The exercise below will help you create your Personal Story.  This exercise is for early career professionals (i.e. college students, non-management professionals).  

Your PERSONAL STORY is the set of professional, academic and personal experiences that best communicate why you are the best person for the job. It can form the foundation for your elevator pitch that you'll use in interviews, cover letters, and email introductions. A compelling story that gets you interviews and job offers will highlight as many of the following 7 things as possible that recruiters look for in strong candidates:

• Job Relevance
• Communication Skills
• Leadership Experience
• Problem Solving Skills
• Expertise
• Pedigree
• Impact

Use the Personal Story Matrix to itemize and develop your story.  Below are the directions:

• Highlight up to 3 significant experiences in each box
• You can / should feel free to use the same experience in multiple boxes
• It is better to have too many things than too few
• It is ok to have empty boxes

Once you have filled in as many boxes as possible, you should be able to identify the 3-5 most significant experiences.  THIS IS YOUR STORY! These are often the experiences that appear in multiple boxes

• Write a detailed paragraph on each of these selected experiences, highlighting as many of the 7 Elements as possible

To see an example of how to turn the information in your matrix into an elevator pitch you might use in an email introduction, look at these Strong and Weak Elevator Pitch Examples