Narratives

Who do you think you are?

The answer is a story you tell about yourself. You have another story about your life, and stories about the people in it.

I call those personal narratives.

They can feel like straightforward observations. But a narrative is an interpretation, not an absolute truth. Becoming conscious of that distinction can change how you experience your life.

Recognize the story as a collection of thoughts

Your narrative contains thoughts about who you are, what your life means, and what other people are like.

Those thoughts create feelings, influence actions, and shape the results you create.

If you never examine them, you may feel that the world is pushing you around while missing the effect of your own interpretation.

Changing a narrative is not automatically making something up. It can mean looking more carefully at the facts and deciding what you want to believe about them.

This is personal narrative work. It is different from the business narrative concept I teach in entrepreneurial work.

Find where the ingredients came from

As children, we learn words for objects and messages about ourselves at the same time.

Someone tells us that is a tree, that is a rock, and this is how we are. We do not yet know how to separate useful ideas about ourselves from ideas that do not serve us.

Much of this happens unconsciously. The people teaching us may be repeating their own unexamined stories.

Later, we can feel trapped in the narrative without recognizing that we have an opportunity to look at it.

Ask where your main ideas about yourself came from. What were you taught to believe? What did you accept without choosing it?

Identify the thesis underneath

Stories usually have an underlying theme or thesis.

Your personal narrative has one, too. What is the main belief you keep proving about yourself?

Imagine one person believing they are an extraordinary human here to do meaningful things. Another believes they are worthless and their life does not matter.

Those sentences create different emotional experiences and different ways of acting.

I have spent years helping clients examine and change those central beliefs. The thesis matters because so much of the rest of the story is organized around it.

Notice how you prove your story about others

A friend told me someone had described her as unkind. I was amazed because I knew her as one of the kindest people in my life.

We had different narratives about the same person.

If I believe she is kind, I look for evidence of kindness. When she does something that seems inconsistent with that, I may explain it as frustration or a bad day.

Someone with an unkindness thesis may do the opposite: focus on the moments that prove it and overlook other evidence.

This can happen without either person noticing.

Look at the stories you have about a parent, partner, friend, or boss. Are you describing specific actions, or turning your interpretation into a complete definition of the person?

Leave room for the whole human

Be cautious with a story that is entirely good or entirely bad.

People are complex. We can be smart in some areas and not in others, kind in one moment and unkind in another. We do wonderful things and make mistakes.

I teach life as a balance of positive and negative. That perspective helps us stop comparing actual life with an imagined version that should be happy all the time.

It also helps us stop expecting a person, including ourselves, to be perfect.

I am not asking you to create a sweet, unbelievable story in which everyone is wonderful and nothing difficult exists. That is not the work.

We also do not need to add unnecessary stories that we are worthless, inadequate, or beyond redeeming. There is enough challenge in being human without using those narratives against ourselves.

Write down the narrative you have now

Start with a paragraph about yourself.

What is your main thesis, and what is the summary of who you are?

Then write a paragraph about your life. What do you believe it is like and what it is for?

You can repeat the process for the main people in your life.

Putting the story on paper may show you why you feel the way you do. A narrative that is hurtful and negative will create a different experience from one that acknowledges value and possibility.

Choose a story you genuinely believe

Your new narrative must feel truthful to you.

If you do not believe it, you will not feel it or act from it. You cannot simply tell yourself a story your mind rejects.

Look at both the negative and positive evidence. Some people can list shortcomings easily but struggle to acknowledge anything valuable or heroic.

Give that positive evidence attention, too.

Imagine someone who loves you writing a short, balanced article about you. What would you want them to notice? What strengths and shortcomings would they include? What would be the main point of the story?

Use that perspective to consider who you are, who you want to be, and what you want your life to mean.

Practice first on someone you love

Choose a person you adore. Identify your thesis about them and the evidence you use to support it.

Then, as an exercise, consider the opposite thesis.

If you see them as kind, look honestly for moments of unkindness. You will probably find evidence of their humanity.

The point is not to replace love with criticism. It is to see how a focus shapes a narrative—and that recognizing a shortcoming does not remove someone's value.

Then bring that understanding to yourself.

You can acknowledge mistakes and still see what is redeeming, useful, and meaningful in you. You do not need a narrative that makes you a saint. You need one you believe that allows you to live fully as a human.

Examine the story. Notice its thesis. Choose consciously what you want to keep telling.