What's your story?

Where are you in the myth of your own life?

What's the story?

Irish folk say this all the time. It's slang for "What's up?" The Irish version of “How’s it going?” But as a culture with a deep oral tradition, I like to think it is a hat tip to the power of the spoken word. A genuine interest in the story of our lives and a call to listen deeply to the stories of others. In last week's penned letter, I spoke about values being our extension into the world. The building blocks of what we stand for as evident by the actions we take, which over time lead to repeated behaviours that end up shaping the story we tell about and to ourselves.

So why do we place ourselves in story through our actions?

Stories are how we make sense of the world and we play two roles in what William James calls "a storied me". We play the role of the main character and we play the role of the narrator. We interact with life through our actions and we tell the back story to tie it all together into some semblance of meaning.

"Our storytelling impulse emerges from a deep-seated need all humans share: the need to make sense of the world. We have a primal desire to impose order on disorder—to find the signal in the noise."
Emily Esfahani Smith - The Power of Meaning

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The Two Great Stories

According to author and mythologist Micheal Meade, there are two great stories:

1. The eternal drama that keeps unfolding at the center of life

2. The personal myth that tries to unfold and become known at the centre of each life.

Our own personal narrative (personal myth) is shaped by the interaction of our internal story with the world's story and vice versa. For the oldest oral culture amongst us, the Australian Aboriginals, this process is called yarning and is how knowledge is vetted, upgraded, shared to allow new knowledge to appear. It is a process of co-creation. Our story rubs up against the stories of others and through the crucible of dialogue, our understanding of the world is shaped.

Plato would call the story of our internal universe and the greater story unfolding in the world around us microcosm to macrocosm.

Our internal story is a smaller version of the story being played out in the universe we interact with. When we feel chaotic internally, the world meets us with chaos. When we feel ordered, order greets us. We make salient in our environments the information that supports the inner story. Over time, we yardstick ourselves and eventually step into a narrative that we identify with. Dan McAdams calls this our narrative identity.

"We use the term Narrative Identity to refer to the stories people construct and tell about themselves to define who they are for themselves and for others."
Professor Dan McAdams

Which mask?

The masks we wear or personas we embody help us play the right character in the right situation. ‘Persona' is Latin for the mask worn on stage by an actor. They are temporary…sometimes. The challenge is that many of us identify deeply with the mask. We method act, becoming overly identified with that character, and give over our sovereignty to that character. We are lost to the mask and all its identifiers.

This story we tell ourselves traps us and we will do anything to avoid being challenged on it. We avoid activities that would threaten our identity. Find information that supports our worldview and discard that which challenges it, creating an echo chamber of entrenched ideology. One only has to spend a few minutes on social media to catch a glimpse of this in action. We prefer to hide behind the house of cards. Some of us don't even know we have another option.

Restorying the story

The personal myth, identified by Meade as one of the two great stories, is ours to write and rewrite. Our story can be re-storyed. The first step is to acknowledge that life is an illusion. A fabrication created by our predicting brains constantly colouring in the outlines of our life based on past experiences. Robert Anton Wilson calls this our “reality tunnel”. And it's a shaky construct.

The idea that life is not all that it seems can be empowering and scary in the same breath. Especially when the world's story is a little chaotic.

Often we don't know we are in a story until you're out of it. Being so zoomed in on our lived experience and story can leave us feeling like a slave to the inevitable. Contrast can give us the gift of polarity. Giving us the view from up here and down there. We get to see the whole picture. This is called the Subject/Object shift. The Subject/Object shift is a tool developed by Harvard adult developmental guru, Professor Robert Kegan, and is how we shift from being the main character to the narrator and back again. We are in the experience (Subjective experience) and then we are looking at the experience (Objective) analysing it. Developing our ability to subject/object shift can help us shift to higher stages of adult development by creating the necessary contrast required to notice the polarities.

Story coding

A key component of re-storying is how we code the experiences we have when we are looking at them objectively. Our brains are notoriously negative. They have to be for self-preservation. Austin Kleon calls our inner monologue the "worst troll" and he's right. Dan McAdams would agree also. He lists two ways that we code our stories retrospectively.

1. Contamination - positive to negative

2. Redemption - negative to positive

Contamination is when we look back at our experience and code it negatively. Our retrospective view highlights the experience as negative and coding stories as contaminated is a strong predictor of depression and low levels of life satisfaction. Redemption on the other hand is coding it positively and has strong ties to positive wellbeing and growth. How we code our stories determines how we progress and it is our choice. McAdams calls our narrative identity a special kind of story - “a story about how I came to be the person I am becoming.” I am a work in progress based on my interactions with life with sovereignty available at all times. Our story is emergent and we are as Meade says "the main character in a life-long story of self-revelation."

We get to write our own story and how we interpret and make meaning of our interactions with the greater story of the world is ours to make.

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Quest Mixtape

This is the active component of this week’s penned letter. This is for you to apply to your life. The below quests have changed my life and are my go-to tools for shaping my own personal myth.

Quest 1: Fulcrum Sliding doors

When we look back on your life, what are the fulcrum moments that changed the trajectory of your life? List them out. Below are a few of mine

• Moving from Ireland to Australia when I was nine

• Meeting my wife

• My brother’s death in a car accident

• Moving to Brasil six months after his death

• My kids being born

• Plant medicine ceremonies

• Vision Questing with Jiro and Leon

Go crazy on this list. After you finished your list, think about the sliding door moments that could have taken place. What are the other possible alternatives to these events? How else could your life have turned out? This process is called counterfactual thinking and we all do it without thinking. The only difference with this process is that we are going to be intentional about our engagement with it. There are two forms of counterfactual thinking

1. Downward - the negative view of this experience. Our poor me story where life feels like it is deliberately out to get me. A victim mentality.

2. Upward - the positive view of this experience. We view the fulcrum moments as growth moments that have led to new and greater possibilities.

This process comes naturally. Personally, with my brother’s death, I played the victim for a long time. I framed my life as the brother of a kid who died in a car accident. I’m not downplaying the grieving process (it will be a feature of an upcoming letter), but constantly downward thinking about his death led to dark places. I have done a lot of work on my dark passenger and the key growth component of this was shifting my reflective thinking upward. My brother’s death was my first awakening and the chasm left by his absence now shows just up deeply I love. That makes me smile. I will always love with that ferocity.

Quest 2: Identity-based habits

If we form our narrative identity based on our experience of interacting with the world, what if we changed these interactions? James Clear calls this the “recipe for sustained success” and it has been a major part of my shift. There are two steps:

1. Decide the type of person you want to be.

2. Prove it to yourself with small wins.

Continuing from above, my upward counterfactual thinking post my brother’s death led to the desire to grab life with two hands and live fully in it. Meditation has been a key component of that. I’ve been meditating for five years and now call myself a meditator. Before then I had never meditated. I decided that I wanted to be a person who meditates. I began with one minute a day. These daily small wins began to strengthen the narrative that I was indeed a mediator. I now meditate daily ranging from 10-60 minutes and have stepped fully into that identity. Major changes to routines can shock our narrative identity and cause us to go into avoidance mode. Small changes (based on BJ Foggs Tiny Habit method) lead to gradual progress, one small step at a time. The key is continuity. Eventually, you look back and that identity is clearly evident.

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Stories are powerful. But they aren’t passive. We are active participants in them. Knowing this allows us to write and live our own personal myth to it’s fullest. Enjoy the ride.

Thanks for all the love and comments on the last letter. Please pass on to peeps who this would resonate with.

Till next week,

Steve