What Your Life Stories Can Teach You

The field of career and life counseling and development was founded just a little over 100 years ago. For most of that time the field has used a method called trait and factor theory to help people to determine what career they should pursue, or what course they should follow in life to find fulfilment and satisfaction. This method involves using some kind of assessment or “test” to determine a person’s most prominent interests, values, personality traits or abilities, and then matching these to a set of possible career choices that best corresponded to the person’s list of traits, as determined by the assessment.

A few years after I began working in this field, I was reading an article that mentioned a “narrative approach” to career counseling. At the time, I had no idea what taking a narrative approach meant, but something about that phrase immediately resonated with me.

I learned that a narrative approach to career and life counseling involves people telling stories of experiences they have had, and then examining the themes and patterns that could be seen across these stories.

Recognizing and understanding these patterns could then help them to make better decisions about what they wanted to do with their lives, what career or work they might want to pursue, and provide clues to their mission and purpose in life.

Whenever you feel stuck, or not sure where to go next, particularly when you're thinking about the deeper issues of what to do with the rest of your life, I suggest that you look back over the events of your life. What have your life experiences taught you, that can inform the choices that you make about what to do with your life going forward?