Is Fear the Author of Your Story?
As a person who has literally hidden behind a camera for over a decade. I know better than most people why you might prefer not to tell your stories. It’s always easier to stay in our comfort zone, but going deep into our stories holds the power to show us our truest dreams and sometimes even the things that hold us back.
Telling stories is deeply human and you’re already telling them every day. This is what you do over cocktails with your girlfriends, at networking events, or at family gatherings. We constantly share narrative moments from our lives but most of us haven’t learned how to harness this skill for our greater good and we rarely consider the stories that we tell ourselves on an almost daily basis.
If you’re anything like me, I’m guessing there’s a story that comes up for you that isn’t necessarily a positive one. For most of us, our most common story is that I am not enough. I call this our inner critic, fear, or the nasty gremlin that whispers our failures in our ears at our greatest moments of vulnerability. It’s been holding many of us back for years and yet we rarely consider that we hold the power to change this narrative.
This fear that we hold is often deeply rooted in our childhood. And when we allow ourselves the space to explore our stories honestly and with compassion, we often discover that our interpretation or memory is not quite as good as we might have believed. That’s because the human body sends 11 million bits of information per second to the brain for processing, but the conscious mind seems to be able to process only 50 bits per second. This means that our internalize, nasty gram stories are not necessarily based on the actual facts. Instead, we are basing our perspective on selective pieces of information that we gather (perhaps during a stressful time) that may no longer serve us.
And when we take the time to review our most meaningful stories, we can often find other perspectives that we never considered which allow us to revise and re-write our current stories. Many of these stories were written by our human fear which was doing it’s best to keep us safe at a vulnerable time of our lives. Our fear did its job, but things are (most likely) different now. You have choices, autonomy, and power that you probably didn’t have when you were young. But you are still telling yourself the same story.
This is totally normal. If you are continuously telling yourself the “I Suck” story, you essentially have created neural pathways that have become deeply rooted in your brain. And your tendency will be to tell that story forever and act from the place of fear and habit over and over again. But there is good news, you can change this story and start to overwrite new neural pathways at any time. You always have a choice.
When you learn to use storytelling as a tool to review your life, you are paving the way for a brand new way of thinking. It is a powerful act. I invite you to focus on how your experiences (good, bad, and ugly) have taught you life lessons and changed the trajectory of your life. You have survived some stuff. And that makes for an awesome story.
If you are interested in learning how to tell your story and you want to do it within a supportive community check out my latest course on how to tell your story. This particular course was made with ex-pat spouses in mind (although we had a student in our last course who wasn’t an ex-pat course and love it anyway). The coursework is delivered virtually on our online learning platform on October 16, 2020 with two virtual workshops. It costs 375 USD and the program is delivered over 3 week, 3 stage process. I’d love to see you there and I know that together we can change the author of your story.