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The story you tell yourself is the most important story. You learn that story from a thousand sources—your caregivers, your authority figures, your family, friends, peers, teachers, and your experiences.
What story do you tell yourself?
I buried myself in books as a child to escape a ferocious family. While they were busy taking no prisoners, I read fairy tales, King Arthur, Greek and Roman myths, adventure stories, biographies, the Arabian Nights, Narnia and Middle Earth—everything I could get my pudgy little fingers on. So the story I told myself involved righting wrongs, accepting invitations to dangerous quests, rescuing fair maidens, and working out your destiny on the long and dusty road to adventure.
Is your world basically good, or basically evil? Fair or unfair, benign or fraught with danger at every turn? Predictable or chance-filled? The story you tell yourself governs your attitude toward life, and ultimately what you set out to achieve—and therefore what you can achieve.
The most important parts of your story are the ones that you are least aware of: the nature of the world you find yourself in, the assumptions about how other people will behave, the kinds of ambition it is OK to have, the expectations you set yourself to fulfill, fall short of, or exceed.
When I’m sitting in a darkened auditorium and listening to an introduction about someone, getting ready to hear a speech, and that person is set before me as “the first one in her family to achieve X,” I pay special attention. I’m prepared to learn something fundamentally important from the speaker because of the special difficulty involved in breaking the mold that family stories place on their children.
I challenge you to write down the narrative that you have been living out, the family and personal story you inherited at first, and then made your own. By writing it out in a consistent, complete narrative, you will expose at least some of the hidden assumptions governing your life. They may be holding you back, even now, or they may be the rocket fuel that has propelled your rise.
Confidence, and the ability to jump into a challenge with all your heart and soul, come from telling a story that puts you in the hero’s role and allows you to overcome the challenges you will inevitably meet along the way—without losing your way.
The idea is to take small steps every day that propel you further into your story, surround you with the allies that you need to succeed, and allow you the sense of forward progress that keeps you trying. The idea is not to bestride the narrative arc in one giant leap, but rather to learn as you go, change directions when you must, and adjust as needed.
It’s only a story. I’ve heard these words many times, in dismissal of a grand idea, or a giant hope, but it is only stories that allow us to make the journey in pursuit of something noble, or outsized, or bigger than any one human can normally achieve.
What’s your story? Is it propelling you forward or holding you back?
