Life Stories
How we craft and interpret our life stories can have a profound impact on the people we become
A few years ago, I took over a foundering health and wellness company that had lost its focus and customer connection.
My first move as CEO, however, wasn’t to dive into the tech, financials, marketing, or staffing, it was to sit down with the founder to hear his origin story.
Before I could redirect the company effectively, I needed to understand who he was, why he started the company, what motivated him, and the inflection points along his journey that led to that moment.
What’s more, I came to understand how he interpreted and framed the meaningful moments in his life and business.
I took pages and pages of notes out of journalistic habit, but I had no idea how valuable they would be.
When you meet someone who’s successful, it’s easy to imagine that success was preordained, that the ride to the top was smooth, or that they effortlessly executed a clear plan.
Even the difficulties in their lives can seem like set pieces from a movie, put in place only so they could overcome them for dramatic effect.
But we know that’s not our life.
As Eagles guitarist and emiment philosopher Joe Walsh observed:
“As you live your life, it appears to be anarchy and chaos, random events smashing into each other and causing this situation or that situation, and it's overwhelming. It just looks like 'What in the world is going on?' But later, when you look back at it, it looks like a finely crafted novel."
That's how most of us experience our lives. We have a plan, but life doesn’t go according to script, so we have to adjust on the fly and make sense of it later.
While crafting the company’s narrative, I was able to truly understand his story and connect it to the company he built.
Armed with this understanding, we were able to rewrite the company’s narrative and fairly quickly and dramatically reverse fortunes.
Everything I needed to know to successfully relaunch the business was buried in that origin story, and I referred back to it often when faced with a big decision. But first I had to listen, rediscover the plot, and clarify the story.
The success was meaningful, but the true value was that it led to me to t
hink about my own personal narrative, the script I was writing and following in my own life.
You see, each of us walks around with a personally authored story — often without even realizing it — in our mind.
New research explores the intriguing idea that how we tell our personal stories can have a profound effect on our emotional wellbeing. In fact, some psychologists use “narrative therapy” to help clients separate from their problems by reframing their life stories.
Dan P. McAdams, a personality expert at Northwestern University, explained this dynamic in his seminal paper The Psychology of Life Stories.
His work shows that people provide their lives with unity and purpose by crafting evolving narratives of the self that lend meaning to their existence and provide the foundation for their sense of identity.
The stories we tell about ourselves reveal ourselves, construct ourselves, and sustain ourselves through time. But we have the power to focus on, and reframe, key moments of our lives.
In an important sense, you are your story.
And the research shows that people who tell more positive stories with elements of redemption — for example the time you lost your job but ended up changing career paths into something more meaningful — tend to enjoy a greater sense of wellbeing.
Those who tend to remember episodes of close friendship and shared experience create a stronger foundation to their life story, and this leads to greater wellbeing and even success, both professionally and personally.
Conversely, those who tell their story focused on negative experiences and personal failures get stuck in this self definition and have a lower sense of wellbeing.
What happens in our lives, happens, but how we interpret it is up to us. And there’s research that shows if we can revise our life stories by considering the positives that came from negative experiences, we can develop a more durable sense of self.
The Best Thing Ever Said About: Life Stories
“Nothing is ever finished and done with in this world. You may think a seed was finished and done with when it falls like a dead thing into the earth; but when it puts forth leaves and flowers next spring you see your mistake.” — Elizabeth Goudge
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Please feel free to contact me at bstump@wellmadecreative.com.