Moving Towards Mastery – Telling a New Story

It seems clear to me that to…

change your life you have to change the story you tell about your life.

It’s tricky though. If you tell a story that reflects the life you want, but you don’t believe it, it won’t feel good, and it won’t change your life.

Let’s say you feel you don’t have enough money, because you’ve been telling a story for a long time that paints you as a victim of economic circumstances or of insufficient education, or because you decided long ago that you could rationalize not having much money by considering yourself as being “more spiritual,” or by saying that money is the root of all evil.

Telling that story might in the short run make you feel better than not telling it, but it doesn’t change anything, which reinforces your feeling of powerlessness with respect to money, and that doesn’t feel good at all.

Now, suddenly telling a story in which you have plenty of money won’t feel good either, because you know you don’t believe it, and every time you look at your bank balance, you feel the same powerlessness all over again. So are we left with a slow, incremental approach to changing our ideas about ourselves, and about what’s really possible for us, or are there levers available with which we can change those ideas in larger chunks?

It turns out that there is a powerful methodology for changing our ideas about ourselves. Let me see if I can illustrate that.

Most people are familiar with the superstition about black cats being bad luck. If you believe in that superstition, and you encounter such a creature on the sidewalk, you may feel the urge to cross the street to avoid it… and risk getting hit by the bus that’s coming along behind you.

However, if you know that black cats being bad luck is a superstition, you probably won’t feel that urge and you won’t be imperiled by the bus.

We live in an ocean of superstition, and most of them are so ingrained in our respective world views that we don’t even notice them. But if you stand back and look dispassionately at our collective ineffectiveness at addressing our problems over the millennia, you may begin to see the effect of living in that ocean.

The good news is that you don’t have to change a superstition and make it more like the way things really are. You just have to see through it, see that it is in fact a superstition, whereupon it simply loses its power over you. And now, you see that aspect of life the way it really is.

For more, I invite you to check out my new book, Hoodwinked: Uncovering our Fundamental Superstitions. It will show you how to tell a new, more authentic story!