“The stories you haven’t told yet are often the most important ones.”
The Stories Behind The Stories James
I always start with an idea.
But the character takes over.
Writing James taught me about James.
And it taught me about the work of creating learning that truly reaches people.
James spent eight months interviewing with fifteen years of experience — and silence after every interview.
In this chapter, I go deeper into the failure, success and passion stories behind the character — and into the real pattern I was observing when I wrote him. The story that reveals who you are professionally is always there. James shows what happens when it finally gets told.
The Stories Behind The Stories James
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 James.
His story is featured in: How to Tell Your Story in Job Interviews.
In the last chapter I told you mine and Aisling’s three stories.
Our success stories.
Our failure stories.
And our passion stories.
Today I want to go deeper into James’s failure, success and passion stories.
Together they reveal something that no single story could show alone.
Who he is professionally.
What shaped him.
And what drives him.
The Story Behind the Stories: Three Stories. One Room. Everything Changed.
“The stories you haven’t told yet are often the most important ones.”
James spent eight months interviewing.
Fifteen years of experience.
Strong results.
And silence after every interview.
I wrote James’s story because interviews are the moment when this gap becomes most visible — and most costly.
In an interview the gap between what you’ve done and who you are sits right there in the room.
And yet so many people prepare for interviews by rehearsing what they’ve achieved.
And so few prepare to speak about who they are.
Because credentials are easy to list.
The experiences that shaped them are harder to name — and harder still to shape into a story worth telling.
The Failure Beneath the Failure
The failure at the heart of James’s story isn’t the one that looks like failure.
It’s not the eight months of rejections.
That’s just the symptom.
The real failure is quieter.
James walks into every interview and presents his credentials.
Accurately.
Professionally.
And completely interchangeably with every other candidate.
He has the story that would change everything.
He just doesn’t think of it as a story worth telling.
Here’s what I think was behind that.
The failure at the heart of James’s story was so subtle, it wasn’t obvious to him.
He believed polished answers were what was expected.
That showing the struggle — the failure, the learning, the cost — would make him appear weak.
Unprofessional.
So he kept giving interviewers the surface.
And they kept seeing exactly that.
What people dismiss as ordinary is often exactly what makes them distinctive.
James had been dismissing his most powerful story for eight months.
And it wasn’t only his failure story he couldn’t see.
The Success He Couldn’t See
His success story was there too.
Sitting in eight months of interviews.
Unrecognised.
The moment that most clearly showed what he was capable of — what he had actually achieved — hadn’t yet been named as a success.
It hadn’t yet been shaped into something worth telling.
Here’s what I think was behind that.
He thought success had to look a certain way.
The expected format.
A list.
Quantified.
Impressive.
And completely impersonal.
What James didn’t yet know was that the success that would matter most wasn’t on his CV at all.
He’d been conditioned to present success the way employers said they wanted it.
Measurable.
Transferable.
Forgettable.
The real success was sitting right there.
It just didn’t look like what he thought success was supposed to look like.
The Passion Too Personal for the Room
And his passion story.
The thing that drove him most deeply in his work.
That was invisible too.
Not because it wasn’t real.
Because he hadn’t yet found the words for it.
Here’s what I think was behind that.
People believe passion doesn’t belong in an interview room.
That it’s too personal.
Too revealing.
That it belongs in their private life — not their professional one.
So they leave it at the door.
And walk in with everything except the thing that most clearly shows who they are.
Three stories.
All present.
All waiting.
None of them told.
Everything Turns on a Question.
The interviewer Sarah asks James something nobody has asked him before.
Tell me about a project that taught you something important about yourself.
Not about his CV.
Not about his achievements.
About himself.
James’s Failure Story
James told her about a software implementation that went wrong.
Not technically.
But humanly.
He had managed the timeline perfectly.
And missed what the people around him actually needed.
That was enough.
Sarah leaned forward.
That question is the whole School of WorkLife methodology in a single sentence.
And that question matters to me.
Because it’s what I did in that room in Ireland.
I stopped following the plan I had prepared.
And asked something different.
Not what have you achieved on paper.
But what have you achieved that matters to you.
I was Sarah in that room.
The enabling moment doesn’t always come from a course or a programme.
Sometimes it comes from one question that opens everything up.
Then Sarah asks something different.
Tell me about a success that mattered.
Not a success that impressed.
Not a success that looked good on a CV.
A success that mattered.
That single word changes everything.
James had been listing successes for eight months.
Projects delivered.
Budgets managed.
Teams coordinated.
All true.
All professional.
And none of them what Sarah was asking for.
This question stopped him.
Because nobody had asked him this before.
Not what you achieved.
What mattered.
And in that pause — something shifted.
James’s Success Story
James described the moment a team member who had struggled most with the new system became the person training everyone else.
Not his achievement.
Someone else’s growth.
Made possible by how he worked.
The first question had cracked something open.
This one went deeper.
James had never separated the two before — what he achieved and what actually mattered to him about it.
There’s a difference between a success that looks impressive and a success that reveals who you are.
Sarah was asking for the second.
This is the question I find powerful in this work.
Because it asks people to value their own experience.
Not perform it.
Then Sarah asks what excites him about the role.
And this time James answers differently.
Not from the job description.
Not from what he thinks she wants to hear.
From somewhere real.
Because something had been established between them by now.
The failure question had cracked it open.
The success question had gone deeper.
And this one gave him permission.
Permission to say what he actually believed.
What drove him.
What he had never said out loud in an interview before.
James’s Passion Story
I care about creating environments where people can do their best work without fear.
Not a rehearsed answer.
Not what the job description asked for.
The truth.
And Sarah heard it.
The passion question only works when trust has been established.
Sarah had established it.
James had barely said this to himself before.
Let alone in an interview room.
This is what passion needs most.
Not the right words.
Permission.
Passion feels too exposed in a professional setting.
Too raw.
Too real.
But when someone finally gives you permission to say what actually drives you — everything changes.
That’s what Sarah did.
That’s what I try to do in this work.
Create the conditions where people feel safe enough to say what’s true.
And James experienced exactly that.
Three questions.
Three stories.
All three told for the first time.
In one conversation.
In one room.
That’s when everything changed.
There’s a moment after the interview.
Writing It Down
James sits down and writes.
He tries to understand what happened.
Why it worked.
And he realises it wasn’t a technique.
It was honesty.
I put this in deliberately.
Because writing is how I find out what I actually think.
It’s how I’ve always worked.
And it’s how characters in this series find out what they actually think too.
Patrick Winston — the celebrated MIT professor whose thinking has guided my work — believed that success depends on your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas.
Writing comes before the speaking for me.
Always.
Writing is how the thinking becomes clear.
James writes that night because the understanding couldn’t arrive any other way.
It had to be named on the page before it could be carried forward.
James discovers something else that evening.
He realises he’s been telling partial stories for eight months.
Achievements without the failures that shaped them.
Competence without the humanity behind it.
Successes without the moments that revealed what he was truly capable of.
Impact without the story of how it happened.
Work without the belief that drove it.
Professionalism without the purpose behind it.
He’s been giving employers the polished surface.
And keeping the real story — the one that actually reveals who he is — to himself.
The Untold Story
That’s a phrase I keep returning to in this work.
Because the untold story is almost always where the real professional identity lives.
The untold story.
That phrase is important to me.
I’ve worked with people who were carrying stories they had completely forgotten.
Or dismissed as ordinary.
Or never recognised as significant.
That room in Ireland was full of them.
When those stories finally got told — something shifted.
Not just professionally.
Personally.
James had been sitting on his for eight months.
Not knowing it was the most important thing he had to say.
Three untold stories.
Sitting right there.
Waiting.
All found in one evening.
Written down for the first time.
Named.
And finally — his.
Three days later — the call.
James gets the role.
The Learning Travels
But that’s not where the story ends.
In his new role he notices a colleague, David, preparing for a director interview.
David is struggling with the same thing James struggled with for eight months.
He can’t make his real value visible.
James recognises himself immediately.
And he knows exactly how to help.
Two months later David gets the director role.
Then James facilitates a team development session.
He introduces the three story types to his whole team.
And something happens that he didn’t anticipate.
People who had worked together for years discovered aspects of each other’s professional journeys they had never known.
The learning travels.
That’s what I believe.
It always travels.
I’ve seen this happen.
Someone receives something — a question, an insight, a moment of clarity — and goes on to offer it to someone else.
That’s how it worked in Ireland.
I helped a room full of people find their stories.
Their stories helped me find my direction.
Aisling — whose story I shared in the first bonus episode, from the programme The Art of WorkLife Storytelling: Creating Three Fundamental Stories That Define Your Identity — does the same thing.
She sets out to help people tell their stories.
And discovers that creating the resources is her real calling.
The learning never stays still.
It always finds somewhere to go.
That’s what this work is.
Something received.
Something passed on.
Seen Differently
James is also invited into a wider room.
A cross-departmental strategy meeting where leaders are trying to fix a failing digital transformation.
Everyone is focused on the technical problem.
James asks the question nobody else has asked.
Has anyone talked to the teams about what actually concerns them?
The room shifts.
He’s no longer the project manager offering analysis.
He’s the person who can see what others are missing.
That’s what the three stories did.
They didn’t just change how James interviewed.
They changed how he was seen.
That’s the shift I find most significant.
This is what I’ve always wanted for the people I work with.
Not only to be valued for what they deliver.
But to be recognised for how they think.
There’s a difference between being useful and being seen.
James had been useful for fifteen years.
His stories made him visible.
That’s what this work is for.
What I hope you take from James — beyond the story, beyond the framework — is something simpler.
The most powerful thing you can share professionally isn’t your achievements.
It’s your understanding of yourself.
James is every professional who has something real to say — a failure that shaped them, a success that revealed them, a passion that drives them — whose experiences are harder to name and harder still to shape into a story worth telling.
Until they do.
FROM MY NOTEBOOK
On Quotes:
I use quotes deliberately in my work.
Not as decoration.
As an opening.
A quote reaches people where they are.
Someone at a crossroads reads it one way.
Someone who has just found their direction reads it another way.
That’s what “The stories you haven’t told yet are often the most important ones” does.
It opens something up before the story begins.
On James:
I chose James’s story first.
Interviews felt like the right place to begin.
Because the gap between who you are and what employers see is nowhere more visible.
On Writing Characters:
For every programme I write eight story lessons.
I create eight characters.
Different genders.
Different ages.
Different backgrounds and cultures.
Different career stages.
Eight characters to access more learning.
More depth.
More ways in.
Because learning travels further when it reaches more people.
I always start with an idea.
But the character takes over.
Writing James taught me about James.
James showed me how completely someone can dismiss their own most important stories.
That’s what following a story does.
It takes you somewhere a plan never could.
On the Three Stories:
Sarah’s three questions gave me the clearest demonstration I had ever seen of the three story types in action.
Not because I designed it that way.
Because I watched it happen.
A failure question.
A success question.
A passion question.
Three questions that together revealed something no single question could.
Who James was professionally.
That’s where the certainty came from.
Not theory.
A room.
One interviewer who knew how to ask.
And a professional who finally answered honestly.
Because trust had been established.
On the Door In:
Any one of the three stories can be the door in.
In my story it was the success story — the room in Ireland.
In Aisling’s story it was the passion story — the words she spoke on the stage.
In James’s story it was the failure story — the software implementation that went wrong.
The door is different for everyone.
But it always opens into the same place.
The story that reveals who you are.
Your Three Stories
Before you go — something to take with you.
Your Failure Story.
What have you learnt from a professional setback that shaped how you work?
Your Success Story.
What have you accomplished that reveals something distinctive about how you work?
Your Passion Story.
What environment do you want to create for the people around you?
James’s story originated from 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.
Support This Work: Your support makes a difference and helps me to continue creating resources that are accessible to everyone. Thank you. Carmel
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