You Deserve To Tell Yourself A Great Story

The Quality Of Your Life Is Directly Associated To The Stories You Tell Yourself Each And Every Day

What is a problem? I’ll tell you… It’s whatever story you tell yourself.

What is a victory? I’ll tell you… It’s whatever story you tell yourself.

What is gratitude? I’ll tell you… It’s whatever story you tell yourself.

What is a failure? I think you can see where I am going with this 🙂

Is the quality of your life directly affected by the story you’re telling yourself. In a nutshell… Yes! Change your story, change your life! It really is that simple. But let’s dig a little deeper so that this makes a little more sense and perhaps get you thinking about how you can go about not only changing your current stories, but how you can change them so that you get to experience more amazing moments.

You see, your life up until now, has been a series of moments, some more memorable than others, and some more conditional to our behaviour than others, and its in these more conditional or conditioning moments that our stories or behavioural patterns become part of who you are. Your values and beliefs are all the result of your life’s stories. From parents and relatives, to friends and strangers, to teachers and the media, they’re all responsible for who you and your actions are today.

Unfortunately some of us (many of us) have been through experiences or have grown up through these experiences where you are exposed to a particular way of reacting to circumstance. More specifically, reactions to situations that tend to create negative emotions rather than positive ones.

As an example or metaphor, lets use busy traffic.

Is busy  traffic a problem?

When you get stuck in traffic does it become such a situation that you get so annoyed you begin to hate dislike the person in the car in front of you? Is it honestly rational to believe that the person driving the car in front of you has caused this traffic problem? Is it their fault for the rage, anger and stress that you are experiencing right now! Are they the ones making you feel this way? Is this doing you any good? In the actual moment I’m sure you feel that your reasons for this stress and anger are completely rationalised. But now that you are reading this, it just doesn’t make any sense.

First of all, (still using our metaphorical example) lets look at the situation.

You drive to work everyday in this traffic. You know how long it takes to get to work.

You know how congested this route is going to be and you choose to leave at the same time everyday. You are aware of the journey you are about to embark on. You do this five times per week every morning and five times per week every evening (assuming you work five days per week and have to drive down a busy road to get to and from work… but lets not get to caught up in the specifics of our example)… Yet, given all of this, you still tell yourself that someone else is at fault for this ridiculous slow, gruelling drive to work and as a consequence allow yourself to experience a never ending list of angry and stressful emotions. Why? Why do you do this? Surely we can agree that there has to be a better way. How can we adjust our story to make this everyday experience a little less stressful? Maybe even an awesome, empowering experience.

We understand that you are about to take a long, slow, stop and start kind of a drive. You should accept that “this going to happen no matter what” and simply agree with yourself to surrender to the experience of the drive to work. No matter what happens, you are going to be driving in busy traffic all the way to your destination. The only thing you can control are your thoughts (stories). You cannot control 10,000 cars on a freeway. You cannot control the actions of the driver(s) in front of you. So don’t try to. Don’t get upset. Don’t get frustrated. Don’t get stressed. You’re going to get to work at the right time. You’ve done this before and it works every time. You are never late. So be ok with the journey and all that it is and can be. Surrender to the experience of the drive and use this opportunity to occupy your mind in other ways by telling yourself some other stories.

You could learn something new or play a new album or listen to a new podcast or make a few phone calls or plan out your day or just be grateful about all that yo have. Do anything to make you feel great about the journey. Learn to appreciate the time you have with yourself and focus on the great things that you can achieve in this time rather than the negative things happening outside of your control.

If you could apply or adapt this metaphor into other areas of your life, job, relationship, finances, family etc by looking at those situations where you feel constant negative emotions, don’t you think you would be on the right track to living the life you deserve?

If you really looked hard at yourself and your regular actions (or re-actions) you could probably write down (right now) a few examples of situations that have happened and begin to think about a better way to handle them; or a better story to tell yourself to make light of the situation and to feel awesome emotions as opposed to not-awesome? emotions.

I know in my life I have come such a long way by truly understanding my stories and looking at how I can adjust or tweak them to make the situations in my universe much more amazing. Its a constant journey that will never end… and Im truly grateful that i get to write the story of each and every part of my life.
 

A Word From The ‘Why Guy’ – Tony Robbins – About How The Stories We Tell Ourselves Alter Our Destiny

happy life, mind over matter, my digital life, psychology, six figure mentors, tony robbins