How to Reclaim the Character Trait Comic Books Quietly Gave You Years Ago
A Story About Discovering How Origin Stories Illuminate Your Journey
Learning how to reclaim the character trait comic books quietly gave you years ago begins with noticing the question you can't answer — not because you don't know the truth, but because you've never practised saying it.
Lewis had always been good at the practical side of helping people. CVs, interview technique, transferable skills — he could break any career problem down into clear, actionable steps. He'd built six years of steady, dependable work this way, and he believed, without ever quite examining it, that this was what good career counselling looked like.
What he hadn't yet understood was that somewhere beneath all that practical competence sat a different kind of understanding — one he'd developed as a teenager, reading origin stories until he knew their shape by heart, and then left behind in a box in his parents' attic the day he decided he'd become a professional.
How to Reclaim the Character Trait Comic Books Quietly Gave You Years Ago tells Lewis's story — a journey from transactional career advice to authentic narrative work through recognising the framework he'd packed away fifteen years earlier, thinking he'd outgrown it. His transformation reveals how the understanding we absorb in childhood doesn't disappear when we set it aside. It waits — quietly, patiently — for the moment we need it most.
What You'll Learn
- Why the character traits comic books gave you in childhood are often still there, waiting, long after you've decided you've outgrown them
- How recognising that origin stories — not just qualifications — shape professional identity can transform a client's coherence and confidence
- What it takes to bring a framework you dismissed as childish back into serious professional practice, without losing credibility
What's Included
- Lewis's complete story
- The origin story framework for narrative identity work
- One reflection question to help identify the character trait comic books quietly gave you years ago
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 life.
The Rehearsal Space — This is where you put it all into practice — the power of embracing challenges and pushing boundaries.
The Enhance Your Character Traits Story Lessons explore what happens when who you naturally are meets the demands of where you work — and what it takes to trust, develop, and defend your authentic traits when professional pressure suggests you should be someone else. Each lesson follows a protagonist who discovers that the traits they've been encouraged to suppress are often the ones their team or organisation needs most.
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 Enhance Your Character Traits Story Lessons — a collection focused on understanding, trusting, and developing the natural traits that define how you work at your best.
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.