(.....or 'Examine Your Stories')
by Belinda Beatty
The stories you are telling yourself are shaping your life.
Yes, you. Your stories.
Do you even know what your stories are? You know, the ones you regularly tell when you are meeting new people that smoothly summarise your life or circumstances in a palatable and socially normative way. Or the ones you tell yourself about where you find yourself in life right now. Are you the hero of your stories, or a victim? Are you in command of these stories you put out into the world or are they being told unconsciously? Maybe they are quietly woven around what you call your beliefs system, or sneakily embedded into ‘just the way I am’ or ‘just the way things are’.
Many of your stories were formed in early childhood, gathering pace at school, and locked in with confirmation biases as a young adult.
I don’t tell myself stories! I may hear you exclaim. I am logical, measured, disciplined. I can review data, follow process, triumph logic over emotion.
All this may be true – I’d like to claim it true of myself! - But if you are human, you are telling stories.
These stories are about us, about those around us and about those that are different from us. We have our stories about our parents, about our friends and about the world. We tell ourselves stories about every aspect of our lives and our behaviours: to explain ourselves to others, to rationalize and justify, to fit the random events of a life into a construct that makes SENSE to us. We must simplify people and our live events, and tie it all up in a simple and easy to understand package.
And so, everything must follow a narrative structure.
Our brains understand story.
Our brain can relate to, and relay on to others, a story. This communication and connection was
key to primitive human survival.
The neuroscientist Michael Yassa puts it this way:
“The brain is wired to encode memories in terms of narrative as it is the basis for building causal chains. If A happens, then B happens, then C happens, and I can remember that narrative, my brain can predict the future. After all, that is exactly what memory is good for. It cares very little about our past. It only cares about making future decisions that benefit our survival” [i]
A coherent narrative sense of self is essential to survival. We now live in a world full of mind-bending technology; computers that solve problems too complex for the human brain, money whizzing through the ether at billions of dollars a second, machines that fly our flight-less bodies through the skies, but our brains haven’t changed in over a hundred thousand years. Meaning, that if we have a story about how others may behave (she is fast) and how we may behave (I am fast too) we believe we can control or predict an outcome (we will both escape the sabre-tooth tiger.)
The story we tell, or have been told about ourselves, provides us a sense of safety – whether or not this sense of ‘safety’ we experience is truthful or even helpful to our best lives. Stories provide us with a structure or context that fits our need for coherence and prediction of future events. Stories also help decrease our brain workload as we interpret millions of inputs a second. We can’t help but to shortcut the collection of information by making assumptions or pre-judgments about a person or a situation * – as this filtering of information often supports our survival.
* This filtering and pre-judgment is also known as cognitive or unconscious bias. This term often is interpreted as being loaded with negative implications, but the fact is if you are human, you have bias. To counter this progressive organisations may have unconscious bias training to help an individual understand and overcome inherent biases in order to make the best decisions for the company.
Thus, the stories we tell ourselves define our past, our present and strongly shape our future. The stories we hold on to about ourselves and our surroundings become our subjective reality. The stories we tell ourselves about others define them too (at least to us, which is the only reality we experience). This is a very powerful cognitive mechanism that we can learn to understand, control and turn to our unimaginably enormous advantage.
Are you aware of the stories you are telling?
“The stories we tell literally make the world. If you want to change the world, you need to change your story. This truth applies both to individuals and institutions.”[i]
Michael Margolis
Let me tell you one of my stories.
I have always found maths to be a little bit challenging. At school I was pretty much an A grade student, except for maths where I got several ‘B’s. I have memories of my Dad saying ‘you’re just not that strong at maths’ and as high school arrived, I was placed in the second top class for maths, not the top. While I studied and excelled in literature in my final years, I hired a tutor to help me though calculus. You see, I was going to be a RAAF pilot, whether or not that aligned with my strengths, and so I worked on my perceived weaknesses. I felt that I was very much an underdog going into the competitive selection that was RAAF pilot. What if my maths was just not fast enough to get myself though?
On pilots course I lived in fear of Navigation phase, where I knew I would have to perform agile mental calculations while still managing to avoid flying into the ground, or another plane, or getting so lost I ran out of fuel. We used mental maths to place ourselves accurately over a feature, plus or minus 15 seconds, after over an hour of flying at different speeds, altitudes and in all directions on a compass……and we did it all with mental maths. We did it. I did it. I even did it well. And I graduated RAAF pilots course. But the story remained in my library. I did not feel that I was particularly good at maths, I had just somehow survived it.
I loved flying the PC9 so much that I came back as an instructor and taught Nav. I sat back in the SA seat (situational awareness) and did mental maths, dead reckoning, relishing the accuracy and speed with which I could make calculations of the aircraft's speed and location while both instructing and flying. I began to question my story. But I could not yet discard it.
It has been several years now that I mentor and coach clients in financial literacy. Perhaps more significantly, since leaving a full-time role in Defence I have become a professional investor. I calculate risk and reward, I do both rapid and detailed feasibility studies on various forms of financial opportunities and I train others to do the same. I have a whole cloud drive full of detailed mathematical spreadsheets.
Now that you know this about me, I’d like to ask you to seriously consider a question.
Do you think I am good at maths?
Of course I am good at maths! Multiple careers have depended upon it.
But it wasn’t until my second career that featured a need of mathematical strength that I began to question the story that I had told myself (or had been told to me) in my childhood. We hold on to our stories even when many were never true in the first place or have simply outlived their used-by date.
I have another word for stories such as these.
Baggage.
(Ahh I can feel the cringe as you draw away from my writing. I don’t have baggage! I have great self-awareness and have worked hard on myself I don’t carry baggage!)
What if I tell you that baggage is simply the collection of stories that no longer serve us?
When was the last time you took stock of all your stories and decided whether they supported the future you wanted, or held you back?!
Consider for a moment: Who are you without your stories, your preconceptions? Can you let go of all your preconceived ideas of self and other? Do you find yourself feeling a little unsure or unsafe, like you are wallowing around in a whole lot of space or uncertainty. Do you feel a tiny nervousness hovering somewhere in your background. What will you say if you don’t have a story to follow that gives you a character to play the part of in your next conversation? Are you suddenly curious? Or just unsure and uncomfortable? What might be possible if you change who you consider yourself to be?
If you humoured me with that thought experiment, you may have found yourself in a strange place. Perhaps lost. Perhaps a sudden and exhilarating sense of space around you. Perhaps a bit panicky. You see, we lean on our stories. Our brain will struggle to organise information without them. Even if we successfully discarded all our old stories in one epic effortful moment, we would replace them with new stories almost instantly; (remember the time I decided I was going to change who I am and I dumped all my old stories and became……insert new story here).
Stories are our lives and our connection to others. Stories make the world understandable.
But......you are not stuck with your stories, not a single one. You are the writer of your stories. You can change the ending, or that main character, or traits, or talents. Tell happy stories, optimistic stories, fun stories. See the best in every situation because you will remember the feeling and file that feeling in your memory-library as your story which blossoms into real-world meaning and consequence.
Like stories, some of our baggage is very useful. But in many cases, we are simply carrying too much.
Make sure you are telling great stories.
Here is an example of masterful storytelling.
Years before he met me, Stephen, my husband, was engaged to be married. A month before the wedding his fiancé was killed in a car accident. Without minimizing or trespassing on the grief of that time in his life, what is important now is how he tells this story a decade beyond the tragedy. No one would have blamed him for becoming a sad and lonely hermit who could never trust love again, but he didn't choose that life. When he could have said - and feel justified or validated by those around him - “I was so unlucky, what a wasteful tragedy” or “what a horrible experience, I will never be whole again”, he grieved and still told a story to himself that one day he would fall in love again, although that day must have seemed very distant at times. The story he chooses to share now is; “I am so lucky to have found such great love twice in my life.” and “I am so lucky that I learned to value every single moment with the people I love, and to never take a moment in life for granted” and “because of my life experiences – which I wouldn’t wish on another – I just choose to be happy”.
This is taking command of your story. Change your story, change your life.
Coaching Questions you might like to ask yourself about your stories
If you find yourself stating absolutes such as;
I’m not very good at….or
I don’t have much luck with….
I can’t do that….
Ask “Is that the story I’m telling myself?” …and wait with curiosity. Leave space for your own self to ponder the question.
This works equally well with a coaching client.
If you are hearing a limiting statement, or an assumption stated as a truth from someone you love and have a trusting relationship with, gently ask “Is that the story you are telling yourself…” and leave space.
Other questions to ask yourself when you become aware of a narrative being told;
Has that story passed its used-by date?
Does that story still serve me?
Can I give this (situation) a better story?
What story would I like to remember about this moment?
Make sure that your stories have not outlived their use-by-date.
References
[i] Margolis, M. (2023). Michael Margolis, Get Storied. https://www.storiedinc.com/michael-margolis/
Weist, B. (2022). ’13 ways to Start Training your Subconscious mind to Get What you Want’. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/briannawiest/2018/09/12/13-ways-to-start-training-your-subconscious-mind-to-get-what-you-want/?sh=5cd26f6f7d69
[i] Yassa, M. (2018). ‘Why Our Brains Love Story’. Centre for Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. https://cnlm.uci.edu/2018/12/04/story/