How to Get Your ‘Story’ Down During Your Career Pause
The story you tell about yourself matters. A psychologist explains how your inner dialogue can help you find confidence, focus, and clarity during your career pause.
Source: Mike Jones
For many mothers, embracing a career pause or downshift can feel like shedding an identity. One moment you’re a person with a job title, marketable skills, and a career path–and the next, you’re a parent planning playdates. At least, that’s the way many women are made to feel as they transition into the gray area between their full-time career and stay-at-home motherhood. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
At Mother Untitled, we believe that this gray area is fertile ground for growth, inspiration, and opportunity. We’ve seen women use this time to achieve incredible accomplishments too many times to think otherwise: There’s the mother who wrote a critically acclaimed novel while her children napped, the entrepreneur who launched a kids’ bath product that garnered a cult following, the mom who took on the NRA in her downtime, and countless others.
The point here, of course, is that how we view the very idea of career breaks matters. And how we tell the stories of our career paths and pauses makes all the difference. During business school, I enrolled in a class I especially loved, appropriately called ‘The Power of Story.’ The class is sold out year after year. It's the brainchild of Jennifer Aaker, a behavioral psychologist and researcher on things like how stories drive decision-making. Aaker is a big proponent of taking a personal inventory and questioning how we introduce ourselves to others.
As part of this inventory, Aaker recommends examining the language you use when meeting someone new—and listening to how others introduce you to friends and acquaintances of their own. What do you say in your introductions? What words do you use when describing yourself and your current chapter?
Meet the Expert
Dr. Nicole Pensak: Licensed clinical psychologist and the author of Rattled: How to Calm New Mom Anxiety with the Power of the Postpartum Brain.
The words we use and the stories we tell are important decisions we make—even when we choose to keep them to ourselves, says Dr. Nicole Pensak, a licensed clinical psychologist and the author of Rattled: How to Calm New Mom Anxiety with the Power of the Postpartum Brain. “The way we think influences the way we feel and behave. A negative story can be a self-fulfilling prophecy because it will limit your perspective, distort your interpretations of interactions with others, and create more negative emotions,” Dr. Pensak says.
Examining the stories you tell about yourself is about more than fine tuning your internal dialogue—it’s about creating a narrative that empowers you and offers you clarity, focus, and confidence in this stage of life.
On the flip side, studies show that positive self-talk, such as the way we think about ourselves, can give us a self-confidence boost. But examining the stories you tell about yourself is about more than simply fine-tuning your internal dialogue—it’s about creating a narrative that empowers you and offers you clarity, focus, and confidence in this stage of life.
For parents struggling to redefine their identity in the absence of a job title, Dr. Pensak recommends exploring what it was about your job that felt meaningful in the first place. What parts of your career do you miss? “Likely these are qualities you value in yourself, independent of the actual job,” notes Dr. Pensak. “Figuring out how to [express these qualities in motherhood] could help the mother who is feeling disempowered to empower herself.”
And, as it turns out, there's a scientific explanation for why the story you tell yourself is so critical to shaping your perspective. It’s called ‘synaptic pruning,’ Dr. Pensak explains. “From a neuroplasticity perspective, I explain to my patients that by creating new ‘positive story’ roads in your brain, aka new neural networks, you are allowing those old, negative and less adaptive networks to fall by the wayside,” Dr. Pensak says.
Getting comfortable in whatever chapter you’re in, and accepting that you are interesting and interested in the world around you, regardless of whether you're stay-at-home, working, or somewhere in between, is such a powerful exercise—even if you tell no one this story but yourself.
