How Personal Artefacts Guide Your WorkLife Story: The Unfinished Childhood Sketchbook
A Story About How Her Early Drawings Revealed What Corporate Architecture Had Made Her Forget—And Why Fantastical Buildings Mattered More Than Profitable Ones
How Personal Artefacts Guide Your WorkLife Story: The Unfinished Childhood Sketchbook tells the story of a senior architect who had built an impressive career designing commercial buildings for corporate clients — award-winning projects, a portfolio of office towers and luxury developments, a professional life that looked exactly right from the outside.
Yet a battered childhood sketchbook she'd never been able to throw away kept surviving every move, every clear-out, every weekend she'd promised herself she'd finally sort through the boxes. She'd carried it through six moves across three cities without quite knowing why.
What began as a Saturday morning in a storage unit — unplanned, unrelated to any career decision — became the confrontation that revealed what twenty years of professional success had been quietly costing her. The sketchbook wasn't sentimental clutter. It was asking whether the buildings she now spent sixty-hour weeks designing were creating anything like the human connection and community flourishing her ten-year-old self had understood architecture was actually for.
Glenys's story is about what happens when we stop dismissing the objects that keep surviving every attempt to leave them behind and start asking what they're still carrying. It's about the difference between work that looks accomplished and work that actually serves a purpose worth dedicating a career to — and how early creative expressions sometimes hold the clearest record of what we knew before we learned what our profession rewards.
What you'll learn
- Why early creative work often contains sophisticated wisdom about your field's fundamental purpose that professional training systematically teaches you to abandon in favour of what generates profit or recognition
- How the questions you asked naturally before learning what your profession rewarded often reveal more about what truly matters than the technical expertise you've spent years developing
- What becomes possible when you combine early wisdom about purpose with the professional capabilities you've built — and why this integration frequently creates superior work rather than requiring trade-offs between idealism and expertise
- Why the gap between what your younger self understood your field was for and what you now spend your career delivering is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as the inevitable cost of professional maturity
What's included
- Glenys's complete story
- The Early Work as Purpose Compass Framework
- Reflection questions to help you identify your own early creative expressions, investigate what sophisticated wisdom they contain about your field's fundamental purpose, and design experiments that test whether recovering that wisdom enhances rather than undermines the expertise you've developed
The Reading Room — Where stories spark insight and learning begins. Read, reflect, and let the power of stories shape your perspective.
The Writer's Table — The power of the written word to clarify thought and purpose. A writing assignment that makes the lesson personal to your own experience.
The Workshop — Takes your thinking deeper, developing the technique into a systematic approach you can apply across your professional communications.
The Rehearsal Space — This is where you put it all into practice — the power of embracing challenges and pushing boundaries.
The Art of WorkLife Storytelling Story Lessons explore how the stories we tell shape the way we communicate who we are at work — our values, our thinking, our experiences, and what we stand for. Each lesson follows a protagonist who discovers that knowing how to find, shape, and share the right story at the right moment is one of the most powerful professional tools available. These lessons help you recognise the stories within your own experience and learn how to tell them with clarity, authenticity, and purpose.
About School of WorkLife
School of WorkLife creates story-based learning resources that help people think more clearly about the challenges, conversations, and decisions that shape a working life.
Each story is drawn from real WorkLife situations and developed into practical learning experiences that combine narrative, reflection, and structured application.
This lesson is part of The Art of WorkLife Storytelling Story Lessons— a collection focused on how the stories we tell, and how we open them, shape the conversations, relationships, and opportunities that follow.
Author’s Note
The stories I write are based on real WorkLife challenges, obstacles and successes. Persons and companies portrayed in the stories are not based on real people or entities. Carmel O’ Reilly.