Podcast: Focus on Your Story, Not Your Résumé

“You always talk about a career path, your career journey, your career trajectory. They’re all a vocabulary that suggests you’re supposed to get onto a road and then ride it,” said Muchin, a clinical professor of management and organizations at Kellogg.

But what happens when you outgrow that narrative?

On this episode of The Insightful Leader, we tell a new story that reflects the career we want.

Podcast Transcript

Laura PAVIN: Suzanne Muchin has a bone to pick with how a lot of us talk about our careers.

Suzanne MUCHIN: You always talk about a career path, your career journey, your career trajectory. They’re all a vocabulary that suggests you’re supposed to get onto a road and then ride it.

PAVIN: This language—that suggests you’re on a linear path or a road—is a crippling narrative that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy if you aren’t careful, corralling you into a lane and keeping you there. Leaving no room for veering. Forever the director of marketing, and that’s that.

Muchin is a professor who teaches management and leadership development here at Kellogg. And she sees this happening all the time with leaders. They think of their careers as a series of titles that follow a logical sequence, like a résumé, until eventually, something shifts.

MUCHIN: You do get to this moment where you ask yourself, am I mattering? Is there more?

PAVIN: You’re listening to The Insightful Leader. I’m Laura Pavin.

Today, Muchin offers tips for rewriting your professional narrative—one that proves to others, and more importantly to yourself, that you’re capable of doing more than what you put on your LinkedIn bio. Think of it as creative nonfiction that manifests. It can even help you weather professional setbacks better, because you’ll think about them differently.

Muchin gives us some exercises for getting there—and shares her own story along the way.

That’s next.

…

PAVIN: Muchin is quite the accomplished leader. She’s led and co-founded strategic communications agencies, social-impact organizations; she mentors entrepreneurs, is an award-winning clinical professor at Kellogg. I could go on. She does, and has done, a whole lot.

But growing up, other people didn’t seem to think too much about her aspirations.

MUCHIN (Alumni Talk): I don’t know if it was because I was a child, a girl, it was the seventies—I’m not sure. But no one really after that ever asked me, “So what do you want to do? What do you want to be?” I remember my brother was asked that many times, but I was not asked that very often.

PAVIN: This is a talk she gave to a group of business-school alumni earlier this year. And I wanted you to hear some of it before we got to anything else, because it’s kind of the origin story behind how she wants us to think about our professions.

So she says that people weren’t totally invested in what she wanted to do with her life growing up. Which wasn’t great on its face, but it actually ended up being really serendipitous for her.

MUCHIN (Alumni Talk): Part of me felt like, well, no one’s watching. So if no one’s watching and no one’s asking, then I might as well, for the first many years of my career, just do things.

PAVIN: So she followed her heart. She was on the founding team of a national teacher corps. She was a social-impact brand strategist. She had an incubator for profit-generating impact ventures.

Of course, when people asked Muchin what she did for a living, she got blank stares. None of these things really fit cleanly into a path of any kind.

But Muchin, for her part, was confused by their confusion.

MUCHIN (Alumni Talk): I was always only one thing to me, and I was actually doing it wherever I went. Whether I was a professor, whether I was an entrepreneur, whether I was on the radio—I was always trying to unleash ideas that matter.

PAVIN: She put up a slide on a projector that said: “I unleash ideas that matter, so that they matter to more people.”

It’s a powerful statement because it wasn’t a restricting title or a path with a static end point. And it allowed her to craft a career on her own terms.

This is the place Muchin wants the rest of us to get to—stripped of a paralyzing label and empowered by possibility. To do that, Muchin says you’ll want to start by rewriting your narrative through a different lens. And that lens is your purpose.

Here’s how Muchin wants you to think about it.

MUCHIN: So my favorite question—which sounds easy, but it’s more nuanced—is: What is yours to do?

“What is yours to do?” has a lot to do with what you would do when you’re not being asked to do it. “What is yours to do?” is the thing that, when you’re not being paid to do it, you do it anyway.

PAVIN: It’s basically the thing that you like to do and that you’re good at doing. And importantly, it has nothing to do with your title.

Another way to think about it, Muchin says, is to imagine you’re a contestant on the reality TV series Survivor—which, sidebar, she’s a big fan of.

MUCHIN: I take the show very seriously.

PAVIN: She’s in a fantasy league with former players and everything.

Anyway—think about yourself on the show.

MUCHIN: If you got dropped off on the island with nothing, the thing that you did when you had nothing—the thing where you were like, “This is mine to do. I will be this particular persona”—that’s a big key into what is yours to do.

PAVIN: Now, Muchin says she’s definitely not an expert on “finding your purpose,” but the idea is that, to write an empowering professional narrative for yourself, it needs to start from a genuine, passionate place—so that you can find the opportunities you’re actually excited about.

And, importantly, it should be general enough for you to transpose onto different contexts.

I actually have some experience here.

I was a journalist before this—print, digital, radio. But at a certain point, I felt like … something’s not working for me here. After some soul-searching, I realized: You know what? “Journalism” is a really narrow way of looking at what is mine to do. It’s really just the storytelling. Seeing my skillset in this more-expansive way allowed me to pivot here—become a multimedia editor at a business school, where I still tell stories. And if I left? And I don’t plan on it—but if I did—storytelling is a purpose I can retrofit across so many contexts.

…

PAVIN: You can start to see how a lot of what Muchin’s advice is, is about your mindset. It can change what you think you can do, which affects what you actually do.

It can even change how you interact with professional setbacks—allow you to stay in the driver’s seat of your own narrative.

Muchin’s passion for making meaningful ideas matter to more people eventually compelled her to co-found a company called Bonfire. It was a talent-development accelerator for women in the workforce.

MUCHIN: So our customers were companies who were paying us to train their women. And we had a curriculum for them, and it was a beautiful setup where they could identify high-performing women who were emerging as high performers and send them to us over a period of about six months.

PAVIN: Things were great. The company was growing. They’d done their Series A in August of 2024. But then January 2025 rolled around, and the presidential administration took aim at Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—or DEI—initiatives across the country. Initiatives that included giving women a leg up. That was bad for Bonfire.

MUCHIN: We lost over $2 million of business in about a month from companies who could no longer provide, or felt they were at risk if they did provide, programming to women separately as an individual group. And that was devastating to our business model.

PAVIN: Muchin and her partner had to mothball the company, let their entire staff go with the exception of one person, because they didn’t know how things would shake out.

MUCHIN: Would businesses change their minds? Would we have companies providing programming for talent development to women again? We didn’t know.

PAVIN: Very quickly, Muchin went from feeling like things were right for her professionally to feeling like they weren’t.

But it’s what she did next—and is still doing today—that matters for us. Something that kept her in control of her professional narrative.

MUCHIN: I had to shift gears into an influence mode because I didn’t give up on the mission. I still believe very much that the rising generation of women in the workforce are those who will shape the architecture of the workplace of the future. But if I can’t do it through my company anymore, it doesn’t mean I just go, “Oh, well, that idea’s over,” right? I have to find another way to work.

PAVIN: She asked herself the question, “What is mine to do at a time such as this?” And her answer was, “Still this! But in a different way.”

Instead of directly impacting women in the workforce through Bonfire, Muchin is currently trying to get at the issue from another angle—one that relies more on influencing people than impacting them directly. The vulnerable part of all of this is that she doesn’t know how the whole thing will end up. She’s building the story as she goes. But it’s the story she wants to tell and, in the process, hopefully turn into a reality.

Her lesson here is that a door closing doesn’t have to be the end of your story. You can get at things from a different angle. In other words …

MUCHIN: What you’re doing has a different ‘how,’ but the ‘why’ stays the same.

PAVIN: And that’s why Muchin wants you to add a second part to the question, “What is mine to do?” And that is, “at a time such as this.”

“What is mine to do at a time such as this?”

When you don’t do that? Well, you might find yourself in a situation Muchin was in years ago, when she was the CEO of an education startup—a startup that was pretty well-aligned with what she felt was hers to do.

MUCHIN: We were building out something very important in the field of early childhood development.

PAVIN: She was making something meaningful matter to more people.

But something still felt off.

MUCHIN: I was unhappy during a lot of it. I was working hours that made no sense to me—especially because my family was growing. I was unhappy because there were dramas and conflicts that were internal and hard for me to handle. I was unhappy at times because our projects weren’t always in our control.

PAVIN: She ignored that. Ended up staying for 11 years.

MUCHIN: I really didn’t think that I had any control.

PAVIN: But she realizes now—she did. She wishes she’d trusted how she was feeling and left sooner. Wishes she had asked herself, at various points, “What is mine to do … at a time such as this?”

MUCHIN: I would have either been entrepreneurial enough to create my own gig separate and apart from that entity; or I would’ve left altogether; or I would’ve started a consulting firm—so I would’ve moved up and out and then looked down and consulted. I would’ve done a lot of things rather than staying in the driver’s seat as a CEO.

PAVIN: She had options—but hadn’t allowed herself to see them. Thought she had to ride things out, because, technically, she was doing what was hers to do—but the company just wasn’t the right vessel for that anymore. Her answer to “What is mine to do … at a time such as this?” had changed. She had to tell herself a different story, one where she could get at that from a different angle.

…

PAVIN: When you do what’s yours to do—and retrofit that to where you’re at in your life—things will start to feel more “right,” professionally. And when they don’t? Get to the bottom of that feeling.

MUCHIN: You can ask yourself, “Is this a moment for an exit path?” And your exit path, by the way, can actually mean, “I’m ready to leave this company this moment,” or “I’m ready to shift into another gear—maybe another role, maybe another position. But I’m done doing what I was doing the way I was doing it.”

PAVIN: The key is to know that you’re in control. And you don’t have to just endure something when things start feeling off.

…

[CREDITS]

PAVIN: This episode of The Insightful Leader was produced by Nancy Rosenbaum and mixed by Andrew Meriwether. It was produced and edited by Laura Pavin, Rob Mitchum, Fred Schmalz, Abraham Kim, Maja Kos, and Blake Goble. Special thanks to Suzanne Muchin. Want more The Insightful Leader episodes? You can find us on iTunes, Spotify, or our website: insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu.

We’re going to take a little break, but we’ll be back in the new year with more episodes! See you then!