Step six
The story map
A narrative you believe is worth a lot. A narrative you can back up with three specific stories the moment someone pushes on it is worth considerably more. This is where the whole thing turns into something you can actually use in a room.
Not a question bank
There are a thousand lists of common interview questions online and they are worth roughly what you pay for them. Generic questions produce generic answers.
So I do this the other way around. I take your finished narrative and build a set of questions from it. Given what you are claiming about yourself, what would a sharp interviewer ask? Some of it is standard. Some is specific to your industry. Some goes at leadership. All of it is aimed at you rather than at a generic candidate.
That is prep work I do between sessions, so we spend the session on the part that needs both of us.
How it works
- I send you the question set after the draft session. Your homework is to read through and mark the ones you would struggle to answer well.
- We meet with those already flagged, so we start at the hard ones rather than reading a list out loud.
- For each question, we find the story from your career that answers it. They are already in your CV walkthrough notes, in what you said you were proudest of.
- We work on the telling. Where the story starts, what actually changed, what you took from it, and where to stop talking.
Bullets, not scripts
The document you end up with does not contain written-out answers. Each story is four or five beats: the situation, what you did, what changed, what you learned.
If you write the answer out in full you will memorize it, and a memorized answer comes out flat. Interviewers can hear it. The bullets keep the story alive so you tell it slightly differently each time, which is what a real story sounds like.
Same reasoning as making you write the narrative yourself.
Where it goes from here
Most people carry on from here into their CV and their LinkedIn profile. Both get sharper once there is a point of view underneath them, and both are much easier to write when you already know what you are claiming.
Some people want more interview practice. Some want to keep going on a specific part of the narrative. That is outside the six sessions and we add them as you need them.
What you walk away with
A document mapping your three narrative sections to the questions they invite, and the stories from your own career that answer them. Banked, in your own words, ready before you need them.