To Create the Life You Want, Master the Art of Storytelling.

Whatever change you wish to make in your life, such as starting a new habit, furthering your education, or applying for a new role, you must master the art of storytelling.

But with a key difference – the only audience you need to learn to convince is yourself.

Your story is the lens through which you view the world, and an empowering story is going to yield a completely different set of results compared to a story of expecting the worst or not being good enough.

Henry Ford said it best – 'Whether you think you can or you think you can't--you're right.'

So, what can you do the next time you create a story that doesn't serve you? Here are some tools:

Know where you are on the ladder.

Below is what author Jason Goldberg, calls the Ladder of Leadership. It is actually based on David Hawkin's scales of consciousness.

We all have this ladder inside of us, and we bounce up and down all day. Why do you start the day in gratitude at the top of the ladder, but by lunchtime, you've plummeted down into fear and anger?

It's whether or not you believe a thought. A collection of thoughts creates your story.

I had a recent experience where my signal dropped in the middle of a large Teams masterclass for five minutes, and I wasn't aware of it until my client called me. Technical challenges and hiccups show up all the time, but I did not use this same lens of subjectivity in the situation.

When I started the day, I felt gratitude and joy for the project, but by the end of the day, I was way down the ladder. All because I believed that I had let the client down because of the tech challenge.

Despite the positive feedback from my client and the generous messages from participants on the chat at the end of the session, I refused to see this and stayed angry at myself.

You may wonder what's wrong with that scenario. Anyone would be upset if something went wrong or did not meet expectations.

The reality is that my story was totally incorrect, and I believed it. I wasn't upset that the internet dropped; my story became about how I let them down and how I sabotaged my future work with them.

There is nothing wrong with visiting the bottom because life will happen, and you are allowed to feel these difficult feelings. The difference is you get to decide how long you want to stay there before you come back up the ladder.

Why does it matter? At the bottom of the ladder, you don't make your best decisions, you don't see the possibilities, and you focus on the negative. At the top is your natural state; it is where you can see possibilities and resonate with higher-level emotions, which have a mind/body connection.

Fortunately, I was aware of the state I was in and coached myself back up the ladder.

How does this relate to you? The next time you feel yourself in a lower-level emotion like anxiety or fear, ask yourself what is the story you are telling yourself to create this emotion.

It is our thoughts and beliefs that create our emotions.

Your body is a brilliant early warning system; you need to have self-awareness to pay attention to it so you can correct it.

If you only notice after a few days that you are stuck at the bottom of the ladder, consider how that impacts not only you but those around you.

How to move yourself back up the ladder.

Have you ever considered what thinking actually is? It's the process of asking and answering questions. Moving yourself back up the ladder and changing your story begins with a better set of questions.

Rather than ask yourself why this always happens to you, replace it with some alternatives:

What do I believe to be true about this situation? In my case, I had let the client down and believed technical challenges should not happen in these situations.

Then I reminded myself that I had been in the audience in many similar situations, and it never tainted the experience one bit.

The simple question, 'What if?' can be the most powerful catalyst for moving back up the ladder and changing one's story.

·             What if I did a great job?

·             What if everything is perfect?

·             What if it all went according to plan?

·             What if I do succeed in this goal/ habit/ course?

·             What if I am the right person for this role?

·             What if this all belongs?

·             What if they aren't upset with me? What if it's all in my imagination?

Look for a more empowering meaning.

A situation is what it is. As soon as we attach language to the situation, we change its meaning.

It's the same with your story; it changes based on the language you attach to it.

If you message someone and you see the blue ticks, but they don't reply, it means that they saw your message. The meaning you attach is that they are ignoring you or that you are not respected because they never responded even though they read the message.

Another meaning could be that they are in a meeting, dealing with something more traumatic than your message, and cannot attend to it at that point.

There could be many meanings, so explore several options other than the one that is causing your suffering. It's not lying to yourself; it's interrupting an assumption that leads to a disempowering story.

In the absence of information, we all like to draw our own conclusions, which are generally further from the truth.

Consider if you're telling yourself a horror story.

Seneca said we suffer more in imagination than in reality. A classic example is waking up early to get to the airport or to start a self-care routine like exercise.

Some common stories – if I wake up early, I won't have energy for the rest of the day. If I wake up early, I won't be able to concentrate effectively for the day, or I'll compromise an important meeting. What about the story of ‘I am not a morning person.’?

The only way to get over this story is through it – exposure is the antidote to anxiety.

When I started with a new gym trainer, the only time he could accommodate me was 5 am, which meant I had to train myself to wake up at 4:30.

When I first started this habit of waking up early, I developed serious sleep anxiety. I would start getting anxious early in the evening that I had to get the kids to sleep on time because I had to get to sleep by 9 pm to allow myself a decent night's sleep to 'manage' my session.

Of course, on these days, everything that normally went according to schedule went out of whack. If the kids normally were asleep by 8 pm, then they magically could not sleep, or they would wake up at 2 am not feeling well.

I became quite unpleasant to be around because I would allow my fear of being exhausted if I had a big workshop the next day to affect everyone around me until I learned through experience that there was a better way.

When I stopped freaking myself out about being late for bedtime, like a meeting, I relaxed, and the night unfolded more peacefully. The irony is I would make everyone else's night unpleasant by forcing a bedtime, and by the time I got into bed, I battled to sleep because I got myself so anxious.

To cut a long story short, I decided that rather than fear this one night a week; I would make getting up at 4:30 my everyday thing. It's like going full tilt into the fear so it stops taking over.

I learnt that some nights will work better than others, but the more you try to control yourself and everyone else, the more it will never go as planned.

Some days, I got a perfect sleep, and some days, I had a really disrupted sleep, but guess what? Even when it wasn't perfect, I was stronger than I thought I would be and had perfect energy for whatever I had to show up to that day.

Nothing changed other than the story I told myself. Even more effective was when I dropped the story and took the lessons to let go of the rigidity and focus on making sure the evening was something to look forward to rather than a military operation to be dreaded.

Stop the horror story of what could go wrong and how you could feel, and instead, focus on what you can control.

Either tell yourself a compelling story or stop the negative story completely and show yourself with action and experience that it's never as bad as you imagine it to be.

And even if the worst-case scenario arrives, you can manage it with grace and resilience. That is a story that will always set you up for success no matter what the scenario.

Owning the story.

"Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it." – Brene Brown.

What happens if your past experience has created a disempowering story for you based on something you did have to go through either in childhood or later in life?

You can't change the past, but you can change the meaning you give it rather than let it define you.

Don't let one bad chapter from your past dictate the rest of the story. What if you see your past as volume 1, and now you get to close that and continue with volumes 2, 3, and so on?

It's not denying the story but reframing how it happened for you and not to you.

Who are you today because of your past? What traits and qualities did you develop that have set you up for success today?

Some of the most successful people in business, the arts, you name it - have come from hard backgrounds or pasts, including abuse and addiction. They didn't deny their story; they instead made their mess their message, and rather than trying to deny what happened, they now see themselves as perfect to guide others through the same journey.

Your stories provide you with empathy and the ability to understand others in a new way.

To create a new story, ban the words' always and never' from your vocabulary. Don't bring the past into the present and future. Rather than rewatch the same old story again and again, which will take you down the ladder, create a new story to focus on.

You can design, produce and narrate the story of your desired future self.

"When we deny our stories, they define us. When we own our stories, we get to write a brave new ending." – Brene Brown.

Final thoughts.

In Tell to Win, Peter Guber says that "the building blocks of all compelling stories, whether they're told in person, in the pages of a book, or via actors on a screen or monitor, are challenge, struggle, and resolution."

In the same way, would you ever watch a movie where the main character had it all from the beginning with no challenges, no heartache or obstacles to overcome? That's a boring movie no one will pay money for.

In the same way, don't get despondent when you have a bad chapter or two. It's part of what makes life exciting and where we grow our resilience and learn the most important lessons.

In these moments, the story you tell yourself will either give you permission to leap or stay stagnant in your comfort zone.

Sometimes, you need to drop the old story but always incorporate the lessons for the sequel. Benjamin Hardy says there are two kinds of people: those with fifteen years of experience or those with one year of experience repeated fifteen times.

Think about what the next chapter looks like and what needs to happen to make it a reality. Is the story you are telling yourself serving you or sabotaging you?

In the words of Brene Brown:

“If you own the story, you get to narrate the ending”.

Here's to the art of storytelling,

Warm wishes,

Lori