The story you make up, or the meaning you give to an event or situation in your life, creates the reality you experience. Want to test it out?
Remember the last time you got angry when someone cut you off in traffic?
Did you tell yourself they were being rude and inconsiderate, maybe a selfish ass disrespecting you? Could you feel your heart beating faster, anger boiling up in your chest?
The data is you were cut off in traffic…the data carries no judgment or emotion. Your story, however, created the kind of experience you had with the data.
What if you attached a different story, a different meaning, to the event of being cut off in traffic? What if the meaning you gave being cut off was that the other driver was trying to get to the hospital as fast as possible because he was informed his child had been in a terrible accident?
Does your heart race in your chest with this meaning? Is anger boiling up? Probably not.
Wait a minute, you say, I don’t know that story is true so why should I make it up?
My answer is that you don’t know if any story you tell yourself about the driver who cut you off is true, so why hold on to one that makes you angry or makes you suffer?
You are a powerful being. You have the ability to create meaning from any actions or any words that enter your universe.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a natural default for us to make up stories, or give meaning to events, that make us wrong, bad, inferior, or incompetent. Have you noticed?
Maybe you leave the house for work, saying good bye to your partner and there is no reply or response back. What story do you create?
Do you say, “I knew it. Our relationship sucks, and I’m sick of being ignored.”; or do you say, “My poor partner has so much on their mind. I hope they can have a good day.”?
Two different stories eliciting two very different emotions.
Of course the truth can only be known if you ask your partner why they didn’t say good bye to you, which is what I advocate as the best course of action.
The point remains, our stories create the life we experience.
These examples are rather minor and insignificant in the scope of a life. What is significant, what does matter, is the story you have created about who you are in relation to others and the world around you.
Who is the man in your story?
Is he competent, strong, intelligent, deserving of love, and deserving of great things in his life? I hope so!
And if he is not this man, if the man in your story is someone less-than, unimportant, or undeserving of love and goodness in his life, I challenge your story.
It is actually a bullshit story. I know this from listening to the stories of hundreds of men, and from years of living in my own bullshit story.
I can prove it to you by stripping away the story and getting to the raw data. Then, from the place of raw data, what is actually true about you in any event or situation can be seen. This is the beginning of a re-frame process.
It is what I often do with my clients in coaching. The process helps them transform the story of who they are, so it becomes a story that supports them to create and achieve all the things they want in life.
Maybe you find yourself in a story that you are too old to change careers, or that you are too young to compete with the old dogs. Maybe it is a story that you don’t deserve someone wonderful in a relationship, or maybe it’s a story that you will never have enough money. Whatever your story is, you have created it. You are responsible for it; and only you can change it.
The great news is, you can change it!
And changing it then changes what you can see, which then changes what you can do, which then changes what you can achieve and get out of life!
So, what story is holding you back, and more importantly, what are you going to do about it?
(If you would like more information on how to reframe your story, contact me.)
todd@empoweredmencoaching.com
