What does your story say about you?

”A story is the relationship that you develop between who you are, or who you potentially are, and the infinite world,” Shekhar Kapur

Few things have a greater #influence over our lives than the stories we tell ourselves. The stories we weave about our lives colour the way we perceive everything.  They embody our beliefs.  They create our senses of identity.  They influence the way we interact with the world. They give meaning to our lives.

And yet, despite the incredible power they exert in shaping us, most of us are wholly #unaware of what our stories are.  Woven from haphazard events without our conscious intention or control, they operate in the background, framing our view of the world and of ourselves, without our even realizing that they’re there.

But if we grab our story, pulling it into the light of day, we can use its power to transform our lives into the life we truly want it to be.

Our conscious mind can’t possibly give equal attention to everything that happens to us.  In order to make sense of our lives, we learn to weave a thread of meaning that connects the more significant events and lets the others fade away.

We highlight the experiences that have the greatest emotional impact on us, and we interpret them according to the stories we hear others telling us.  We adopt plot lines from the people around us, from books, from media and from our cultures.  We borrow the beliefs and values that they pass along, matching them to our experiences, adopting the ones that seem to fit.

Once we have a general plot line, we selectively notice the life events that support it.  In effect, our story becomes a filter through which we view ourselves and our roles in the world. We believe that our lives narratives not only describe experiences, but actually have an impact on how we live. 

When we turn episodes from our lives into anecdotes, it’s not just to entertain our friends. Stories allow us to make sense out of otherwise puzzling or random events. Stories help us smooth out some of the decisions we have made and create something that is meaningful and sensible out of the chaos of our lives. The stories we tell about our lives are not simply accounts of our experiences, they also generate experiences: how we feel, what we think, what possibilities and obstacles we see for ourselves.

Let us imagine our stories like a blank canvas, we can paint a beautiful picture on it or we can put an ugly picture on it. It is up to us. However, what we put on it #determines our #happiness. The stories we believe about ourselves decide the direction where our lives are moving.  If we repeatedly berate ourselves with negative labels, we live one story. If we instead often remind ourselves that we are smart and worthy, that we are fine just the way we are, we live another. If we hold a belief that prevents us from attempting a new activity, we live a different story than if we tried and succeeded, or if we tried and failed and tried again. All of these beliefs create various #stories that can take our lives in many directions.

If we want to change our lives, we need to change the stories we tell ourselves.  I know that sound a cliché but it is true. We can change the direction of our lives any time we want. These days, many of us have been telling ourselves and others that we are at the mercy of our damaged #unconscious forces set in motion by our #childhood #experiences. We blame our #parents. We believe we are victims of some neglect or abuse we have experienced as a child. Besides some of our #memories are not even real events, they are things we have interpreted from what we have heard - false memories.  I don't want to sound like I am oversimplify whatever has happened to us, but at one point we need to stop blaming and we need to take #responsibility for ourselves. We need to tell our stories according to us not according someone else.

My understanding of #Sigmund Freud teaching was that what happened in your childhood decides your adult life. If it was bad you are doomed. But now, from experience I know better. We are not prisoner of events from the past.  We have the ability to make new choices and to carve out new directions for ourselves.

We are not just products of our circumstances or passive #receptors of forces.  We also make decisions, act #intentionally, and can have an impact on many of the developments in our lives. As Dr. Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, puts it, we’re pulled by the future, not pushed by the past.  

So, the first step to take when we revise our lives story is to let go of the theme that says we must be a loser in some way because we had a less than ideal childhood or experienced #trauma along the way. People whose stories have happy endings rise above devastating childhoods and traumas every day.

Once we are aware of the story we have been telling up until now, we can begin to rewrite it.  Take a sentence, a paragraph, a page or chapter at a time.  Start with the part of the story that’s holding us back or keeping y us stuck, the part that says we can’t or that we are not smart or good or deserving enough, and rewrite it with a happy ending.   Showcase our #strengths, our abilities, our knowledge and skills, the things that make us feel good about us.

We should write our story about us that we are becoming, the one that is pulling us forward, the one who overcomes all the obstacles and is actively shaping the life of our dreams. Fill it with different memories and new #perspectives, with interpretations based on the values, beliefs and wisdom that we possess now, as a mature and capable adult.

The world is infinite, and we, potentially, are anything we’re #willing to believe we can be. Write our story large.  Let its pages shine with our strengths and our triumphs.  We become the stories that we tell ourselves. Write ours with passion and joy, where every adventure builds to a #happy ending.