'Strengths & Weaknesses' Doesn't Capture the Nuances of Interaction & Synergy An acquaintance who heads a department at a small company was talking to me the other day.  Her department had recently experienced turn over and she mentioned the toll in time/energy/attention that meetings and email chains required just to integrate her team.  It’s challenging for a group to work together effectively, particularly when, as my friend shared with me, the only data collected on the new hires relevant to collaboration was the boilerplate ‘strengths & weaknesses’ questionnaire.  That information too may be available only to someone in HR [...]

I was recently listening to the Talking Heads’ song ‘Once in a Lifetime’.  At one point, the lead singer David Byrne prominently asks himself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’  This is a question we all may ask ourselves rhetorically once in a while, and we may not know the answer, at least in the terms that Byrne poses it.  It got me to thinking, though:  there are situations in the professional ecosystem (e.g., networking, interviewing, casual conversation) in which someone does ask, ‘Well, how did you get here?’.  And it’s critical to have a response at the ready that [...]

Think of your skill in StoryPathing™ as a kind of GPS.  But rather than guiding you to whatever your next may be from where you are, it guides from WHO you are.  You discern with clarity and are equipped to share, with evidence, your competencies and motivations over time.  Your audience meanwhile can orient itself to how your present and what's next intersect in the present moment.  Gain perspective, confidence and direction about the next step, whether you are in transition educationally or professionally, by learning how to know and show who you really are with the StoryPathing™ methodology.  Curious?  Interested?  [...]

When someone asks “tell me about yourself”, that's a cue to show your 'I.D.'  Not a document issued by a government agency, filled with personal stats, e.g., birthday, height, hair/eye color, address, etc., but more substantive information that fills you out, delivered by a 'narrative I.D'.  This is a moment, formal or casual in which you have the opportunity to share who you really are:  where you've been, where you're going, and why you’re here; your competencies and motivations; how you've made meaning out of your life; and what value you might bring in this moment.  In short, how your [...]

What's the difference between your CV and your story?  Imagine that your CV is like an X-ray.  It shows the 'bare bones' of the body, but not the flesh, muscle, tissue, and ligaments; in other words, the components that hold and move together as a real person.  You can use Storypathing™ to provide the connections in your life:  it makes you a kind of animated CV.  And when you know and can show the connection between your past, now, and next, you demonstrate intentionality and self-authorship.  An X-ray-like CV is useful as far as it goes, but it can't give [...]

The Beauty of Imperfection In the course of my reading I have recently encountered references to the Japanese art forms "Wabi Sabi" and "Kintsugi".  I had to look both of these up.  What I found was that both of these traditions value what can be described as 'imperfection', 'impermanence', and 'brokenness'; in short, what we might describe as 'wear and tear'.  Wabi Sabi and Kintsugi operate on an aesthetic of 'weathering'. This has wonderful applications to StoryPathing.  'Weathering' is what gives us character.  And thus of course, in delivering our storypaths, we communicate an authentic self, with its 'weathering' [...]

My recent encounter with a government office left me in a state of bewilderment, questioning the very foundation of my identity. It all began when I was instructed to present documentation to prove who I was, and to my astonishment, I discovered that there were two different birthdays associated with my name in the system. For my entire life, I had celebrated one particular date as my birthday, but now there was another, just one day and one month different, recorded in the records. It was a perplexing mistake—a mere reversal of two numbers creating an alternate birthdate. The repercussions of [...]