“Tell me a story, Daddy!” I’d say as I climbed into his lap.  And not just any story.  I wanted the story of me.

When I was little he would spin a delightful story about this little girl with long dark hair who was always going on adventures and was always rescued by a handsome prince when she got in trouble.

Later the story changed to one that said big girls married a doctor or lawyer and stayed home and had babies – but by then I wasn’t asking for stories anymore.

Our stories no longer meshed.  A teen of the ’60 and a feminist as soon as the word was invented, I found myself floundering for a story that felt right.

Eventually that floundering led me, in the mid ’90s to creating an individualized master’s degree in story and social change where I tracked how the pieces of our lives that we choose to see create our story.  That holds for individuals, families, communities, states, countries, the world, and our businesses.

I could tell you of the baby who was abandoned by her mother and adopted into a house where”being blood” mattered to the extended family, of always feeling like an outcast.

Or I could tell you of the baby who went from her birth mother’s arms, to a social worker’s arms to her adoptive parents’ arms who much loved her (I didn’t know that all of that story until I was 57).

Same story, different strands.  You can see how one’s world view might be affected by which strands one chose to follow.

Our choice of the strands of our own story which we choose to tell again and again out loud creates our own self-image and our image of the world.  Our subconscious is always happy to see only that which fits with our story.  The human species does not like discomfort.  The subconscious therefore rules out anything that creates cognitive dissonance  (i.e., uncomforatble feeling when trying to hold two contradictory ideas at one time).

Molly Gordon says, in her newsletter article, Do you every get cranky? The high-cost of pooh-poohing the success industry

When you realize you’re in a sad story, take a moment to acknowledge it. Pushing it away just gives it power. Consciously inhabit it and let yourself notice what kind of world emerges when you live there. As best you can, don’t berate yourself for what you find. Just notice.

Then ask yourself what world would emerge if you dropped your sad story. See if that world could be as legitimate as the one you’re in now. You won’t need to force a choice, just allow yourself to see the alternatives.

If you are an entrepreneur, you can always find a story that will make you feel disempowered which will, in turn, make you angry.  But that doesn’t help you grow your business.

We make our own world.  What are you missing because you’re so sure that everything is working against you?  What grace are leaving on the side of the road because you are rushing so quickly to the next proof of how bad things are and how you can’t possibly succeed because [fill in the blank]?

Once upon a time there was a little girl who was raised to live in a gilded cage.  It was a lovely cage but a cage nonetheless.  One day the little girl found herself growing larger and larger.  Suddenly the lovely cage pinched and squeezed and hurt.  She noticed a thing called a door, which she realized had always been there.  She never knew what it was for and hadn’t much thought about it.  Now she thought she remembered a story about how the door opened out into something bigger called the world out there.  For a while the little girl, who was no longer little and getting bigger every day, sat and looked at the door.  What was the world out there?  To her it was unknown and therefore very scarey.  She shifted her weight, curled in on herself and ignored the pinching and pulling until the cage’s bars cut bloody swatchs in her arm.  She reconsidered the door and the world out there.  Tentatively she pushed at the door and it swung open.  She recognized that the only thing that kept her in the once comfortable cage was that she had memories of when it fit and she knew where everything was.  And she realized that the only thing keeping her where it was hurting was her fear of the unknown.  She had a choice.  What do you think she did?

What is your story?

Wylde Women’s Wisdom

A woman must become capable of telling the story of her life in a way that literally puts the pieces together, that discloses and creates meaning, that constructs the possiblity of a real future in which she, and all women, will be free.  Bonnie Mann

The essence of our story lies not in the events of our life in and of themselves, not in the things that have happened to us, but in the inner relationship we have with these events.  Ira Progoff

In probing the experience and asking basic questions, a woman may begin to wonder whether she has ever chosen anything she has done.  Carol Christ