My favourite part of working as a careers professional is that everything is relevant; every article, conversation, choice and story.
So when I came across Pixar’s Emma Coates’ 22 rules for telling great stories – the overlaps with how to make good career decisions struck me immediately.
Here are 4 ways:
Rule #1: “Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.”
Substituting “stories” for activities you choose to do, you’re looking to understand why you like those things. I believe 90%+ of making good career choices is being a good noticer of things – and once noticed – figuring out the why. I recognised my love for career coaching from first volunteering as a bike-racing coach. One of my all-time favourite quotes is to “pay attention to what you pay attention to”.
Rule #9: When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
This is a brilliant way to beat career decision paralysis. By defining what work you don’t want, what you do want will slowly reveal itself (or at the very least it’ll have fewer places to hide!) I recommend making a list of everything you don’t want in a career. Oddly, this is far easier than a list of what you do want. You can list the type of work, what kind of impact you want your work to have, how much supervision you like and how much of your day is spent at a computer etc. What we want often lies at the far opposite end of the spectrum of what we don’t want.
Rule #18: You have to know [for] yourself… Story is testing
Good career decision-making means testing your career ideas to see if they actually work for you or not. This might mean temporarily acting in a different role, work shadowing and more.
As scary as it can be to test our career ideas (it might mean we realise it’s not actually right for us) it’s much better to know this sooner, than later. The best learning is by doing.
Rule #17: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
All the information you get – both positive and negative, will help you triangulate towards better career options.
When I was made redundant from my 1st professional role it hurt because I realised I’d been far too passive about seeking out projects that would help me develop and show what I was capable of. This experience encouraged me to be less passive in the future – leading to projects and collaborations that have enriched my subsequent working life. As the jazz legend Miles Davis put it “When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that makes it good or bad”
To sum-up:
It’s no surprise that Pixar’s rules for storytelling overlap so much with good career decision-making; both centre and celebrate the human experience.
It also shows how the tools for good career decision-making are all around us.
My thanks to Emma Coats, to Pixar – and to you. You can catch my full video where I talk about this here.
Let me know what unexpected places you’ve derived career-meaning from! Yours, Raj.
