Telling Your Story

Building Good Projects

Projects are great for two reasons.

• They help you organize your thoughts around the skills you have been building your entire life.
• They give you a way to showcase those skills to a target audience.
  

Follow the process below to begin making connections between your experiences and the professional and social skills employers are clamoring for in their new hires.

• Preparation
• Connecting the Dots
• Building Your Story
• Making it Public

Preparation

The purpose of this step is to help you work from a place of abundance.  How often do we sit down to work on a project, type a paper, or draft a document and suffer from "blank page paralysis"?  You sit there and just have no idea how to start.  This exercise will flex your brain and prime the pump so that paralysis will be no more.

Step 01 - Brainstorming Round 01

Set a timer for two (2) minutes.  Grab a pen and a scratch piece of paper (or a blank document on your computer).   

When you start the timer, you are going to write down (type) every single role you have played in your life that comes to mind.  Some of them might be silly and irrelevant but that is the purpose of brainstorming. Nothing is wrong. Simply write down as many roles as possible.  When completed, you should have between 20 and 50 items.

• Midfielder on the soccer team
• Debate team captain
• Student in Biology Class
• Waitress at Tuck's
• Pizza maker at Charlie's
• Caregiver to grandmother
• Cello player in Orchestra
• etc…

Step 02 - Brainstorming Round 02

Set the same timer for another two (2) minutes.   

Look through the list of roles you created.  Grab one of those roles and give it all your attention for this next session.  You are going to let your mind dwell on that role and once again make a list of everything you did while serving in that role.  Remember, this is a brainstorming session, so there are no incorrect, odd, or worthless items you can write down.  Many times, by writing down something that seems ridiculous, it will trigger another thought in your brain that could be very pertinent

Connecting the Dots

Step 03 - Connecting the dots

This is where the work begins.  For this next step,you will look at thelist of items you created in the second brainstorming session and think about how certain items may pair with one or manyprofessionalessential skillsthat all businesses look for in potential employees. Usethe list of essential skills below (or use this expanded version).

• Critical Thinking
• Communication
• Teamwork
• Leadership
• Initiative
• Mindset

Here is an example of how this works.

From your brainstorming sessions you picked "Midfielder on my soccer team" and "tore my ACL".  Now tie this to "Mindset" and "initiative".

In the next step you'll use simple story writing techniques to explain how these skills are connected to that experience.

Building Your Story

Stories are the best way to share memorable valuable information. Stories have been used for thousands of years to help other people remember facts, events, values, morals.  It is everyone's default method for communication.

Think about it, how often do you relay to friends or family events that have happened in your life?  Or, consider the internal dialog you have with yourself.  How often to you replay events or play out how you hope events will occur?  This is all done through a narrative.

The next step in this process takes the narrative approach and applies it to your role, experience in that role, and the skill you used, developed, or acquired.  To do this we break up your experience into three buckets:

• What did you do?
• How did you do it?
• What were the results?

Using this structure, let's break down our example.

What did you do?

My freshman year of high school as a starter for our varsity soccer team, I tore my ACL and over the course of the next nine months was able to rehab and refine my skills and strengths so that I once again could start varsity as a sophomore.

How did you do it?

Nine months is a long time to keep focused and motivated.  My first step towards success involved clearly identifying the milestones I needed to achieve.  From walking, to biking, to running, to dribbling, to cutting, to shooting, to full contact. Then, in conjunction with my doctor, physical therapists, personal trainers, and parents developed daily routines to slowly work towards each milestone.  It was brutal.  The number of times I had setbacks and wanted to give up was far more than I care to admit.  But slowly, with resilience, persistence, and perseverance my confidence grew, and I was able to achieve one milestone, then another, then another.  Each milestone presented its own set of challenges, from new injuries to self-doubt.  But through my community of friends, believing that who I was as a person was more than just this injury, and a laser focus on the future, I was able to maintain the course.

What were the results?

Once I was finally fully able to play the game again, I realized that the work I put in daily made me stronger, faster, and more skilled than I was prior to the injury.  Additionally, I had a new understanding and appreciation for what it was like to really push yourself to become better.  Today I have more grit, more resilience, and know what it means to take ownership of something and create a better version of yourself.  There is a reason a chisel is needed to carve statues from marble.  Great transitions often come at the expense of great hardships. No pain, no gain.  Quite literally.

Project Structure

This is the final step in the process.  Taking the content you have already written, and adding that content to your project in Foliotek.

Overview - Setting the scene

This is the summary for your entire project.  You have already written the content for the next three pages.  Take a look at that content and summarize the experience.   

If we are using the example that we have already given about playing soccer, this is what the summary would look like.

Overview

At a pretty young age, I faced significant adversity that challenged me in new ways and led me to develop resilience, perseverance, and confidence.  It all started my freshman year of high school soccer when I started as forward for our class five varsity team.

Page 01 - What did you do?

During my freshman year of high school as a starter for our varsity soccer team, I tore my ACL and over the course of the next nine months was able to rehab and refine my skills and strengths so that I once again could start varsity as a sophomore.

Page 02 - How did you do it?

Nine months is a long time to keep focused and motivated.  My first step towards success involved clearly identifying the milestones I needed to achieve.  From walking, to biking, to running, to dribbling, to cutting, to shooting, to full contact. Then, in conjunction with my doctor, physical therapists, personal trainers, and parents developed daily routines to slowly work towards each milestone.  It was brutal.  The number of times I had setbacks and wanted to give up was far more than I care to admit.  But slowly, with resilience, persistence, and perseverance my confidence grew, and I was able to achieve one milestone, then another, then another.  Each milestone presented its own set of challenges, from new injuries to self-doubt.  But through my community of friends, believing that who I was as a person was more than just this injury, and a laser focus on the future, I was able to maintain the course.

Page 03 - What were the results

Once I was finally fully able to play the game again, I realized that the work I put in daily made me stronger, faster, and more skilled than I was prior to the injury.  Additionally, I had a new understanding and appreciation for what it was like to really push yourself to become better.  Today I have more grit, more resilience, and know what it means to take ownership of something and create a better version of yourself.  There is a reason a chisel is needed to carve statues from marble.  Great transitions often come at the expense of great hardships. No pain, no gain.  Quite literally.