How Our Working-Life Stories Reveal What We Have Learned
Professional Development: What Do Our Stories Tell Us About Who We Are Becoming? Sometimes a story we have told many times can reveal something different when we return to it with the benefit of experience.
Anthony had told the story many times.
It was a good story.
There was a difficult decision.
A tight deadline.
A colleague who strongly disagreed with him.
A meeting that could easily have gone badly.
He knew how to tell it.
He knew where people usually laughed.
He knew which detail made the situation sound more dramatic.
And he knew how to finish it.
For years, Anthony had thought the story was about leadership.
Then, one day, he realised it wasn’t.
The Story
The situation had happened several years earlier.
Anthony had been responsible for a decision that affected a number of people.
The obvious answer seemed clear.
But one person in the team disagreed.
Anthony had initially dismissed the objection.
He was busy.
The deadline was close.
He believed he had considered the issue carefully.
Then the colleague asked him a question he couldn’t answer.
“What would you do if you weren’t trying to prove you were right?”
Not because the answer was complicated.
Because he hadn’t asked himself the question.
Anthony went away and reconsidered.
He realised that the decision he’d been ready to make would have solved the immediate problem but created difficulties for the people who would have to carry it forward.
So he changed his decision and proposed a different approach.
The story had always been told as an example of good leadership.
Anthony had listened.
He had changed his mind.
He had done the right thing.
But when he thought about it again, he realised there was another story underneath it.
What Had Actually Changed?
Anthony had not always been comfortable changing his mind.
Earlier in his working life, he had thought that confidence meant being decisive.
He had believed that people expected him to know.
He had sometimes mistaken certainty for leadership.
The experience had unsettled that.
It had shown him that changing your mind wasn’t necessarily a sign that you had made a poor decision.
Sometimes it was evidence that you were still thinking.
That was a very different understanding of leadership.
And it had stayed with him.
Our Stories Change as We Do
This is one of the interesting things about the stories of our working lives.
The facts may stay the same.
But the meaning can change.
We tell a story at one point in our career and it means one thing.
We tell it again years later and notice something else.
Perhaps we understand a decision differently.
Perhaps we recognise something about ourselves that we couldn’t see at the time.
Perhaps we realise that the experience changed the direction of our working life.
Or perhaps we discover that the story we have been telling about ourselves is no longer quite true.
Anthony had always told the story as:
I listened to someone else’s perspective and made a better decision.
Now he heard something else:
I learned that I didn’t need to be certain in order to lead.
That was a much more personal story.
The Stories We Keep
Most people who have worked for any length of time have stories they return to.
The first opportunity.
The difficult manager.
The project that went wrong.
The person who believed in us.
The decision we regret.
The time we spoke up.
The time we didn’t.
The moment we realised we wanted something different.
The experience that changed how we understood ourselves.
We may tell these stories to other people.
We may tell them in interviews.
We may use them to explain our decisions.
We may tell them simply because someone asks.
But they can also tell us something.
Not just about what happened.
About what stayed with us.
What Do Our Stories Reveal?
A working-life story can reveal what matters to us.
It can reveal what we value.
It can show us what we have learned.
It can expose assumptions we didn’t realise we were carrying.
It can show us where we have become more confident.
Or where we are still developing.
It can reveal the kind of work that gives us energy.
The kind of responsibility we want.
The situations in which we do our best thinking.
The qualities we admire in other people.
And sometimes the professional we are becoming.
Anthony realised that the story he kept returning to wasn’t really about the decision.
It was about the person he had become capable of being afterwards.
We Are Not Finished Stories
Perhaps this is important.
Our professional identity isn’t something we establish once and then simply maintain.
Working life keeps giving us experiences.
Some confirm what we already believe about ourselves.
Some challenge it.
Some change it.
Some reveal possibilities we hadn’t considered.
The story of our working life therefore isn’t fixed.
We can look back and understand earlier experiences differently.
We can recognise development that was invisible at the time.
We can see connections between events that once seemed unrelated.
And we can decide what we want the next part of the story to be.
Anthony’s Story Had Changed
The event itself had happened years ago.
But Anthony wasn’t the same person who had lived through it.
He had become more comfortable with uncertainty.
More willing to listen before deciding.
More willing to admit when someone else’s perspective had changed his thinking.
He hadn’t planned all of that development.
Much of it had happened through working.
But his story helped him see it.
And perhaps that was what the story had been trying to tell him all along.
So What Do Our Stories Tell Us About Who We Are Becoming?
They can tell us where we’ve been.
But they can also tell us what we’ve learned from getting there.
They can show us the qualities we have developed.
The beliefs we have changed.
The decisions that shaped us.
The experiences that still matter.
The moments when we became more fully ourselves at work.
And perhaps they can help us ask one of the most useful questions in Professional Development:
Given everything my working life has taught me so far, who am I becoming?
Anthony had told his story for years.
He thought he was telling people about a decision he had made.
Now he understood that he had been telling them — and himself — about something much more important.
The story of how he had learned to lead differently.
And perhaps that is what our working-life stories can do at their best.
They don’t simply tell us what we have done.
They help us see what our experiences have made possible — and who we might become next.
Connect and Continue
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
Listen to the audio version here:
Share This Piece
If this piece resonated with you, or made you think of someone who might appreciate it, please share it forward.
Discover more from schoolofworklife.com
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.