As a professor, mentor, and coach, I’ve listened to countless talented people talk about their work. I’ve heard about books they’ve published, programs they’ve written, companies they’ve sold. They mention achievements so noteworthy I can’t get specific without a risk they could be identified.
All of which has given me a close-up view of a widespread issue: most of us are telling completely terrible stories about our lives.
Even when we talk about great things that we’ve done, we zero in on the near misses, the set backs, the crappy feelings. We’re so focused on why we’re miserable despite our triumphs that we barely notice how much we’ve triumphed despite the misery.
Don’t get me wrong — helping people use their talents without all that misery is my main purpose as a coach. And I know first-hand the transformative power of understanding exactly how you became your own worst enemy. Not to mention, truly awful things happen to people every single day, and talking about it can be crucial.
But we wouldn’t be here to tell the tale in the first place if the negative version was the only story. And, at this point, it’s the negative version that is getting most of the airtime, in our own heads and in the culture at large. The story of How We Got So Messed Up is playing on every channel and platform, from self-help podcasts to therapy TikTok to the Harry and Meghan show.
And that’s a problem, because the overarching stories we believe about our lives tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. At a certain point, the description of how we got this way, which was so empowering at the beginning, can become a reason that we stay this way. For better and for worse, the origin stories we adopt for ourselves wind up charting our future as much as explaining our past.
Here’s why we wind up with such negative stories, how we can go about changing them, and how that can change everything else.
The default story
Researchers use the term coherence when talking about the power of the stories we tell about our lives. Like purpose, coherence is one of the key ways in which we give meaning to our existence. When we have coherence, we see our lives as a unified whole that makes sense, rather than a random series of events.
If you’ve ever watched even five minutes of reality TV, you’ve seen coherence in action. Through clever editing, hours of chitchat and tedium get turned into recognisable plot lines like ’small-town girl wants to make it big’ or ‘city-slicker gets foiled by his own ambition’. These stories are what make the show cohere.
Even though it’s all around us, coherence hasn’t made much of a splash on the cultural radar, especially compared with purpose. The Purpose-Driven Life is a self-help classic, but there’s no bestseller about the coherence-driven life. Which means most of us have never even considered deliberately choosing or cultivating coherence.
Instead, we’ve wound up defaulting to what I call negative coherence, which comes from a combination of how our brains process experience and how our culture encourages us to understand our lives.
For example: let’s say you have a problem with procrastination. You’ve done the work to trace it back to childhood stuff about the pressure to achieve as a first-generation kid. You know how that history connects to your current anxiety levels and tendency to self-sabotage. Basically, you’ve given your problem an origin story. You are The Procrastinator!
Now think about how this story is likely to shape your days. When you identify yourself as someone who procrastinates, you’re going to look for evidence of those tendencies in your life, because our brains are designed to find data that confirms what we already believe. And because of the brain’s negativity bias, you won’t give equal weight to the times you got things done with ease. Plus, whatever actions we imagine doing ahead of time we’re more likely to enact. So if you picture carrying out your day as The Procrastinator, then that is probably what will happen.
But this origin story leaves out huge parts of your past and present. You don’t notice how you fought your anxiety every day to get through tough classes or high-stakes auditions or marathon code reviews. You don’t identify, much less name, the tough-as-hell part of you that has kept waking up to battle this stupid procrastination thing for literal years. You don’t have an origin story for how you became The One Who Doesn’t Quit — even though it’s at least as accurate an identity as The Procrastinator.
It’s as if a Spiderman movie told us all how Peter Parker got his overdeveloped sense of personal responsibility, but forgot to explain how he wound up swinging from skyscrapers and saving lives.
When we change the story
Now imagine you shift your story to describe how you became The One Who Doesn’t Quit. You connect all the data points that explain how you got so steely and find all the examples of when you could have given up but didn’t.
Let’s say you wake up thinking about a deadline and feel anxious that you’ll fritter away the time you have. Before you can start spiralling, you remember that you’re The One Who Doesn’t Quit, and your heart rate automatically slows. Because even if procrastination wins today, you know it can’t win in the long run. Because that can only happen if you quit, and you already know you don’t do that. Then you remember that you managed to make some progress the day before. Rather than discounting it as too little to matter, you imagine building on it. At this point, you’re already 80% of the way to sitting down to work.
And notice — none of this means you have to discount your negative experiences. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re used to hearing how extraordinary talents like Serena and Venus Williams got trained in self-belief from a very young age. But research actually shows that athletes at the most elite levels also tend to have some kind of serious tragedy, setback or disadvantage in their history.
This is key, because it changes how these people approach obstacles. If your origin story includes how you got over some terrible stuff, you aren’t going to fold when you encounter more terrible stuff. You already know that when you hit a wall, you find a way over it. You can address the negative and still propel yourself toward the positive.
Basically, you’ve got all that inbuilt confirmation bias and pattern-seeking working for you, rather than against you. Your brain hums along finding evidence from your past that proves you can create the future you want, even when shit goes horribly wrong.
Of course, no one can control everything about their future. Even the Williams sisters lost sometimes. But imagine how much more likely you are to reach your goals when the story you’re telling yourself leads you right there.
The heroic saga of you
I know you may be reading all this thinking, Yeah, but what if I don’t HAVE any positive backstory or amazing powers to explain?
To which I want to offer: What if that is just your negative coherence talking?
This can be a strange idea to contemplate, because negative origin stories so often depict us as lacking in control. To imagine that you could seize control over the story itself can feel like turning reality inside out. It can lead us to feel disoriented or even defensive.
Which makes sense, because letting go of negative coherence can often feel like letting go of the most meaningful story we have. The tale of How We Got So Messed Up may wind up limiting us, but it’s also a compelling, high-stakes drama. And it creates a sense of camaraderie with everyone else struggling in the negative-coherence trenches. When we identify as The Procrastinator, our suffering isn’t inexplicable, and we don’t have to do it alone.
I’m not suggesting that this story can’t be true, or useful, or important. What I’m suggesting is that it’s too fucking small. It includes everything about why it’s so hard to use our talents and nothing about the incredible way we’ve kept trying anyway.
And that is a colossal waste, because our inbuilt engine for story-based meaning is a superpower. Once we understand the compound effects I’ve been describing here — the way that our stories about the past fuel our future — we can choose what we want to do with that fact, on purpose. We can decide if we want our narrative to lead to the same old bullshit or to the person we know we’re meant to be. Let’s start telling ourselves stories worthy of that power.
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This post is part of a series on creative blocks. I’m a coach, a professor and a writer. Learn how to work with me here.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: iStockPhoto.com
