When I work with a coaching client, I try to extract more and more pertinent information to form their career narrative.
“Tell me more,” I ask. “Because if you don’t tell us no one will.”
And the gremlins in our heads confuse things, turn ideas upside down and resist order, such that our exposing an important fact or detail is occluded, or blocked.
Often out of the blue I get a comment “One more thing. Marc I should have told you this story about {…} a while ago. Is this important?”
And I draw it out of the client and I find a thread to weave the newly found story to, and we rework the narrative to enhance the reader’s ability to remember the story later.
Does this happen because the story is too old to remember, or it seems out of context? We’ll fix those issues in the right place and right ways, together.
It happens largely because we hold back, and thus hold ourselves back, even the most “together” of my clients.
Pulling these disparate parts together into a cohesive career story is one of the joys in what I do, one of my “whys.” It happens with nearly every client every session.
And it frees them as much as it elates me.
