What Story Can We Be Telling Ourselves?
“I lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
— Mark Twain
I came across Mark Twain’s quote the other day and smiled. I’d seen it before, but sometimes we need to see, hear, or experience something multiple times—or at different points in our lives—before it has an impact on us.
I’ve worked through a lot of anxiety in my life.
Anxiety that resulted from imagining “terrible things in my life.” And that’s the insidious nature of anxiety: our imaginary world affects reality.
Too often the story I told myself caused me to course-correct.
I’d find myself at square one again.
And, while I certainly felt better, there I was starting over again.
Doing that on repeat is like going to a bookstore and moving up and down the rows of books, stopping to open each book, reading the first few pages, closing it, and then moving on to the next. Sure, we get to sample a lot of books, but we never know how the story turns out.
I think we owe it to ourselves to see how the story turns out.
To do that, maybe we should simply change the narrative of the things we think we are going to experience.
My wife and I do little challenges every now and then. Usually when we get stuck.
You see, Julie has a dream of creating a magazine. She thinks it’s a wonderful idea.
I do, too! And not because she’s my wife.
I love watching people get excited about ideas and then start down the path to “doing” that idea into reality. Watching people chase after BIG, SCARY, HAIRY GOALS is motivating—and fascinating.
For Julie, I think it’s a story that she should play out to the end, regardless of the outcome, because I bet she’d have a ton of fun doing it even if she doesn’t make a penny from it. My guess, though, she’ll figure out how to make a whole heap of pennies from it…if she allows herself to see—on repeat—herself being successful from it.
It happens too often.
And not just to my wife.
We dream up these BIG, SCARY, HAIRY GOALS and then we quickly go into bookstore mode: read a few paragraphs and then move on to the next book.
Julie was cruising through her “magazine creation story” for a bit and then I saw her start to close the book—ready to put it back on the shelf.
It was challenge time.
“Julie, tonight, for your magazine, you need to write about why everyone should watch The Queen’s Gambit.” (It’s a great series on Netflix that I think everyone should watch—I’d expand more on it here, but that’s Julie’s task.)
She rolled her eyes at me.
And, that’s okay.
Because chasing after your BIG, SCARY, HAIRY GOALS should, at times, put you in places to do things that you don’t want to do.
“Ok, fine! I’ll do it,” Julie told me. “But, you have to write about what fear is without using any psychological terms.”
Challenges accepted.
And just like that, we both started turning another page in the book that we had open—our current BIG, SCARY, HAIRY GOAL—rather than put it back on the shelf.
FEAR: F*@&ing Everything About Reality
So I started writing:
What is fear?
It’s the one thing that will hold you back from chasing your dreams.
It’s the one thing that will corrode your soul.
Fear is not writing this sentence because I’ve told myself it has no value.
Fear is quitting this activity before I know I’ve come to the end.
And I just kept writing and writing and writing.
Fear is a story.
Fear is made up.
Fear is thinking you can predict the future.
And that’s when it hit me:
I’ve stopped doing so many things in my life—stopped chasing after so many goals—because I was giving weight to myself as a fortune teller.
For many years, I’ve believed that I could predict the future and, like Mark Twain, I’d convinced myself that I was going to live through some terrible things.
And in that moment I smiled thinking about how I felt like I was finally flipping the script. I’ve allowed the fortune teller part of me dictate my future and close book after book after book. Since I give so much weight to the fortune teller part of me, why not just change the narrative of the future that it’s predicting:
Why not tell myself a story of the great things that could happen to me?
Why not see myself succeeding and doing the things that I know I’m capable of?
Why not spend our times seeing myself be successful at the things that I am currently working on toward a goal that I am striving to achieve?
Those kinds of questions make me want to keep the book of my BIG, SCARY, HAIRY GOAL open rather than put it back on the shelf.
Why Can’t We Have a Positivity Bias, Too?!?
The whole negativity bias that humans are supposed to have—apparently because of evolution—is a funny thing. Shouldn’t it act like any other bias that we have: you know, those things that we are told to challenge?
When chasing after our BIG, SCARY, HAIRY GOALS to tell the story that we’ve always wanted to tell, our negativity bias has to be challenged.
And, maybe we can do that by tapping into our childhood roots: engaging in more imaginary play.
Heck, in a way, we’re already doing that when we imagine “some terrible things in my life.”
Just start imagining “some amazing things in my life.”
Stuart Brown, author of Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, tell us that:
“Imagination is perhaps the most powerful human ability. It allows us to create simulated realities that we can explore without giving up access to the real world…[a]s kids grow older, the line between what is pretend and what is real becomes more solid, but imaginative play continues to nourish the spirit.”
When we give in to the negativity bias—and close the story that we are creating out of anxiety—we’re using imaginary play. It’s just a type of play that does anything but nourish our spirit.
It’s time to stop being the fortune teller in your story that is imagining all the terrible things in life—some of which may happen.
Instead be a fortune teller in your story who is imagining amazing things that are happening to your life as you chase after your BIG, SCARY, HAIRY GOAL.
While they may not all happen, maybe you finally create a path for them to actually happen.
If the fortune teller part of us can cause us to create our future by closing the book of the story that we are currently working on, why not allow for the possibility that the fortune teller part of us can also create our future by keeping the book open.
In thinking about your goals, allow yourself to be a kid.
Tell yourself a story of the great things that could happen to you.
See yourself succeeding and doing the things that you know you’re capable of.
Spend your time seeing yourself be successful at the things that you are currently working on toward a goal that you are striving to achieve.
Just be an adult after engaging in some imaginary play and start doing the things in the moment to get you to that imaginary state.
And, maybe that’s what growing up is about: continuing to dream big—continuing to use imaginary play—but actually putting our skills and abilities to work on a consistent basis day-after-day, week-after-week, month-after-month, and year-after-year to achieve the BIG, SCARY, HAIRY GOALS that we want to achieve most so that we can tell the story that we’ve always know we’re capable of telling.
That’s what I’ve been doing lately and, gosh, it sure is a more fulfilling way to live a life and, heck, the story that I’ve always wanted to tell is actually starting to unfold.
As for Julie’s magazine—her BIG, SCARY, HAIRY GOAL—well, keep an eye out for an amazing magazine as she sat down the following morning to work out part of her story’s outline for the next 12 months.
The next time your anxiety—your negativity bias—gets in the way of you continuing to chase after your BIG, SCARY, HAIRY GOAL so that you can keep telling the story that you’ve always wanted to tell, flip the script: