenges you faced)

4) Outcomes: Describe the outcome or result of your efforts, what you accomplished

5) Measurables: Capture any measurable/quantifiable statement of that outcome that you can think of (how much money or time you saved)

*This exercise is adapted from “What Color is Your Parachute?” by Richard N. Bolles