“Your body of work is everything you create, contribute, affect, and impact… Individuals who structure their careers around autonomy, mastery, and purpose will have a powerful body of work.”
- Body of Work, page 7
"No matter how wonderful and fulfilling your body of work is, if you want people to believe in it, act on it, be moved by it, or buy it, you must shape it into a cohesive narrative and tell powerful stories."- Body of Work, page 185
Telling your story is the most valuable thing you can do for your career, and it requires a serious examination of your ideals, strengths, weaknesses, goals, and accomplishments. All of the activities and exercises that comprise Body of Work lead toward a final exercise – defining your narrative.
Slim provides a powerful method for tying the threads of your life into a compelling story. The Persuasive Story Pattern creates a dramatic narrative:
By using the Persuasive Story Pattern, your passions and experience create a powerful motivation to your audience.
"Learning about different work modes will give you more stability and a wider variety of options in an increasingly uncertain global economy."- Body of Work, page 55
The 21st century has brought a massive change in how we work. The structures that defined the previous century have shifted dramatically and changed how we connect with employers, customers, and colleagues. It’s not surprising that many of us need to expand our comfort zones to create a healthy work-life balance.
Body of Work provides a “loathing scale” to help us determine when it’s time to leave our jobs or modify how we work within them. Slim provides a sliding 0-10 scale:
"Your definition of success will drive who you serve and what you create, but, most important, how you feel while you are creating it."- Body of Work, page 174
Determining what success means for you, personally, is one of the most difficult tasks Slim gives us in her book. Her Success Framework incorporates
It’s a complex, and highly personal definition, that requires honestly accepting what you truly value and letting go of the expectations others (or society) has foisted upon you.
Viewing one’s success through someone else’s lens creates “success dysmorphia,” when you feel “awkward, ugly, less than, and not quite on par with [others’] accomplishments.” And while Pamela Slim includes dozens of definitions of success from a wide variety of individuals, she reminds us, again, “there is no right answer. There is only the answer that deeply resonates with you.”
Body of Work turned out to be a rather timely read for me. In December 2013, after more than a year in an extremely difficult job, I found myself saying “enough.” I called upon my mentor, who asked some tough questions – many of them the same questions Pamela Slim asks in her book. And on a flight for a job interview, I dug into Body of Work, defining for myself what I needed in my career, identifying many of the threads that define my story. I believe it was this clarity that helped me land a new job and which has brought a lightness of spirit and sense of joy to my career.
Pamela Slim is an award-winning author, business coach and speaker. She spent the first 10 years of her business as a consultant to large companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Charles Schwab and Cisco Systems, where she worked with thousands of executives, managers and employees.
