What's Your Story?

The stories we tell ourselves resonate at the core of our identities. They make up an existential playlist, and the playlist never stops. We have religious stories, family stories, and stories about money—and we live by them. 

Breaking big narratives when they confine and oppress us is the work of heroes. Pulling all the wires out of a master, population-wide narrative — and building something new — is at the heart of the radical action of MLK, Gandhi, Malala, Milk and Mandela.

What is the story you tell yourself that’s constraining you, confusing you, hurting you? Can you turn the volume down on it, and listen to the radical inside you—the one that says maybe the idea that I’m stupid, incompetent, evil, unlovable ? The one that can deconstruct and dissolve the stories that burden you — and those around you? 

It’s not easy work. But none of us is helpless. We all have within the capacity for transformation — if we are ready to talk to the parts of ourselves that have been burdened by trauma and stories.  

My client Elise, a novelist, has long told herself the story that she’s not beautiful like her mother. The story feels so binding that she told me she’s powerless to doubt it: Her mother is beautiful and she, the drab daughter, is an utter disappointment.

Opening up just a micron of doubt about this story was possible once we connected with Elise’s protective parts — the ones that needed to second her mother’s vanity, as well as her mother’s idea that beauty is a woman’s most important possession and achievement. Elisa had participated in this story, and embellished it, because she wanted to make sure her mother kept winning at something so important to her. 

And the micron grew. She started to doubt a story that had been so grooved in that it had determined much of her life. The skepticism became a superpower. And the story came undone before her eyes. 

Within a month of confronting the stubborn story, Elise relaxed into her own beauty for the first time. Sounds small? It was radical. 

Come work with me to challenge the stories holding you back