Last month's issue of Taking Care of Business focused on the advantages of a "Career Autobiography", a panoramic view of an entire lifetime.
This month's issue speaks to the value of digging deeper into selected experiences—"peak moments" in our career history—and "mining" them for the treasure of the skills we most enjoy using.
We begin with an article by Beverly and Michael Ryle, followed by a personal reflection on the importance of skill stories by Hilda Cashman.
Mining Peak Moments
by Beverly Ryle and Michael Ryle
The Center for Career and Business Development
We've become accustomed to hearing the story of a professional life told almost exclusively in terms of outstanding accomplishments. Ask an athlete to reflect on his career and he'll tell you about the time he pitched a no-hitter. Ask an actress and she'll talk about landing the lead in a Tony-winning Broadway play. Ask a writer and he'll recall how it was his third novel that lifted him from obscurity and made him a best-selling author. These public, universally acknowledged achievements, which everyone recognizes as peak moments, are what we've come to expect when someone looks back on their life.
But what about the rest of us—those of us who've never won a Cy Young or an Oscar or a National Book Award? What are our peak moments? Do we even have them? Of course, we do. Everybody does. They may be public and universally recognized or they may not be, but even if they're not, it doesn't mean they're any less important to us (or to the world, for that matter). In fact, it's often true that the less world-shaking the experience, the more valuable it is on a personal level. It's not at all unusual to hear some highly successful person speak of finding more satisfaction in a small task done well than in the great achievements he or she is celebrated for.
What exactly is a peak moment? It's simply a time when you felt a deep sense of accomplishment and personal fulfillment over your part in a particular event or happening. It's a moment when you felt fully alive and completely enjoyed being who you are. It may be something that the world knows about and applauds you for. Or it may be your own personal secret. It doesn't matter. Recognition, or the lack of it, is fundamentally irrelevant. What's important is the sense of personal fulfillment.
Most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about their professional accomplishments until they're faced with the task of preparing a resume. In a sense, a resume is a collection of peak moments, but only of the kind that the world recognizes as peak moments. Too often the things that provide the greatest satisfaction on a personal level are not the sorts of things that can be included in a resume. You can say that you successfully negotiated a million dollar contract or implemented a just-in-time inventory system that saved the company $300,000 a year, but you can't say that you cared for a dying parent or mentored a troubled teenager through to graduation or helped to set up a neighborhood watch program. In the single-minded pursuit of "the job" through the painstaking perfection of a resume, we can easily lose sight of the richness of the narrative of our career autobiography (see last month's issue for more on this subject) and the pivotal content of its most meaningful events.
When we identify, write down, and tell the stories of our peak moments, the things we've done which have given us the greatest personal satisfaction, we are "mining" our career history for those skills which we most enjoy using. When we dig deeper into old shafts that seem played out or open up new ones, we discover these skills like precious gems and when we have found them we put them into our packs for later use. This is how we amass the hidden treasure that is there to be discovered in our professional life—aligning who we are with what we do, and eliminating any conflict between the two. Taking a closer look at those occasions when we put forth our best efforts measured purely by our own standards is the foundation upon which we can build a more satisfying professional life.
Guidelines for Skills Stories
Step One: List "peak moments"
Think back over your life and try to remember anything you did which was meaningful to you in a personal way. Use what Richard Bolles calls a "memory net": review your history in terms of places you lived, schools you attended, jobs you held, etc.; some people find it helpful to proceed a decade at a time. Use whatever approach seems most natural to you. The goal is to be as thorough as possible.
Step Two: Choose topics
From your collection of peak moments select 6 to 10 to write about that speak to achieving a goal or overcoming an obstacle of some kind. This can, and should, include everything from selling magazines door-to-door at the age of ten to winning Salesperson of the Year. The topics you choose should represent the full spectrum of your life (i.e., don't focus just on your childhood or your education or your career). Try to select at least one topic from your pre-career days and at least one that represents something you feel you've lost track of along the way.
Step Three: Write out each topic in narrative form, as a story
Tell what happened, your part in making it happen, how the outcome affected you and others, and why the accomplishment is still meaningful to you. Focus on content, saying what you need to say, rather than form, how well you feel you are expressing yourself. This is not a literary exercise but a mining expedition, and the goal is self discovery, not polished prose. Most people can tell a story in a page to a page and a half. If you need more space you may be trying to tell more than one.
Step Four: "Mine" each story for hidden skills
The stories you have written embody the skills you most enjoy using. Now you need to identify and name those skills. To do this, reread your stories looking for evidence of the skills you used to accomplish the goal or overcome the obstacle. Then share your stories with at least two other people and ask them to identify the skills they see there. Often their list will reveal skills that come so naturally to you that you never think of them. As you continue your storytelling and "skill-collecting" you will find that the same ones come up again and again. These repeated patterns point to the skills syou most enjoy using, the "mother lode" of genuine wealth you're after.
Authors note: I am indebted to Dick Bolles, author of What Color is your Parachute? for both the story-writing exercise and the rich personal experience of hearing his own stories and sharing mine during a workshop of his I attended some years ago. His work and spirit continue to serve as a strong foundation for the Center's mission.
Skills Stories
by Hilda Cashman
When I felt a need to refocus my professional goals I wasn't sure how to proceed. On the broad canvas of everyday life, it wasn't obvious where to begin. The discipline of sitting down to search my past experiences, to identify and to write my "skills stories", was revealing. Once my search began, the stories percolated to the surface and I found them eager to be told. The experiences I chose to write about came from varied perspectives:
- as a camp counselor, teaching a camper to swim
- as a supervisor, moving an idea/task from being supervisor-driven to staff-initiated
- as a mother, the birth of my two sons
- as a prospective staff member, finding employment in a tough job market
If I were to do this exercise today, I would also include my recent experience caring for our father who passed away six months after being diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease).
Through the skills stories exercise I learned I had been drawing a distinction between my professional and personal experiences. I viewed them as separate arenas, not to be co-mingled. I came to realize that when I left out the personal side, I left out an important part of my whole story. Integrating this side of myself allowed me in effect to double the size of my "canvas" and to tap more deeply into relationships and, in turn, begin to both name and value the skills that I have used to build them. Through my skills stories I came to claim the importance to me of:
- facilitating dialogue between members of my staff
- designing tools and processes to guide and enhance dialogue
- providing direction and leadership to facilitate learning
- creating meaningful connections between myself and my work environment
Writing and telling my skills stories helped me appreciate and value all my experiences. My discoveries guided me through a change of work and directed my decision-making toward complementing the areas of strength, meaning and importance I had identified.
My skills stories still inspire me. Like the feeling one gets from looking at a photograph of children laughing heartily—smiles that express pure joy can't help but make you smile in response—rereading my skills stories reminds me of what makes me smile.
Hilda Cashman (hcashman@comcast.net) is a healthcare administrator in a medical school setting conducting clinical trials in women's health. Her goal is to reflect in her daily work and attitude the blessings discovered in her skills stories.
The Center will be helping the Hot Chocolate Sparrow gear up for the 2004 tourist season with a series of customer service training programs beginning in mid-April. What's not to love about working with people whose mission is to "sell enjoyment" in the form of chocolate and coffee! The Sparrow is a favorite destination for both locals and tourists on Outer Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The program is partially supported by a grant from the Massachusetts Workforce Trainining Fund.
Beverly Ryle has been invited by a project group from the 2004 class of the Cape & Islands Community Leadership Institute to present on Community Building at the CapeCorps Volunteer Expo on April 14th. Beverly is a 2003 graduate of the Community Leadership Institute.
BusinessBuildersSM presents Smart Start,, an interactive program for individuals in the early stages of business development, on April 14, 21, 28, and May 5, from 8:30 AM to 12 noon at the Orleans Inn, in Orleans, MA. Beverly Ryle of the Center for Career and Business Development will teach the marketing segments and Sherri Mahoney from Taxing Matters will teach money management.
In this month’s issue ...
Mining Peak Moments
by Beverly & Michael Ryle
Skills Stories
by Hilda Cashman
Quote-of-the-Month
Center News
As we move forward into the 21st century it’s pretty obvious to just about everyone that work isn’t what it used to be. Whether we work for ourselves, or for someone else, or are in transition, things are changing rapidly and we’re caught in a shift of seismic proportions. Many things are being demanded of us, and it’s going to require more than just new skills to survive and thrive. We’re going to need to learn how to get serious about taking care of the business of our professional lives.
Taking Care of Business was created to focus on issues related to this re-education process. If you find it helpful, please pass it on to others you know who are trying to find their way through the new realities of the world of work.
We invite you to share your thoughts by emailing us at:
Through the practice of hearing and telling stories we discover, and slowly learn to use, a new “map”, a map that is more “right” because it is more useful for our purposes. Using this map gives some sense of place, of how things are located and how they fit; and this flows into a developing sense of how we fit, of self as “fitting” into some meaningful whole.
That “meaningful whole” is twofold: it involves first our relationships, for that is one name for our “fittings”; but it also involves, and indeed, is, our very identity—who we are.
In a very real sense, we are defined by our relationships, our connections with all reality; what happens in the re-mapping of story-listening and storytelling is that in telling our own story, we come to own the story that we tell.
Ernest Kurtz
&
Katherine Ketchum,
The Spiriturality of Imperfection
40 Oak Leaf Rd
PO Box 156
North Eastham, Cape Cod, MA 02651-0156
508.240.3532
www.successonyourownterms.com
About Us
The Center for Career and Business Development specializes in teaching people how to manage their professional lives by providing customized counseling and educational programs which integrate conceptual thinking with practical training. Our long-term relationships with clients, recognition by peers, and growing reputation as a community resource speak to the excellence of the services we provide and our commitment to making the world of work a better place for all.
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The stick illustrations in this issue are by Eloise Morley.
Her email address is eloisemorley@earthlink.net
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