10: Oh the Stories We Tell Ourselves & How To Change Them

Welcome: 00:00

Thank you for joining Leaders Lift episode 10. I'm your host Greg Cunningham and I hope you have had a chance to dial it back over the last week. If you don't understand that reference, check out episode 9.

Intro

In a survey response, I had someone suggest that I cover imposter syndrome. I had already been thinking about that as a part of what I'd like to discuss today and that's stories that we make up in our minds and/or tell ourselves. Imposter syndrome definitely is a story we tell ourselves so I'll have a section on that but I want today's episode to be just a bit more broad.

For story time, I'll share a story about the first professional conference I was asked to speak at.

For today's little lift recommendation, I have another book that is a great example of telling ourselves stories about others. Then I'll dive in and talk about the types of stories we tell ourselves including imposter syndrome. I'll end with a few idea on how we can change the narrative, but more so than me giving you a bunch of "how to's" today, my real goal is to get you thinking about the stories you have or are telling yourself and how they impact your life. That's the first step in changing the narrative.

Pre-Roll

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Story Time: 01:51

Speaking at the conference in San Francisco

Wasn't my area of expertise technically

Didn't have a lot of confidence

Was well prepared

Didn't go as well as I expected

Got bad ratings

Little Lift: 04:16

Today's recommendation is another Kirk Weisler book. This one is called The Cookie Thief. I'll put a link to it in the show notes, but you can also watch a youtube video his son did of the story. I'll put a link to that in the shownotes as well or you can search on youtube for weisler cookie thief.

What Stories We Tell: 04:44

Have you seen the movie the Pursuit of Happyness with Will Smith? Great movie about perseverance so I would recommend giving it a watch. But let's talk about one scene in particular that will help us kick off this discussion on stories we tell ourselves.

Will's character, Chris, is trying to land himself an internship at an investment firm. This would be an opportunity to really change his life. Somehow with now experience he managed to get an interview for one of the few spots. The day before his interview he is arrested for failure to pay parking tickets. He gets released in time to run from the police station straight to the interview. Do not pass go and definitely do not collect $200. He shows up in a tank top and a light jacket as that is what he was wearing when he was arrested.

Let's just pause there for a minute. Could you imagine walking into a wall street level investment firm for a once-in-a-lifetime interview dressed like that? What thoughts would be running through your head? What story would you be making up on the way to the interview? What would you tell yourself when the lead executive won't even look at you when he shakes your hand?

On the other side of things, what do you imagine was going through the heads of the executives? One of the executives had met Chris and suggested they interview him. I'm sure he was starting to regret that decision and was probably wonder what his peers thought of him. Do you think they were making up stories in our heads?

One of the execs even posed the question. He asked "what would you think if I hired someone that came to the interview without a shirt on?" So you know there were stories going through his head and he was wonder what stories others were telling themselves.

Now this next statement is a spoiler so beware. After the interview was over, the exec that recommended him for the interview basically said that he couldn't believe Chris pulled it off. So there had to be stories going through his head during the interview.

This story and the Cookie Thief really do point out that in almost any circumstance, we are making up and/or telling ourselves stories. So let's see if we can explore this enough today to get us all thinking about the kinds of stories we are telling ourselves.

What Kinds of Stories Do We Tell Ourselves

We are constantly telling ourselves stories. Stories about ourselves, others, situations and life in general. If you don't agree, what were you thinking about watching the Cookie Thief video or the scene from Happyness. Who did you think was the theif and what would you have thought about someone you were interviewing showing and dressed like that and telling you they were arrested?

These stories we tell ourselves can have some of the greatest impacts on our lives. They impact our state of mind, influence our decisions and how we respond in situations.

The problem with a lot of the stories we tell ourselves is that they take a little bit of fact (truth or things we know) and then we fill in the blanks (things we don't know, assume, etc.). And quite often there are a lot more blanks that we fill in versus the facts that we have at hand. Think of Chris Gardner in the story. If you stopped listening when he said he was arrested, where would your mind go? Would you wonder if he had escaped from prison or done something really bad or would you have thought it must have been a case of mistaken identity or something small? Either way, you take what you do know - that he was arrested and showed up dressed inappropriately and start making assumptions and telling yourself stories. The one exec that knew more about Chris may have told a different and maybe more positive story, but what about the other three that had just met him? They didn't have hardly any facts and when we don't have facts, we tend to make them up in our heads.

When I think about the stories we tell ourselves, I have a few categories. First are the stories we tell ourselves about, well ourselves. Then there are the stories about others and then stories about situations. Let's go through each of these categories.

Stories about ourselves

We are constantly telling stories in our minds about ourselves. We think about our personal worth, our abilities, the kind of person we are, the kind of person we think we should be, the kind of person we want to be, etc. We also consistently compare ourselves to others. We evaluate ourselves against situations, problems and opportunities that come up in our lives. The stories can change as our lives changes or as we gather more facts. But sometimes even when we have facts, we can override those facts. Let me give an example here. This example is kind of a combination of a story about myself and a situation (which I'll talk about later).

Back when I had corporate jobs, we had sick time. I'm not a big fan of sitting around and doing nothing, even if it means to get well. My personal sick philosophy developed into something like "If I'm not so sick that I'll just sleep all day, I might as well power thru it." This philosophy got more entrenched once I started working remotely.

At one point I got a massive ear infection, I could feel it coming but I thought I could tough it out. Well, on Sunday afternoon I got to the point where I knew that I needed to get some help. I called the nurse line and got some advice that would get me through until I saw a doctor the next day. Sure enough, both ears were super infected. Antibiotics were prescribed and I was told to not go to work for three days to let it heal and give the meds a chance to take affect. I went home, called my boss and sent off the note "excusing" me from work. But in my head I started having this narrative about how sick I really was. Tylenol was taking care of the pain and I could probably just work from home for those days. After that I started thinking about what my boss (we didn't have a ton of trust built up at this time) would think of me taking the time off and I started to imagine the worst case scenarios that could happen. Since I wasn't feeling well, I didn't do a good job of mitigating one of my potential pitfalls which is to overthink and try and prepare for every worst case scenario. I still remember calling HR to make sure that my boss couldn't fire me for taking the three days. To give this a bit of additional context, I had banked so many sick days that I was no longer allowed to accrue them. It was something like 60 days of banked sick time. So it's not like I had a habit of taking sick time, let alone abusing it. Of course HR reassured me that I was fine and that I needed to take care of myself first. So I did. But I really didn't need to tell myself this story and go through the extra angst.

Let's analyze the story I told myself. The facts were that I was sick, I needed to rest and I was on solid ground as far as taking the sick time. But in the story I told myself, I tried to override the fact that I was sick and needed to rest and then I did completely override (at least in my head) the fact that I was on solid ground for taking the sick time.

This is just a simple example of how the stories we come up with can have a negative impact on our well being. Just to wrap up the story, it actually took almost 20 days of antibiotics to get to the point where the ear infections could finish healing. When I went in for a follow up, my doc was fine with me going back to work but did not want me working out or anything else that would take away from my body healing itself. What if I hadn't rested those first few days? Would recovery have been longer? Most likely. Could I have permanently damaged my ears? Yes. And that would have all been because I made up a story in my head.

The stories we tell ourselves can also have a positive impact. Last week we had a couple of bugs floating around our house. That happens when you have little kids and when your wife works at a germ factory, I mean elementary school. In fact, my 18 year old got it pretty bad and one of the grandkids asked if he had a bug buzzing around in his stomach. Ah the things little kids say.

I woke up a couple of days into this and just felt tired and my brain was not moving as quickly as it normally does. I started to tell myself that I could just take it easy. Then I realized I had a meeting I needed to do. So I told myself I would get through that meeting and take a nap and that would be it for the day. Then I told myself I needed to get a couple of other things done. Then when I saw it was a decent day outside, I decided that I could just take an easy walk outside and get some vitamin d and exercise. By the time the day was done, I had put in a normal days work. My brain was still running a bit slow and I didn't get as much done as I would have liked, but I was able to power through it.

I find this same thing happening when I'm on a big climb on my mountain bike. At the beginning of the ride I'm all in and going to have an awesome ride. Then when your lungs and legs are on fire, you start telling yourself stories like "you don't have anything to prove" or "you've done enough, just turn around" or even worse "you can't do any more". The facts are that your legs and lungs are burning and it's possible that you don't have anything left to give. But most times I have found that I have to change the narrative (that will be our concluding topic today) and if I can do that, I can successfully move forward.

Let's take a quick break and when I come back I want to dive talk about imposter syndrome, which is really another kind of story we tell about ourselves and situations we are facing.

Mid-Roll

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Imposter Syndrome: 14:25

Have you ever been in a position in your life where you seriously doubted your ability to do something? I think the answer for most everyone would be yes. Now, there are times when we are faced with doing something we probably don't have the ability to do. In those cases, the story we tell ourselves about why we shouldn't do that is probably a good thing. They protect us from ourselves. Think about the person that doesn't do any cardio and only lifts weights but is asked to run a marathon the next day. They probably want to develop the story that helps them realize that is probably not a good idea. Remember my story about climbing the 14k mountain? I had told myself I was all ready to go and that I would be fine because I was in great shape. Then about two weeks before the trip I was on the track doing some cardio and decided to do stairs on the bleachers. I was ready to quit in about two minutes. It was only then that I realized that the story I was telling myself for the last few months did not have all the facts. I had to quickly adjust.

Those are just a couple of situations were we tell ourselves what could be perceived as negative stories but they turn out to be beneficial.

Imposter syndrome is kind of the opposite of that. This is where I start telling myself a negative story about my ability to handle a situation or be successful in an opportunity. In the professional world, I have seen this come up when follks take on a new project, opportunity or position. In a non-professional life, consider a young couple decided to start their family. What are some of the negative stories that could come up in both of these situations?

Imposter syndrome can show up almost any time that we take on something new or unknown. Or even worse, it shows up when we are taking on something that maybe we have done before but just not on this scale or it's been a while.

Over the course of my career, I have had opportunities to take on things that I was not qualified to do. At least not qualified in the traditional sense. That started with my mentor sending me out of state to shut down a call center. I wasn't even a manager at the time. All I had done was take phone calls and work at a security desk.

Early in my career I didn't know about imposter syndrome and I'm not sure how much I would have paid attention to it anyways. That's because I had this overriding story in my head that would have drowned out those thoughts. That story was all about ambition, talent (I thought I had plenty of it) and confidence that I could some day be a CEO. So I really didn't even question if I had the skills to get the job done. I figured what I didn't already have I would learn along the way. That was a pretty arrogant story but it was there. And that carried over into most aspects of my life.

Now that I'm a bit older and I have changed my story about my own capabilities, I have and do fall victim to imposter syndrome more often than I would like. Some of the reasons for the change are maturity, but also getting laid off a couple of times (there are a whole slew of stories you tell yourself when that happens) have impacted my confidence in my original story.

Let me take you thoughts that I have had lately about this podcast and my consulting business and let's see if you can relate to these stories.

A really good friend of mine was the one that suggested that I make this podcast. She has worked with me at multiple companies and has been through a lot of my leadership development program and we have stayed in touch. My initial reaction was aligned with my original story. I can do that and it will go viral and I'll completely change corporate leadership and get it where it needs to go. Ok. Maybe that's a little extreme, but I really did believe that I could do it and be extremely successful. The facts were that podcasts are a great medium, they are not that hard to get up and running and I had a ton of knowledge to share with the world. Plus I had the time to work on it while I figured out what my next career steps were.

Once I started working on the logistics, the imposter story started overriding some of those facts and then filling in other blanks. Thoughts like, if it was so easy to do a podcast why doesn't everyone do it and why don't I know great leaders that have left their corporate jobs to just podcast. Those kinds of logistical stories are not too hard to overcome but here is the one that I struggle with every week preparing an episode. In fact, this episode has been more difficult than most to write because of it. That's the story that all of my experience and knowledge really isn't that great. That what I have done in the past was a fluke or was due to just being in the right place at the right time. That the content I have to share won't make a difference in anyone's life. There is no way I'll find enough people to listen to make the podcast worth it. You aren't good at marketing so how are you going to generate sales or get folks to support the podcast. You don't have enough content so you'll be done after two episodes. You're just faking it and someone is going to find out that you really don't know what you are talking about. Everyone out there already knows more about these topics than you do so what could you possibly offer them?

Do any of these questions sound familiar to you? If so, know that you are not alone in facing these kinds of questions.

So how do we deal with imposter syndrome. Well, it's really the same way we should deal with all the stories we tell ourselves. Let's talk about that for a few minutes before we cover a few other things.

First, you need to recognize that you are telling a story. I know that most people would think of a story as a novel or several pages or whatever. But in reality, even a single thought can be a story in and of itself. Or a single thought can be the start of a story if we let it develop and grow. So learn to recognize those thoughts that are or start stories in your head. They can be as simple as 'you can do this" or "you're not good enough" so it might take some work for you to really start identifying them.

Second, we need to analyze the story. Separate the fact from fiction. Again, this can be as simple or complex as needed. Let's think about the thought that I don't have anything to offer leaders (just that thought) and analyze it. The facts are that I have decades of leadership experience and have developed other successful leaders. That means that I have had and should still be able to offer something to others.

Next, I recommend categorizing the story. Nothing complicated but think of this as how you are looking at yourself (others or the situation). Am I looking through rose colored glasses (the story is making things out to be better than they are), through sunglasses (making things look darker than they really are) or am I looking through my own personal prescription lenses.

As you all know, I love to mountain bike. It's one area of my life where I'm able to be a bit more adventurous. I like to try out new trails, new styles of riding, new bikes and even doing some of my own maintenance. Here is an example of an experience I had last year on a new set of trails.

I had already spent an hour or so riding and had a great time and got some good exercise and I decided I wanted to head over to the other side of the trail system and take a trail down to my car. The trail was rated as a blue (green easiest, blue next, black diamond hard, double black and pro). So I headed over. When I got to the trail head, it was marked as black diamond. I had not ridden any trails that were black or higher. Nor do I deliberately seek them out. That's just not me. I'm not big into jumps and drops or other high risk kids of things. I don't mind technical riding but I like to feel safe and in control and my skill had definitely improved over time. What stories do you think I started telling myself? Well, mainly it was the thought that this is too dangerous and I should turn back. So let's analyze that story.

First I recognized that thought as a type of story. Second, the facts were that there was a discrepancy in ratings. One blue and one black. I also had other options to come down the trail. Third I thought about what category of story this was. Were my glasses dark, rose or just right? They definitely weren't rosy because I didn't immediately think that I could just fly down the trail and be just fine. Were they too dark? Maybe. Were they just right? Probably. If I had already done a bunch of black trails and had those doubts, they would definitely had been too dark. But since this was my first time on this trail and I didn't have a lot of experience with black diamond's I was probably pretty spot on. It sounds like this was a complicated process but when you get used to doing it, it becomes natural and happens very quickly.

So what do you do with all of this analysis? You need to use it to decide if you need to change the narrative of the story or not. We will all run into situations where using the right type of glasses (rose, dark or prescription) is the right view. But we will also have times where we need to swap out our glasses and that's what I mean by changing the narrative. So if you decide your narrative needs to change, and this should be a deliberate decision, how do you do that.

First, identify which direction you need to shift the narrative. Do you want to have it come into true focus or do you want to move it more into the rose colored spectrum. In some cases, you might even need to move it into the dark spectrum. In my riding example, if there had been a sign or I could see on the trail app I use that everyone was saying how dangerous the trail was, I definitely wouldn't want to try and make that rosy. In maybe a simpler example, maybe it's first time riding a mountain bike and those I'm riding with try and convince me that I want to go off a massive jump. I could easily tell myself that I don't want to look like a wimp and that if they can do it so can I. That might be one of those times where I want to move from rose to dark and do so quickly. I think most times though we will be trying to move from a dark or rose colored narrative into one that is in focus with our own personal prescription.

Once you know which direction you want to move it, then you need to recreate the story in your head. To do so you may need to ask yourself additional questions and maybe even do some research to gather more facts so that your story is less fictional.

Let's consider a professional story where you have just been asked to support for a new piece of software that you are unfamiliar with. Someone has told you that it's very complicated. You then create the story in your head that starts with something like "I don't think I can do this". You identify that you are probably looking at this through sunglasses and want to move it into clearer focus. How do you do that? Well first you might need to learn a little bit more about what it means to support he product and why they believe it's complicated. Then you can evaluate your skills against what it's going to take to successfully support it. Once you have that done, you can build a plan to allow you to be successful. You can set milestones for learning, identify resources to help you learn and set other appropriate goals. These all become a type of fact that starts to bring your story into clearer focus. Now, ultimately you could lay out this plan and bring it into focus and decide the path is not for you. But at least then it's an informed decision and not one based on a fictional story.

This is also a good example of how rose or dark colored glasses could cause a problem. If you just automatically thought I can handle this and I'm better than those that said it was complicated, you might jump in unprepared and not ask for help and fall on your face. If you go too much to the dark side (finally I was able to get in that Star Wars reference) then you might be hesitant and end up not performing well.

I would also suggested writing down this new narrative that you have created. There is something about writing things down that makes them more concrete in our minds. I have found that when I write it down and can refer back to it, I'm less likely to go back to the fictional story. This also allows for refinement as needed.

Now we can't always write things down and sometimes we don't need to if we can recognize an unwanted negative thought and just push it out. But for our most important stories, I have found this as a good example.

Tying this all together around imposter syndrome. Both for my podcast and my digital transformation consulting business, I have had to use these techniques. I have to recognize, analyze and then quite often change the narrative of the story. I'm most often trying to move from the sunglasses to my own prescription. I have to write things down and refer back to them often. I set goals and milestones to measure my progress. For this, I do want to refer you back to an earlier episdoe where I talked about the need to have goals that you can measure yourself and are mostly in your control. For my podcast, I do look at listener growth and downloads. But I also have other personal goals for content quality that I look at to help me remember the new narrative that I do have value to add to the leadership world.

Just a quick story from the other part of my business which is consulting. I had a prospective client (now they are a client) reach out and ask if I would be interested in helping them on a project. Immediately a story started to form in my head and the more it formed the darker the glasses became. Do I really know enough? Have I been away from the subject matter for too long? What if I screw up? They are looking for me to be the expert and what if I'm not? Those were all parts of the story. But I finally identified the largest negative line in the story that I had to change first. That line was that I didn't know the right solution right now so there is no way I can add value. Do you see the problem with this? They weren't coming to me and asking me to tell them in a single call what they should do. They were looking for me to come in and guide the team through the process of finding the right answer. I had to change that narrative.

So I analyzed, separated fact from fiction and then built a plan that changed the narrative. And I have tons of notes and documents that have become the new story and I refer to them every day.

Even with all of that, I still have at least one moment a week where I start to allow a simplified version of the original story, can I really do this, to creep back in. That's when I have to go back and look at my notes and plans and then most importantly, look at how far I have come from where I was when I first had that thought.

So that is probably the last thing I would say about overcoming imposter syndrome. You don't overcome it completely (probably ever) and being able to look back on your progress is the best way to keep pushing it aside.

Other Stories: 30:00

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are probably the most impactful, especially when we combine that with certain situations in life. Now let's talk about some of the other types of stories. As I go through these, remember the techniques mentioned earlier on how to deal with them. Recognize, analyze, categorize and change the narrative as needed will apply to these types of stories as well.

Do you ever tell yourself stories about others? I hope your answer is yes. Whether we consider that evaluating, judging or whatever, we are almost constantly telling stories about others. These can be tricky because when it comes to other people, we are almost always missing the facts and unless you can read other peoples minds and motives perfectly, you are going to have to learn to do this without all of the facts.

Thing of the brand new employee that you hired who should up 15 minutes late for work. What story are you likely to tell? Will you give benefit of the doubt? How much trust has been built up? The stories we tell ourselves about others are almost always influenced by trust (the kind of trust we talked about in epsiode 6).

The movie invincibleis based on a true story a nd is about a school teacher/bar tender that gets an opportunity to try out for and makes the Philadelphia Eagles professional team. This move is loaded with stories. Everything from his wife leaving him with only a note that says you will never amount to anything to the equipment manager not wanting to fix his name on the locker because "will you really be around that long". Everyone thinks it's just a joke and a publicity stunt. He didn't even unpack his bags during training camp as he constantly waited to be cut. But the head coach told himself a different story. He put on somewhat rose colored glasses and imagined what he could do for the team.

What about that new hire that you don't agree with? Do wonder what they did to get hired? Do you believe its only because of their fancy degree or because of who they know?

Or how about the co-worker that missed a deadline? If you have trust built up, you might put on the rose colored glasses. If not, dark is probably where you will go.

Let's try one more example. Your son or daughter come home from school after having been sent to the principles office for disturbing others in class. Do you subscribe to the rose colored glasses view where they could do no wrong so it must have been someone elses fault? Or are the glasses so dark that you go extreme and ground them for life. What if they come home having failed a test?

I had this happen in junior high. I was an A student and I participated in tons of extra curricular activities. One day I had to miss a math test because of an activity. I wasn't the only one and we all had to go in and make up the test. Well, I failed the make up test. We all did. I was livid and so was my mom. I insisted that we had been given a test that was harder than the rest of the class and that is why I failed. I also had this story in my head that the math teacher didn't believe in missing school for any reason and so it was done on purpose. My mom worked with the school and eventually we were able to take a different test - and we all passed. This story story started out as pure fiction - the teacher didn't like us so gave us a test we would fail deliberately. The eventual story ended up being that we were given an unreasonable test, that became a fact. What I won't ever know is why they did it.

In all of these examples, how hard is it to really get the right focus without having all the facts?

So the next time you find yourself in story land about someone else, take a step back and bring the story into focus.

Stories about situations

Lastly, I want to talk about the stories we tell ourselves about different situations in our lives. Everything from imagining worst case scenarios to replaying conversations we have had with others to wondering why something failed are all stories.

I've talked about this before but I tend to imagine worst case scenarios and it drives me crazy when others always imagine the best case scenarios. Most of the time, reality ends up being somewhere in between. This particular category of story can be very debilitating to a lot of individuals. All of us have certain triggers that create stress and anxiety. For me, when one of those enters my mind, I almost immediately start creating a worst case scenario story in my head. There is no doubt that these stories definitely come through glasses so dark that they probably can't even be considered sunglasses. When these stories begin to expand in my head, it's hard to think about anything else or to even think rationally about the situation. I've learned that I have to absolutely recognize the story and immediately work to change the narrative.

Just one example, a few years ago, we were at a campground close to our home. I got a call or text from my kids that were at home telling me that there was a problem with one of the many fire alarms we had in the house. They had all been replaced when we moved into the house and a couple of them had already had this same problem. Basically I just needed to replace it. I knew that but for some reason I created a worst case scenario in my head about it not working and something happening and their being a huge tragedy with my family (that was not even remotely likely to happen). Because I didn't change the narrative, I ended up coming in from the campground and spending all morning trying to find a replacement for it. I drove for a couple of hours hitting the different stores with no luck. Eventually I decided I would have to order one from amazon. When I got home, I found a replacement in my storage room. I had already anticipated this might happen and had a spare avaiable. But because the story was so consuming, I didn't even think to look for it.

There are a few other triggers where I have had to learn to immediately change the narrative. Sometimes I just have to force myself to ignore the thought. In either scenario, I have to recognize that a story has been triggered in my mind and be deliberate in dealing with it. Otherwise it becomes very consuming.

Worst case scenarios also tie into imposter syndrome for me. In my personal business, I had this go through my mind both as I started the podcast but also for my digital consulting business (as I have discussed already). I didn't do a great job in either scenario of immediately recognizing the story and dealing with it. Instead I thought about being exposed as a fraud, being sued for not being able to do a job I claimed to do, etc. I even had a portion of this conversation with my client and explained that I had been out of the game for a bit so may not be as familiar with the market as I needed to be. He was great and helped me recognize that I did know how to help them and that we would be working together to figure out the rest. That was what I needed to start changing the narrative and move forward.

This kind of makes me wonder what other risk or opportunities I might have taken advantage of throughout my career or life if I had been able to better manage these worst case scenarios. I'm beyond a lot of that now but hopefully you can learn from my experience.

I also tend to go back to key conversations, or at least those I believe were important, and replay them over and over and worry about everything I did or said wrong. Or I make up stories about what the other person must have thought or felt (talk about fiction). This is completely unproductive and means I don't move forward. That's not good. Learn from the past, don't dwell on it.

These kinds of scenarios are really important to bring into focus. You want to think about what you could do differently next time in the same situation, but you don't want to dwell on something you can't change to the point where it brings you down. If you bring the story in focus, you can learn from it and move on. If it's rose colored, you learn nothing and if it's too dark, you still don't learn from it but you also end up living in the past.

Change the narrative on thoughts like: that hiring manager didn't reach out because they didn't like me or I'll never find a new job or If I don't go full throttle all the time I'm a failure (see episode 9) or if I try, I'll make things worse.

This last one is one comes through my head everytime I think about trying to fix something around the house. I have to change the narrative on that otherwise I would never get anything fixed.

Another area where we need to be aware of stories is when we use them to justify our actions (past, present or future). This can be very dangerous. If the story is not in focus, we can do some real damage to ourselves and others. In a lot of cities you can find individual on street corners holding signs and asking for money. What is the story you tell yourself when you seen them? I'm not here to judge your stories or how you handle those situations so I'll just leave it at that, but I hope that imagning that scenario will help you see how tricky it is when you mix stories about others with those about their current situations.

The last one to think about is when something goes well in your life, what is the story you tell. Is it all about how awesome you are? Is it about luck? Is it a combination?

The same thing for when something fails. Do you think of yourself as the failure? Was it someone elses fault?

Odds are that in both of these scenarios, it's probably not other extreme.

Wrap Up: 39:24

That will do it for today. Since we all have stories in our lives, you are probably telling yourself one about this episode, I hope you found something you can apply. And for those of you that suffer from imposter syndrome as I do due to the stories in our heads, I hope you'll work on learning how to change the narrative. These stories have such a tremendous impact on our happiness and what we get out of life. Work on it and I'm confident you will see a difference.

Post-Roll

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