Careers, emotion and narrative: How stories become scripts and scripts become lives

In this chapter the author examine how emotions can stimulate story-telling, and how these stories can become scripts, for our careers and lives. To develop this theme the author examines a pivotal event in his own career, his decision to drop out of university, which captures many of the key themes in play. The author shows how he “narratively sleepwalked” onto and off a degree course, how his underlying career narrative led him to pursue a particular path despite abundant evidence that it was not for him, and how the roots of this ongoing error can be traced back to a much earlier period of his life. The chapter identifies a number of issues around narrative and memory, showing how a career narrative can influence perceptions of current and future events, but also a recollection of past events.