Those with the Best Story Succeed
The stories we tell ourselves determine the direction we go.
For the hundreds of thousands of years before books and computers, there was story telling. Stories linked us to the past, organized the present, and paved the way for our future. Stories allowed us to connect with each other’s experience and humanity as we met on long journeys around and out of Africa, and as we populated new worlds.
The anatomy and physiology of our brain grew as a byproduct of both our need and our zest to share our experiences. As we trial-and-errored our way to new skills, we told our stories about those efforts and results with feelings of seriousness, passion, heartbreak or hilarity, and the new brain developed. This “new brain,” the neo-cortex, is the part of the brain that separates us from other animals. So it is here, on walks, in work, over meals in caves and palaces, through stories that the new brain grew. We dream.
We developed judgement, vision. And it was our stories that informed, instructed, organized, governed, and to this day, inspire. And the best part is that we can still use our story telling to activate our brains and create new results for ourselves and our world.
Storytelling is in our DNA. Telling and listening creates the production of the endorphin serotonin, the brain neurotransmitter that create bonds of trust between people. Stories are the most powerful way humans communicate. They give birth to possibility. In stories, we connect with others, interpret our events, and create a road map to our unique and collective futures. The stories we construct give direction to our lives. The stories teach and model compassion and action, leaders and leadership, producers and production. The great story tellers have a vision or idea, share that vision in order to find others who will make it their own, and help bring the idea to fruition.
In, hopefully what is the ending of our recent year long pandemic, one of the most talked about ways of dealing with the loneliness, separation, change of social rules is to listen and talk. Talk to friends, share stories. Talk to your spheres of influence. Ask a better question. Focus your listening. We all have a psychological and a biological need to be heard and to speak. Numbers of suicides, physical violence, depression are all off the charts. Much of it has to do with not being heard and not having relationships where the personal stories can be told.
Make a few more calls. Social Zoom more. Arrange more backyard visits. Reach out even more. You know it feels good when you do.
Often people go to therapy only when they are stuck in old stories and can’t figure out how to escape or create themselves anew. Re-doing their story telling usually is the remedy.
Yet, if they seriously want to replace the ferris wheel of ups-and-downs arriving at the same gate, they can benefit at anytime by using a professional coach or therapist, someone who can help them change their story. Fresh stories and fresh perspective create possibilities with plans for a bigger and more fulfilling future. Through stories, shared with an expert, we can choose and facilitate our own change.
We each have the ability to write a new story for ourselves. In each moment, regardless of the source of any feeling, we write that moment’s story in our head. We are the auteur of the story as we will remember and as we will share it.
It’s NEVER what happens that matters, it’s HOW WE VIEW IT, the STORY we tell, that empowers us or disenfranchises us from our power.
We can decide what part of our stories to change and thereby establish new beliefs about ourselves and our place in the world. We transform our identities according to our chosen new stories, to make ourselves more enlightened, skilled, thoughtful, strong or confident. And we can make these new, elevated possibilities of ourselves the go-to, default mode.
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