“The meaning of your life is to find your gift. The purpose of your life is to give that gift away.” – Picasso
The Stories Behind the Stories Aisling aka Carmel.
Every character I write carries something real.
A real pattern.
A real challenge.
A real moment of recognition.
Including one who carries more of my own experience than any other.
You’ll meet her in this post.
Hello,
It’s Carmel from School of WorkLife.
Welcome to The Stories Behind the Stories.
Where I go deeper into the WorkLife Stories I’ve crafted.
The thinking behind the ideas.
The experiences that shaped that thinking.
The lessons learned from those experiences.
Today’s chapter is Aisling — aka Carmel.
And I want to tell you my own story.
Because before I take you inside anyone else’s story — you need to know where this work came from.
Not the overview.
The real experience inside it.
And the character who carries more of that experience than any other I’ve written.
Her name is Aisling.
And her story — and mine — is where everything began.
The Story Behind the Stories: How This Work Found Me
“The meaning of your life is to find your gift. The purpose of your life is to give that gift away.” – Picasso
And it’s a story in three parts.
My success story.
My failure story.
And my passion story.
Because that’s what the first eight episodes in this series are built on.
Where It All Began
It was the early 2000s.
Because of the economic downturn, all contract work at the investment bank I was with had come to an abrupt end – and I was out of work.
I had been offered a permanent position.
But I turned it down.
Something inside me knew it was time for a change.
I just didn’t know yet what that change would be.
The universe has a way of providing answers when you’re ready to receive them.
The Journey to Ireland
A friend called with an emergency.
She needed someone to teach the job-search portion of her programme in Ireland.
The original trainer had dropped out.
Despite my lack of experience, she insisted all I needed was a common sense approach.
With just 48 hours to prepare, I crafted the course while embarking on an adventure—taking trains across England and Wales, a ferry to Ireland, and finally, another train and bus to reach my destination.
Sleep-deprived but determined.
I did what I always do when I’m nervous: I over-prepared, then let go.
The Room That Changed Everything
The room I walked into was full of people who had lost their jobs to the economic downturn.
Their stories were written on their faces before they said a word.
Broken confidence.
Diminished self-worth.
The carefully prepared plan I had arrived with suddenly seemed irrelevant.
These people didn’t need job search techniques.
Not yet.
They needed something else first.
So we began with stories.
My Success Story
I asked each person to talk about their WorkLife achievements.
Not the polished CV version.
The real ones.
The things they had forgotten.
Dismissed.
Or never recognised as special.
As each person spoke, the room transformed.
The collective mood shifted and their spirits lifted before me as they rediscovered their value and potential.
Only then could we tackle the practical elements of job searching.
Crafting CVs that truly reflected their capabilities and unique journeys.
Preparing for interviews where they could articulate what they genuinely had to offer.
And approaching salary negotiations from a place of clarity about their worth.
On my long journey home, exhausted yet energised, I recognised a profound truth: I had found my gift.
Though I couldn’t articulate it perfectly then, I knew my purpose was helping others navigate their WorkLife journeys.
That’s my success story.
When the Student Is Ready
But purpose alone isn’t enough—I needed proper training to serve others effectively.
Following my belief that “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear,” I pursued a degree in Career Coaching and Management.
This led to a position with a careers consultancy.
The one-to-one career coaching work came easily to me.
The group workshops didn’t.
I was so incredibly nervous.
I didn’t sleep for nights before.
And I threw up on the day.
I spoke to my manager.
I asked if I could do the individual coaching sessions only.
He said, I’m sorry Carmel, that’s not possible.
He continued, saying every time I delivered a workshop, everyone signed up for the coaching sessions and more workshops were booked.
He didn’t know about my anxiety.
And I didn’t tell him.
Instead I researched public speaking courses.
The Auditorium
I discovered a week-long intensive.
From Monday to Thursday morning we would work in groups of 20 developing three stories that connected.
On Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, we would deliver those three stories in a three minute presentation to an auditorium of 100 people — fellow participants and guests.
These would be recorded on VHS tapes.
I prepared exhaustively.
I knew my stories back to front, inside out, upside down.
When Thursday afternoon came, I asked the facilitator if I could go first.
I knew if I didn’t I would bottle it.
He said, I’m sorry Carmel, that’s not possible.
He said the 80 tapes would be drawn randomly.
My Failure Story
So, I took my seat and waited, and waited, and waited some more.
As I did I was growing more and more nervous.
My stomach was in knots.
Late into the afternoon, my name was eventually called.
I don’t remember the walk from my seat to the stage.
I do remember looking out at the audience, before I burst into tears and ran off the stage.
The facilitator found me in the empty room I had fled to.
Still sobbing.
Mortified.
Certain I had destroyed everything.
He told me I hadn’t.
He asked if I would try again the following morning.
He knew how hard I’d worked all week.
I said I would think about it.
That the only way I could do it was if I went first.
He agreed.
That night I faced the hardest question I’d asked myself in years.
Not whether I could do it.
But what would happen if I didn’t.
The answer was clear.
I texted the facilitator.
I’ll be there.
The next morning I went first.
I stood at the podium.
I took a breath.
And I began.
“Learning is my passion and my work has taught me that the one thing in life that can never be taken away from you is your learning.”
Three minutes later I left the stage to a standing ovation.
Afterward, one of the other participants came over.
Well done, he said.
I thanked him and said — I don’t think my voice shook too much.
He smiled.
No, he said.
And your neck didn’t go red either.
Not like it did all week during practice.
I hadn’t known.
Not once during those days of practice had I known my neck was turning red.
That small detail changed something significant in how I understood my own anxiety.
What I was experiencing inside — the fear, the certainty that everyone could see it — and what others were seeing were dramatically different.
That is my failure story.
And this is my passion story:
Learning is my passion.
My work has taught me that the one thing in life that can never be taken away from you is your learning.
Those were the words I spoke at the podium that morning.
Not chosen for effect.
Chosen because they were true.
A long time ago I began a passion project.
To help people pursue their WorkLives with greater clarity, purpose, passion and pride.
By creating continuous WorkLife learning resources that are accessible to everyone.
Because every downturn in the market brings not only the loss of jobs — but the loss of learning budgets for the people who remain in their positions.
The people who find themselves out of work also find they no longer have access to learning resources.
And the people who go on to become self-employed — establishing a business of their own or setting themselves up as freelancers, consultants or contractors — have to finance their own continuous learning.
That’s where the passion came from.
Not an abstract belief.
A real gap.
Real people left without the resources they needed.
That’s why School of WorkLife exists.
That’s why this newsletter exists.
That’s why The Stories Behind the Stories exists.
Because the one thing that can never be taken away from you is your learning.
And it should be accessible to everyone.
These insights are woven into characters I’ve written about ever since.
Including one in particular.
The Character That Carries My Story
There’s a character called Aisling.
She lives in one of the programmes — The Art of WorkLife Storytelling: Creating Three Fundamental Stories That Define Your Identity Crafting Success, Failure, and Passion Narratives with Powerful Beginnings, Engaging Middles, and Memorable Endings.
Her story — the anxiety, the workshops, the course, the tears, the standing ovation, the red neck — carries more of my own experience than any other character I’ve written.
Not in every detail.
But in its shape.
In what it cost.
In what it revealed.
Her failure story mirrors mine most closely.
Her success story is where mine led.
For years Aisling delivered workshops successfully.
Every participant signed up for individual coaching afterward.
The feedback was exceptional.
And she was quietly falling apart before every single one.
Her breakthrough came when she stopped trying to manage her anxiety and started building a framework that could carry her through it.
Three fundamental stories. A success story. A failure story. A passion story.
When she finally found the structure — and trusted it — everything shifted.
Not just the workshop.
Her understanding of her own work.
And her passion story is perhaps the most personal of all.
Because what Aisling discovers — slowly, through years of delivering workshops and developing materials — is that her real calling isn’t standing in front of a room.
It’s creating the resources that help people learn in their own space and time.
She sets out to help people tell their stories.
And discovers that creating the conditions for that learning is her true gift.
Not the delivery.
The creation.
That discovery — that your real calling sometimes hides behind the thing you’re already doing — is one of the most important things Aisling’s story holds.
I’m telling you this because it matters for your own work.
The methodology you’re learning through these stories comes from somewhere lived.
The failure story.
The recovery.
The learning that only arrived because the failure happened.
The success story.
The moment in a room when everything became clear.
The gift that was found by giving it away.
The passion story.
The belief that has driven everything since.
That the one thing that can never be taken from you is your learning.
And that it should be accessible to everyone.
This is where the work comes from.
Not theory.
Life.
Every character in this work carries something real.
A real pattern.
A real challenge.
A real moment of recognition.
The crafted layer isn’t distance from the truth.
It’s a way of getting closer to it.
Because the truth — when it’s only about one person — can feel like a private experience.
But when it’s shaped into a character, something different happens.
It becomes universal.
It becomes yours to use.
That was the beginning of School of WorkLife.
Not a plan.
A revelation in a room full of people who had been told — by circumstance — that their value was gone.
And discovered, through their own stories, that it wasn’t.
The methodology isn’t theoretical.
It came from watching what actually happens when people find the words for their own experience.
Something shifts.
That’s what I’ve been building since that room in Ireland.
And since the long journey home when I understood something had permanently shifted.
That’s why The Stories Behind the Stories exists.
To take you inside where this work came from.
The thinking behind the ideas.
The real experience inside the crafted story.
Because that’s where the learning lives.
Not only in the story itself.
But in what it reveals about yours.
FROM MY NOTEBOOK
A fact about Aisling. Aisling is an Irish language name meaning dream or vision. It refers to a poetic genre that developed in Irish poetry during the 17th and 18th centuries. I chose that name deliberately. Because this work — and the character who carries most of my own story — began with a dream. A vision of what learning could be. And who it could reach.
I discovered early on that writing yourself as a character takes you somewhere you can’t reach any other way. The distance creates clarity. Aisling gave me that. She made it possible to go deeper than I might have gone writing as myself. To share experiences in a way that felt true without feeling exposed. To tell a story that was mine — shaped into something universal. She gave my experiences a form that others could find themselves in. She made the personal universal.
In the episodes that follow, I’ll take you inside where the characters from the Success, Failure and Passion stories from the first eight episodes of WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife came from:
James.
Lisa.
David.
Emma.
Marcus.
Sarah.
Daniel.
Rachel.
For each one — their failure story, their success story, and their passion story.
What I was observing when I wrote them.
What real pattern each one was built around.
And what I hope each one gives you beyond the story itself.
Five Practices That Underpin This Work
Before I close — there’s something I want to share.
Five practices.
They underpin everything in School of WorkLife.
Every story.
Every category.
Every resource.
They’re not techniques.
They’re ways of knowing yourself professionally.
In the programme — The Art of WorkLife Storytelling: Creating Three Fundamental Stories That Define Your Identity — Aisling develops all five.
What follows is an excerpt from the programme — to demonstrate what they look like in practice.
1. Develop a Practice of Self-Awareness
Self-awareness in WorkLife storytelling means recognising your natural patterns of meaning-making and narrative development. It’s about understanding which experiences you instinctively highlight or minimise, noticing what themes recur across your professional journey, and identifying the values that consistently emerge in how you interpret challenges and achievements. Like Aisling’s growing recognition of her preference for creating insightful learning programmes over delivering workshops, this practice helps you discover authentic patterns that reveal your true professional identity.
2. Develop a Practice of Observation
Observation involves paying attention to how different stories affect both yourself and others. Just as Aisling noticed which workshop participants engaged more deeply with written materials than group activities, systematic observation helps you recognise which narrative approaches create the most meaningful connections in different contexts, providing valuable insights for refining your three fundamental stories.
3. Develop a Practice of Effective Self-Feedback
Regular reflection on your WorkLife narratives provides essential insights for their continued development. This isn’t about harsh criticism but about honest assessment of how accurately your stories reflect your authentic experience and values. Aisling’s practice of reviewing whether her workshop approach truly expressed her natural strengths helped her ultimately discover a more aligned professional direction. Similarly, thoughtful self-feedback helps you refine your stories to better reflect your evolving professional identity.
4. Develop a Practice of Insightful Self-Questions
Reflective questioning deepens your understanding of your three fundamental stories. These aren’t formulaic prompts but thoughtful inquiries that reveal meaningful patterns in your WorkLife journey. Aisling developed specific questions for each story type—”What am I most proud of in my WorkLife?” for Success Stories, “What has been my greatest failure, and what did I learn from it?” for Failure Stories, and “What is the favourite passion project I’ve worked on?” for Passion Stories. These questions help you discover the experiences that have shaped your professional identity most significantly.
5. Develop a Practice of Writing Your WorkLife Stories
Your professional experiences gain clarity and meaning when articulated as coherent narratives. Learning to write your Success, Failure, and Passion stories helps you recognise patterns, extract lessons, and develop a consistent professional identity. Like Aisling’s development of comprehensive learning resources, the process of writing these narratives helps you integrate disparate experiences into meaningful frameworks that guide both your self-understanding and how you present yourself to others.
You will find these five practices woven through everything I create.
Your Three Stories
Before you go — something to take with you.
The three stories in this series aren’t just a framework for the characters you’ll meet.
They’re a framework for you.
Your Success Story.
When did your work create an impact that went beyond what you expected?
Your Failure Story.
What moment of falling apart became the foundation for something real?
Your Passion Story.
What belief drives your work?
You don’t need to have all three ready.
You just need to start noticing them.
They’re already there.
Waiting to be found.
In the next chapter I’ll go deeper into James’s failure, success, and passion stories from the story How to Tell Your Story in Job Interviews to take you inside the story behind the story.
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Aisling’s story featured in the Programme: The Art of WorkLife Storytelling: Creating Three Fundamental Stories That Define Your Identity
Work With Me: Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships.
Listen to the audio version here:
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