Episode 54: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

The Stories We Tell Ourselves Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Story power serves you best when you know how to use it.  Today we’re taking a quick visit to the stories we tell ourselves and how these create our entire reality. Let me start with a story: When I was 10 years old my mom and dad went out for the evening and I was put in charge of babysitting my younger brothers and sister. There were 4 of us. It was dark outside and we were getting ready for bed when suddenly there was a knock on the front door. Who was it? There was no peephole and we looked back and forth at one another. We whispered little questions like “do you know who it is?” “was someone supposed to come over?” “what if it’s a murderer?”  Our body language and big eyes perpetuated the story that there was something to be afraid of.  I, the one in charge, also created fear with my own fear.  Our little kid stories of being alone in a house after dark with the unknown on the other side of the door took over our young minds. We ran, all of us, into my bedroom and hid under the comforter on my bed. The four of us hunkered under the covers, eyes wide. When the rap, rap, rap came on the door again…the fear escalated, but I felt someone needed to answer it.  I was babysitting, so I felt it was my role to assign someone to answer the door.  I pointed at my sister, and with a sweep of my finger I assigned her the task of answering the door. She shook her head no, and so I pulled out the threats…”You go answer the door or I’m going to punch you in the nose,” I demanded. Her fear of what was behind the door was more powerful than her fear of me, but I had to follow through, so I pulled back my fist and punched her in the nose. She started bleeding and crying and the energy escalated to the next notch. Now there was blood AND fear, and yelling, but no one answered the door.  The four of us lay there, under the covers, yelling at each other and refusing to budge until my parents came home and we could run into the safety of their arms. There is a mechanism in our minds that creates gratitude, happiness, unhappiness, envy, joy or jealousy, fear or peace.  Not many of us pay too much attention to this mechanism, despite the fact that it is working all the time, in everyone alive on this planet. It is the stories we tell ourselves all day long, every day, about every interaction we have, about ourselves, about our friends, about our spouses, about the things that happen to us! By calling them stories I am not giving them a value of true or false, rather I am acknowledging that they are narrative interpretations we create about our experiences to make sense of our lives. Ryan Clarkin, one of my favorite life coaches said, “The most powerful stories we’ll ever tell are those we tell to ourselves.” I asked him to go into more detail about this topic, for this episode – here’s Ryan… –To hear Ryan’s message, listen to the audio version of the podcast.   Let me share some examples of how we create stories: You may have a story about how your boss and work environment is supportive and fun. The people you work with are your friends. While someone else in the office may have a story about how the receptionist is always dismissive, the work areas untidy, the boss too caught up in their own dealings to pay attention to them. You may have a story about how your spouse is a lazy and a slob because after dinner he/she does not clean up their mess. Whereas someone...