Are you a story-teller?
Are you fond of weaving tales and enthralling people with them?
What do your stories tell about you? What are they creating in your life?
There are the stories that you tell to entertain people like ones about what you did on vacation or the time you fell out of a tree or the time you got on the wrong bus and toured all of the city trying to get home.
And there are stories that you share to illustrate a point and to share your message.
And then there are the ones that you tell about why you can’t do something or can’t change something or have to keep doing something. Those stories contain all of the excuses that you use to explain, justify and defend the choices that you have made and continue making. Those are the stories that create the limitations in your life. Those stories make all those choices you made right and unchangeable.
What Stories Are You Telling
Think about what stories ARE you telling?
What stories are you telling to others?
What stories are you telling yourself?
Are they the same stories or are they different?
Do you believe those stories?
How long have you had them?
And ….. drum-roll please ….. are those stories really true?
Sometimes you even try to force the story to be real, even when it isn’t. If you want to make your story real, then you have to hold onto whatever occurs no matter what. You have to justify it and add to it in order to keep it in existence. So how much of what you have defined as your story of you and your life is based on a lie?
Who would you be without that story?
Your Fortress
Sometimes you tell different stories to others than you tell yourself. Why? It may be that you desire to protect yourself in some way from their judgment or disapproval. You may also feel that you need to hide things in your life or that you feel guilty or ashamed.
So you create stories as defense mechanisms and hide and shield yourself behind them as if you are building a fortress for yourself against the rest of the world.
What is the value of each story? What does each prevent you from doing or keep you doing? What need is each fulfilling?
What have you made so vital and valuable about your stories of your limitations that keep you hiding behind them and never creating beyond them?
Every time you repeat a story you make it more real and true to you and you solidify that story into your world. It fortifies those walls of your fortress.
Getting It Right
You frequently use stories to justify and validate the choices that you made and to make those choices right. If you get something right then everything in your life will work – or so you believe.
Stories validate the choices you made and are continuing to make as well as all of the upsets and problems you have that are the subject of those stories. They are all about the validation, justification, and rightness of your point of view.
It doesn’t matter if the story is true, what matters to you is that it explains, justifies and supports the choices that you made and continue making and makes those choices right somehow in your mind.
So whether the story says that you can’t do or that you must do or that you must continue doing something, you have to ask is that actually true or is it just a story that you are using to avoid changes in your life.
You stay in your story because you don’t want to change your choices. You want to prove that those choices were right and were not mistakes. Thus, you must make those choices work, and your stories support you in that!
What are you refusing to acknowledge by staying in your story?
What are you refusing to change?
What are you trying to force to be right?
If You Weren’t Telling That Story
If you weren’t telling those stories, what could you do differently in your life? What could you choose? What could you change if you didn’t have to force that story to be true?
If you are tired of hearing your story, tired of being stuck in your story, when you get to the end say “WOW, that was fun!” or “WOW, that was really SILLY!” And usually you will stop telling it so much. Often it is because you are boring yourself with it or you are limiting yourself so much that you forgot you could let go. So say “I was boring myself to death. You know what? Story sucks! What am I doing?”
And set yourself free.
Start asking yourself more questions like: “What choices do I have here?” and “What can I do differently now?” to allow yourself more choices and possibilities
What can you create now that you are not stuck in that story any longer?
Whoo Hoo! Get out the tools, it’s time to create!!
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