I was eavesdropping at my local diner—my favorite laboratory for human behavior. At the next table, a couple in their mid-forties was chatting about a movie they’d just seen. As the waiter zoomed by without stopping, the man became visibly agitated. I heard him tell his partner that it was the third time the waiter had “ignored” him and that if he were “a star,” if he were “somebody who people had heard of,” if he were somebody people “respected,” then they would already be enjoying their burgers. When the server finally did arrive, sweat bubbling above his lip, I heard this man aggressively asserting that the young man should be less obvious about whom he deems important enough to serve.

My dining neighbor was just a normal person doing what normal people do, creating a story and crafting meaning. But the particular meaning he made and we all make—the specific story we tell ourselves—this is our personal narrative, and more than anything else, what determines our reality.

The story we tell ourselves about ourselves answers two important questions in every situation we encounter: what’s happening and why it’s happening. In this example, what was happening to the man sitting next to me was that he was being ignored, snubbed, and treated disrespectfully. Why it was happening, in his story, was because he wasn’t important or famous; he was just an irrelevant, invisible, nobody. The narratives in our head are continually connecting the dots of our life, making links and forming cause and effect relationships between facts, situations, and events that we carefully select and design. This happened because of that for every aspect of our experience—whether related or not.

In this case, the insanely busy and overwhelmed waiter was passing him by, purposefully not taking his order, because he wasn’t publicly known or someone who mattered in the grand scheme. His story succeeded at making sense of what was happening and inventing a reason for it, but through an incredibly specific and narrow lens. He chose (or crafted) one of a thousand different explanations for the wait-time on taking his order and related to that one explanation as if it were the truth, sulking with his companion and erupting at the waiter in anger.

In accepting his self-designed narrative as fact, he validated a version of himself, a self-experience that was clearly frustrating, upsetting, and painful. He designed a reality that supported and strengthened a pre-existing storyline. His mind, like a heat-seeking missile, went searching for evidence that he could use, either on its own without alteration, or in this case, with his self-made bridges and personalized flavoring, to confirm his already written self-narrative.

The result of our story-making habit and basic nature is that we lock ourselves into being someone who can’t grow or change and into a life that can’t grow or change. We assume that the movie playing in our head is what’s actually happening outside the private cinema of our own mind, and that our explanation for why it’s happening is the accurate explanation. We take it as given that the intentions we’ve invented for everyone else in the world (and why they’re doing what they’re doing to us) are in fact their true intentions. And finally, we don’t question that the universe is behaving the way it’s behaving because of what we’ve determined the universe thinks of us. All of it is true, which then means that it must always be true, because we effectively make it the only thing that can be true.

The problem is, we all do this in one form or another, from the cradle to the grave, and few of us are even aware that we’re doing it. The most important thing, how we’re writing the story of our life, in the micro moments, in each situation, is what defines how we feel, see ourselves and experience our life. That said, we’re constantly limiting ourselves to a kind of Groundhog Day life, the same thing over and over again, day after day. We feel stuck because we’re keeping ourselves stuck with our stories. So many people say they want to change, and even more people say they want their lives to change. But neither can happen as long as we’re using the same writer to craft the story—of who we are and the possibilities that exist for our life. Nothing can change if the script and meaning are already written and we’re just filling in the details to make it all work—again.

We tell ourselves that our story makes sense and is justified, we have that story because it’s not a story; it’s reality—what always happens to us, and we have the track record to back it up. But we don’t see that we’re the ones making that reality a reality in the way that we’re writing the story. We are right because we make ourselves right. It is indeed what happens to us because we are the authors of what happens to us.

What allows you to break free from your stories (and resulting stuckness) is to become aware of yourself weaving your narratives, to notice when you’re telling yourself and everyone else the story of what’s happening to you and why. Freedom happens when you can see the leaps you’re making, and what you’re adding to reality. The way out of a life that doesn’t change, a you who always feels the same way and has the same kinds of things happen to her, is to become aware of where you’re inventing the narrative, constructing meaning, building bridges, and connecting self-selected dots between stand-alone events. Ask yourself, where am I making assumptions, and adding to the bones of reality where it doesn’t actually exist? Again and again, notice when you’re making self-constructed interpretations and generating meaning, writing the story of the situation through your own corrupted lens, accepting (and reacting) to your personal narrative as if it were the Truth. Notice and stop—pull the lens back; step out of the cinema of your mind. Return to the present moment, drop into your senses and the bare bones of what’s actually happening, without any spin and with nothing added. Simply put… let the thing be the thing.

The post Does Your Life Feel Like Groundhog Day? appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Do you ever feel like no matter what you do or say, how you behave, or the choices you make, the results are the same? No matter how hard you try, you can’t move the dial forward: can’t experience new things, new people, and new opportunities—can’t change your life. Does it feel like you’re stuck in the same loop you’ve always been in?

If that feels true for you, it may be time to shift your attention—away from your circumstances and from trying to change outcomes, and toward something more fundamental: the stories you’re telling yourself—about your life, your possibilities, and yourself.

Ask yourself, what are the background narratives running in your head that you’re accepting as true? What is the reality your mind is constructing that you’re accepting as what is?

A Few Examples

My friend Francesca was furious. She’d been invited to be a bridesmaid at her friend’s destination wedding in the Bahamas. In the story she told me, the bride had only asked her to be a bridesmaid because she assumed that Francesca would never get married herself. And, because she couldn’t possibly have other plans and therefore could just slip off for a four-day trip to the Bahamas at the drop of a hat—with only nine months’ notice! In my friend’s narrative, the invitation to be a bridesmaid in the Bahamas was insulting; the bride obviously thought she was pathetic and was just “throwing her a bone.”

Just this morning, I was late to meet a colleague because I unexpectedly had to take my daughter to the doctor. My colleague made a comment about not being able to rely on anyone and always having to take care of herself. When I asked her what she meant, she brought up the fact that I’d been late despite our having twice confirmed the time.

I had been late, that part was true, but she’d also never asked why or inquired about what happened on my end. And ironically, she’d told me many times that I was someone she could count on, and how much she appreciated that aspect of our relationship. In the nine minutes she’d been waiting for me to arrive that day, she’d written a comprehensive story that used my tardiness as an endorsement for her preexisting storyline.

Anne (not her real name) hated being single; she was desperate to find a lasting relationship. A woman in her early 30s, she’d been in two important relationships in her life, both with men she wanted to marry. In the first, the man broke up with her after two years of dating, and then immediately paired up with her closest friend. Later, he told her that he’d only dated her to “get to her friend.” In the second relationship, something similar happened; that boyfriend also ended up with one of her friends, whom he also married.

On the outside, Anne presented as confident and outgoing. She described herself as flirty and fun—“the life of the party.” But her inner storyteller had her cast in a different role, namely the woman men “got their ya-yas out with,” but not the one they ultimately chose. What men really wanted was a more demure and mysterious woman, a woman with the magic fairy dust she didn’t have. The story hiding behind her claims of being fun and sexy was that no matter how fun and sexy she was, she would never be the one men picked for a wife or as the mother of their children. And that was because, as her story explained, she was too big of a presence, too loud, too opinionated, too…something.

As a result, Anne ended up acting in ways that were out of sync with how she actually felt. In social situations, she became that big presence—loud, brash, and wild. Fun at all costs. But even as she was performing this part she’d self-scripted, she was also resenting the men for whom she was performing it. Having already decided they didn’t really want her and would eventually choose someone else, she would go so far as to suggest quieter women to her boyfriends, women who were what she insisted they really wanted. Her self-sabotaging campaign, in the end, succeeded at convincing her partners to break up with her, which then re-created the same painful rejection she’d already decided would happen. And so she would be single and alone, once again, alone with her story—proven to her own satisfaction—and despair. She was not the woman men chose, and she had the track record to prove it.

Stories Creating Our Reality

The difficulty with our personal narratives is not just that they exist but that we don’t see them or recognize the fundamental role they’re playing in our lives. We don’t see that the story we’re injecting into reality is creating our reality, and that the reality we’re accepting as truth is of our own making. We don’t consider that the stories playing in our head are just that—stories playing in our head. We lose perspective, disappear into the story, and become its main character.

We bring our stories with us everywhere. They dictate how we fill in the gaps in our life, make meaning, and determine potential outcomes. Our stories are layered into the way we think, feel, interact, and make choices. Ultimately, we see what our story is willing to show us and then behave as if what it’s telling us were true. The story becomes our life, and our life becomes the story. If our stories were a backpack, we would drop it. But we don’t see the backpack, and we don’t see our stories—that’s the problem.

Breaking Free From the Unhealthy Cycle

What allows you to break free from these unhealthy cycles, to step out of your stories, is first to realize that you’re telling yourself stories, to recognize that what feels like truth may actually be a constructed narrative. Before anything new can happen, you have to be able to notice what you’re adding to and doing with reality, the overlay you’re placing on top of it.

But to get there, you have to ask yourself hard questions:

What assumptions did I bring into this situation?

Where did I make the leap from what actually happened to what I’ve decided is the meaning behind it?

Where have I constructed a bridge from fact to fiction?

Where did I shift from the bones of reality to my story?

And finally, how is my story shaping what happens next—locking me into an outcome I’ve already written, and situation that, ultimately, I don’t want.

More to come…and in my upcoming book, Narratives: Let Go of the Stories That Keep You Stuck (November)

The post What’s the Story You’re Telling Yourself About Yourself? appeared first on Nancy Colier.