This paper explores the constraints to innovative, creative and reflexive careers counselling in an uncertain neo-liberal world. We draw on previously reported research into practitioners' use of a narrative model for career counselling interviews in England and a Europe-wide auto/biographical narrative study of non-traditional learners in universities. The latter draws on a number of narrative interviews with an asylum seeker, to debate whether such a way of working with people, "in a clinical style", offers contextualised insight into people's struggles to construct a career and a methodology for doing so. The paper also examines the difficulties of creating a "good enough" professional, psychosocial space for experimentation with creative approaches in a marketised guidance world, where more is expected from less.