What's your story?!

What’s your story? More importantly, how do you tell it? DO you tell it? Or are you reiterating how someone else has passed it down to you? A parent or a mentor, maybe? When telling your story, or when contemplating which decision to make in your company, a change in perspective can be pivotal. A change in perspective can reveal solutions, offer insights, and pave the way not only to better outcomes, but forgiveness, empathy, and compassion.

How often do you stop and examine your own personal story?

Have you ever caught yourself sharing a memory of a childhood event in the exact same way as a parent used to tell the story? Have you ever just kept sharing about a situation in the exact same way, perhaps even finding yourself overly complaining about the situation (instead of changing it)?

Consider telling your story from a different perspective, and see if you find any solutions or even wisdom within. This can be your entire life story, or just a small situation that you’re dealing with right now.

Part of why we are so damned good at giving advice to others is because we see their story from a different perspective and, more often than not, there is obvious wisdom in that perspective. It’s why coaching is so incredibly powerful: a good coach is willing to say what seems (painfully) obvious, highlighting what’s hiding in plain sight.

Whenever I ask my clients, “May I be blunt?”, they know I’m about to help them see a truth they’re not yet seeing. There is an empowering truth in a different perspective that often reveals the best solutions; your own solutions.

But you don’t need a coach to change your perspective.

You can just go into a mental handstand, like that:

Take a story you usually tell with a lot of anger, and re-write it from a place of opportunity or gratitude. See how a delayed flight story now becomes a story about insight and opportunity.

Take a story about a family member that you don’t get along with and re-tell it from a place of compassion or, better yet, their perspective. And see how a story about a falling-out and resentment can become a story about healing and forgiveness.

Take your current financial situation and re-write it from the perspective of someone else, fictional or real – perhaps, from someone’s perspective that has built a successful business from scratch with 6 figures in student loans pressuring them. And see how a story about a “can’t do”-scarcity-mindset becomes one of unstoppable momentum.

Try it. Pick a story you’ve told over and over again and re-tell it. See what happens.

Words create your world. Stories shape your life. Take an active part in telling them.