Change Your Story
Welcome back!
”Change Your Story To Change Your Life”
If you want to change your life, the most powerful thing you can do is change the stories of your life. Why? Because stories are powerful persuaders. They teach us who we are. They teach us how we are to live. And stories especially teach us who has the right to tell us what to do.
A Hopi proverb declares that “the one who tells the stories rules the world.”
There is no such thing as an innocent story. Stories are powerful tools of persuasion. More than any other single factor, stories persuade us how we are to live and who we are.
Every story is an act of power, because the one telling the story is defining the world and our place in it.
This means that one of the most powerful weapons of power is the right to tell the stories. It also means that one of the most powerful ways for to you change your life is to claim the right to retell your life stories.
If you think about your life in terms of the stories you heard again and again, you will begin to discover how much your life has been shaped by those stories.
What were your favorite stories, either from your own life or from books, movies, and family lore? What stories did you hear again and again when you were young?
What did the stories teach you? Did they teach you to be powerful? Did they teach you to be obedient? Did they teach you fear? Did they teach you to imagine yourself capable of accomplishing great things? Did they teach you to mind your manners and don’t step out of line?
These are important questions and they are worth investigating. If you can identify the stories that you heard again and again, you will recognize the power of these stories to rule you.
You will also discover that the stories that rule you are inherited stories. You inherited stories from your family. What are the stories your family told about you? What are the stories they told about your family history and the place of your family in society?
In addition to family stories, ask yourself what stories you were taught in school. What are your ethnic stories, religious stories, political stories, gender stories? What are the stories you heard about the place you lived?
When you stop to think about it, you will see clearly how much your entire life is made up of countless stories.
And when you think about it even more, you will realize that all of these thousands of stories are not really thousands of different stories, but a handful of the same stories told again and again.
And when you think even more, you will see that your handful of stories are really one basic story, with only small variations.
And then you can ask yourself if you like this story, and all of the variations of this story.
If you don’t like the story, what is it that you don’t like?
You will probably discover that you don’t like the story, and the thousands of stories based on that foundational story, for two reasons.
The first is the story is not authentic. It was an inherited story, which misrepresents who you really are. The second reason is that the story robs you of power. If you are repeating the same basic story again and again, this is a clue that those who told you the story told you that you are powerless to change your story.
And then you can ask yourself if you really want to live the rest of your life repeating the same old story again and again.
Here’s the good news. If you don’t like your life stories, you can change them, one at a time. Each time you change one version of the basic story, the basic story itself will change bit by bit, until you have a whole new story, a story that is authentic and gives you power to live the life you choose.
This blog is committed to the radical idea that your life story belongs to you. You have the right to decide if it is authentic. You have the right to change your story. And you already have the power to change your stories to change your life.
Kalinda Rose Stevenson
The Story ReTeller
