Self-Discovery at Work
Helping Experienced People Understand What They Value, What Their Expertise Is For and Where They Want It to Lead
The answer to where you want to go has been waiting in your own working life all along, in the moments that energised you, the ones that drained you and the ones that taught you something you didn’t want to learn.
Self-Discovery at Work begins with a question Gillian Hart can’t answer.
A Story-Based Learning Resource: Gillian’s Story — From the Obvious Answer to Her Own
Gillian has spent eleven years at a housing association, trusted with the projects that matter and encouraged by her manager to apply for Head of Programmes. Her development conversation is in two weeks, and she has one thing to prepare: her own thoughts about where she would like her work to go.
The obvious answer is the next role up. What she hasn’t yet examined is whether it fits who she is — what she values, what her work is for, where she wants it to lead, and what she does best and most loves doing.
Self-Discovery at Work follows Gillian through the two weeks before that conversation. Through a question from her partner, a notebook she carries everywhere, three stories from her own working life and a manager who listens closely, she discovers that the answer she was expected to give and the answer that belongs to her are very different, and that the second one has far more to offer her organisation.
Blending storytelling with Reflection Points, Learning Questions, Self-Coaching Exercises and the Self-Discovery at Work Workbook, the resource guides each of your people through the same journey Gillian takes. It is designed for independent learning and for facilitator-supported group sessions, with a full Facilitator Guide and a Manager’s Guide that explores the same story from the other side of the table.
Self-Discovery explores four elements of a working life: values, purpose, vision and motivated abilities. Here, all four come together through the Success, Passion and Failure Stories each person writes from their own experience, and they are brought to one of the moments organisations know best: the development conversation.
For Your Organisation
The Challenge
Your organisation has invested in development conversations. Managers are prepared, the time is set aside and the conversations take place. They are one of the most valuable moments in a working year, a chance for each person and their manager to think together about where that person’s work is going.
The conversation is only as rich as what each person brings to it. Experienced, capable people are sometimes the ones with least to say about their own direction, because their next step looks obvious to everyone, including themselves. The question “Where would you like your work to go?” receives the expected answer, the next role up, and the conversation closes around a job title.
When that happens, something valuable goes unsaid. A person who does their best work close to customers, clients or communities steps into a role that takes them further away from it. A gifted practitioner becomes a stretched manager. Or the person senses the mismatch, can’t put it into words, and carries it quietly until it becomes a reason to leave.
Self-Discovery at Work helps each person arrive at that conversation knowing what they value, what their work is for, where they want it to lead and what they do best and most love doing. And it helps managers receive what they hear with curiosity, so the conversation becomes the start of a direction that serves both the person and the organisation.
Who This Is For
Experienced people approaching a development conversation, a promotion decision, a development programme or any moment when the question of what comes next is on the table.
Perhaps they are well regarded and quietly unsure whether the obvious next step fits them. Perhaps they have been asked where they want to go and found they had nothing ready to say. Perhaps they have noticed that the work they do best is the work a promotion would take them away from.
It is also for the managers who hold those conversations, and for the learning and development teams who design the programmes around them.
What Your People Will Learn
- How to recognise when the expected next step and their own direction have quietly drifted apart
- How to read the pattern in what energises and drains them, and name their motivated abilities
- How to write a Success Story, a Passion Story and a Failure Story from their own working life, and find the values running through all three
- How a disappointment can reveal a value more clearly than any success
- How to put their purpose into a single sentence that belongs to them and no one else
- How to picture a vision of their working days three years from now, with the job title left aside
- How to bring values, purpose, vision and motivated abilities together on one page they can take into a development conversation
- How to open a conversation about direction in a way that invites curiosity and support
What Your Managers Will Learn
- How to invite people to bring their own thinking to a development conversation
- How to listen for values, purpose, vision and motivated abilities in what someone says
- How to respond when a person describes a direction the organisation hasn’t yet mapped
- How to turn a clear answer into a next step both sides can test together
What’s Included
- Gillian’s complete story, told in three parts
- Reflection Points, Learning Questions and Self-Coaching Exercises at every stage
- The five School of WorkLife practices for sustaining Self-Discovery: Self-Awareness, Observation, Effective Self-Feedback, Insightful Self-Questions and Writing Your WorkLife Stories
- The Self-Discovery at Work Workbook, including the Three Stories Worksheet, the Purpose Sentence, the Three Years From Now Exercise and My Self-Discovery Page
- A Facilitator Guide with three 90-minute session plans, facilitator questions and guidance on feedback in the group
- A Manager’s Guide, exploring the story from Anita’s side of the table
How This Resource Works
Self-Discovery at Work is built in three parts and nine stages.
Part One — Discover What Lies Beneath the Obvious Answer
- Stage 1 — The Question
- Stage 2 — The Notebook
- Stage 3 — What the Notebook Revealed
Part Two — Develop Your Three Stories
- Stage 4 — The Kitchens: Gillian’s Success Story
- Stage 5 — The Courtyard: Gillian’s Passion Story
- Stage 6 — The Garden That Stayed Empty: Gillian’s Failure Story
Part Three — Direct Your Working Life
- Stage 7 — What Her Work Is For
- Stage 8 — Three Years From Now
- Stage 9 — The Conversation
Each stage follows Gillian through a moment in her two weeks, then turns to the experience of each of your people with a Reflection Point, Learning Questions and a Self-Coaching Exercise, and closes with time to write. By the final stage, each of your people has named their values, purpose, vision and motivated abilities, written three stories from their own working life, and prepared a single page to bring into their next development conversation.