As a professional, what does your career map look like, or what do you envision it to be? While we may be inclined to map out a linear career based on lifetime earnings or on our education alone, it is important to realize that we did not get to where we are currently by chance. As such, the likelihood that that would happen for the next phase of our careers is low. But if you want to go somewhere different, you need a map, and a toolkit to go with it.

One of the tools in that toolkit is adapted from Tara Yosso’s work. Tara is a professor of Graduate Education at the University of California, Riverside, and her work centers on how students from communities of color use an array of knowledge, skills and abilities to help them navigate discrimination while pursuing educational equity. I call it a Career Wealth Wheel (CWW), built around six spokes: goals and dreams, education, communication and language skills, self-advocacy, family/peer/community support, and social media capital.

What is the CWW? The premise behind it is to help us understand, identify and articulate our talents, strengths and experiences (TSEs) as valid and valuable additions to our educational qualifications. As far as education stands, we are all professionals. What makes you or I uniquely different from the over three hundred thousand industry-reported working professionals (Bureau of Labor Statistics) would be those TSEs.

Breaking down the CWW: the right side deals with our personhood — our education, facilitated by the communication and language skills we learned from our parents and family. And we get the education to facilitate a goal or a dream — in our case, that of becoming a professional. Those are fundamental strengths that make us capable of high performance in any setting that requires our educational skill sets.

The left side is where careers are built and strengthened. These are the strengths, in the form of capital, that can help you build a career that works for you.

Self-advocacy is applying a strengths-based approach in communicating your unique skills and motivations that may be traditionally overlooked. One of the best ways to advocate for yourself is through storytelling — being able to take a situation and use a storytelling approach to underscore how your talents and abilities tie into a role is a craft to master. If you have ever sat through a behavioral interview, you will recognize that those are story-based.

Good storytelling involves the use of certain basic features, identified through a multiple-“C” approach: Causality, Conflict, Complications and Character. The first C arises because events in stories are related — someone did this, and it caused a chain of events. The second C is the meat of the story, the situation or issue that needs resolution. The third C, Complication, feeds into the second, because no conflict walks alone, as it were, and the last C is the Character, or the actor in the story.

Since most behavioral interviews follow the STAR (or SOAR) method — Situation, Task, Action, Result (the T is replaced with an O for Objective in SOAR) — we can basically align each C in the storytelling framework with the letters in the interviewing method. The character is the interviewee, and the task would be the conflict (which was caused by, or preceded by, other events). The action (and results) would align with complications (the story’s essence). And finally, the character resolves the story — in our case, through results.

We all learn and transmit knowledge through stories. Storytelling is thus an ingrained strength. Like a muscle, we need to use it and train it as we go along. If you can tell a story, you can advocate for yourself. The training becomes important so we know what stories to tell, and when, and how long the story should be, based on the circumstance. No one wants to hear an interviewee drone on in a time-bound interview, as it could show a lack of respect for the interviewer’s time. At the same time, you should be able to go into interviews knowing that only you can tell the story of you, and tell it well. So — self-advocacy? Check.

After self-advocacy comes the next biggest capital: our external support partners. Just as with a bicycle, all spokes are not the same, and this is the case here. Our external support partners, or our community, are made up of our families, friends, mentors and sponsors. Although these are all classified into one bucket for the purpose of our toolkit, in reality the levels of support you will get from the various layers of your community will differ. The point is to realize that you have them, and to invest in them. Talking about the power of community, there’s an African (Igbo) proverb that says, “He who has people (community) is wealthier than he who has money.” Such life wisdom, encapsulated in one line.

The last, but certainly not the least, in this hyperconnected world we now live in, is the powerful capital instrument of social media, or the internet, where the world (web) becomes the limit of your connections. Now we move from the boundaries of two or three degrees of connection to an almost infinite degree. The beauty of this final capital is that we get to see, in real time, that we can contribute meaningfully to others’ lives as much as we learn from them. It also democratizes our strengths and skills, because we can continue to use them even without a formal work environment. Building on this capital allows us to quickly pivot into other forms of employment that are not necessarily office-based.

Walking through this exercise always helps clients recognize the power and wealth they already have, as they work or as they search for new opportunities. The CWW is a powerful piece of a career toolkit, and next time, we’ll take a look at how we can articulate the different skills we bring to the table as a result of career wealth acquisition.