5 Things You Need to Know About Your Personal Narratives

Your personal narratives are perhaps the most important aspect of you.

Never heard of personal narratives? You aren’t alone. I had never heard of them either, even though I was actually helping people develop their personal narratives every day. Once I learned about personal narratives it changed everything. My efforts became more effective and from then on the transformations I saw in my clients were amazing!

If you consider yourself to be a person who helps others, then understanding personal narratives will be the key to explosive results for you and them. It is imperative that you understand how your personal narratives work, and then put your knowledge to use in life and work.

“Sometimes we have to inspire and encourage ourselves, through our personal narrative.” - Deborah L. Parker

It turns out there are a lot of people tackling the topic of personal narratives from many different perspectives, but very few people are unifying the message that we are all working toward the same goal.

Personal narratives are the stories that we tell ourselves (or that others tell us through our families, culture, religion, job, or pretty much anything else) which defines who we are. Personal narratives are not cast in stone! We have control over which narratives we accept, which we challenge, and which we reject.?

The best book I’ve seen that tackles personal narrative from a variety of angles is Designing the Mind by Ryan Bush (@RyanABush) . The book analyzes the big concepts behind how people shape their personal narratives, including the five takeaways below:

1. Biases are hidden patterns which result in mistaken beliefs and faulty decisions

All of us show bias when it comes to what information we take in. We typically focus on anything that agrees with the outcome we want. - Noreena Hertz

Bush defines over a dozen biases. He makes it clear that biases can play a huge role in personal narratives. One example is Logical Fallacies, like this, “The richest people in the world are white men, Scott is a white man, therefore, Scott is rich.” This is called the fallacy of the undistributed middle. He also covers ad hominem fallacies, appeals to consequences, the slippery slope argument, false dichotomy, negativity bias, and many more.

Being aware of our biases is freeing. If we aren’t aware of them, we fall into beliefs that might be damaging to ourselves or others, simply by not questioning if a bias has power over us. But if we know that biases are almost unavoidable and work to see their underlying principles, we can live richer, fuller, empowered lives.

The strength of a person’s spirit [can be] measured by how much truth he could tolerate… to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened. - Friedrich Nietzsche

If your life is based on false beliefs, it means you are dependent on “truths” that other people spin. Those people could be leaders in media, religion, politics, academia, entertainment, and other places where big power and influence come together. But even more common is for false beliefs to come from the people near us - family, friends, and local community leaders. We give those people a proximity bias. They have instant credibility with us.?

The key to overcoming the biases, according to Bush, is “you must come to pride yourself, not on the accuracy of your current beliefs, but on your willingness to abandon your beliefs for new, more accurate ones.”

2. The sooner you begin the endeavor to acquire wisdom, the greater your ability to increase your satisfaction in life

Wisdom is something we don’t talk about much. We assume it is acquired over time - that some of us just become wise as we get older. But we can’t expect that we will make more and more wise decisions as we age. Instead, becoming a wise person takes real effort. We need to do the work to examine our biases as well as our stories. We need to look at the people and culture around us and understand it’s impact.?

According to Bush, “wisdom is the pinnacle of cognitive self-mastery, the first pillar of the self-mastery triad.” But what does “wisdom” mean? It is the difference between knowing what is good for you versus living blindly with random goals. Wisdom is practical insight and strategic self-interest.?

Our culture is highly goal-oriented in that it advocates setting and pursuing goals as effectively as possible. But it places much less emphasis on ensuring that one is setting the right goals. - Ryan Bush

This is the reason why wisdom is such a big part of our personal narrative goals. Our job with our personal narratives is to examine stories that shape our lives, and with wisdom, decide which stories are worth keeping, which stories are doing us harm, and where we might be missing stories and need to examine our narratives further.

When working on gaining wisdom, be patient and deliberate. Expect difficulty because difficulty is a sign that you are examining something that really deserves your attention.?

3. Emotional self-mastery is the ability to control one’s own emotional experience

Have you ever thought about mastering your emotions? I bet you did when you were a kid and a grown-up told you how they wanted you to feel like, “Doesn’t it feel great when you act like that?” Or “Stop crying. You’re not hurt.” In both of these instances, the instruction about how to feel came from outside. It didn’t allow for self determination. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Kids need help with their interpretation of emotions in order to learn appropriate ways to deal with them. However, the interpretations also become part of kids’ personal narratives. If they choose to accept the instruction from the grownup, they are choosing to “own” that story.?

Can you think of a time when you were a kid and were given a message regarding your emotions that has shaped your life? Maybe you’ve even passed that message on to the next generation without thinking about the “why” or if it is even useful or accurate?

Later in our lives, once we are adults, it becomes more optional to master our emotions. Hopefully nobody is telling you how to feel any more. If they are, I encourage you to closely examine the nature of that relationship, and if the relationship respects you as an independent, self-determined person. But let’s say that you do you have the ability to look at and master your own emotions. What would that look like?

Bush points out that, according to James Gross, one of the leading researchers in emotion regulation, there are five ways that people effectively control their feelings.

• Choose the situations we enter (situation selection)
• Change those situations once we are in them (situation modification)
• Or only pay attention to the things which make us feel the way we want to feel (attention deployment)
• Change our emotional response through outside stimulation like music, exercise, sleep, or substance use (response modulation)
• Make changes in our minds which allow us to determine our emotional experience from within (cognitive change)

All of these are versions of selecting your own personal narrative, and some of the choices might be more wise than others.?

Mastering the emotional experience can sound a limiting. As if you will reduce your emotional experience if you are in control. However, just the opposite is true. By customizing your emotional experience you are able to fully embrace joy, sadness, anger, or whatever emotion you find or allow yourself to experience. The stability found in mastering your emotions means you can feel them fully without concern that they are going to end too soon or get worse.

4. Every desire we harbor is a potential threat to our contentment and stability

Contentment and stability are wise goals because the ability to remain tranquil and content in spite of our circumstances is foundational for taking the next steps. Even after we’ve examined our lives to optimize wise choices, we still experience desires. Desires can offer seductive rewards, but those rewards might pull us away from, or toward, our goals. As Bush says, “The desires that pull us away from our goals are called temptations. The desires that push us toward our goals are fuel…”?

Desires that are fuel add another layer of complexity, especially if we fail to reach our goal but still have the desire. Take, for example, an aging professional soccer player who’s personal narrative is that his life is unfulfilled because he never played in the World Cup. This previously advantageous desire which motivated him to work hard for a fulfilling and successful career now causes him emotional suffering.

Fortunately, desire modulation and personal narrative modulation are something most of us can do, once we realize it is something we need to do.

The sage desires to have few desires.

- Lao Tzu

Freedom is not achieved by satisfying desire, but by eliminating it.

- Epictetus

Bush states that if we can tame our desires and develop agility at modulating them, in order to want only the right things at any given time, we can leverage them to fuel us toward our goals as effectively as possible.?

Desire and personal narrative can be modulated by deploying one of several methods proposed by a variety of practitioners. We can use things like preoccupation and distraction to down-regulate the strength of a desire, or we can focus on its most negative aspects. We can up-regulate a beneficial desire by focusing on its most positive aspects. Gratitude practices, cognitive behavioral therapy, and mindfulness are other common tools to help deal with desires.?

There are many more methods of desire modulation covered in Designing the Mind. Some of the methods point toward gaining tranquility while others cover learning to use desire modulation for effective motivation.?

5. You are both the protagonist and the audience of your own life

How greatly you appeal to this audience of you determines how much well-being you will have. Living an examined life, striving for wisdom and self-regulation, is one of the great gifts of being human. Designing an ideal lifestyle and ideal actions toward wise goals is the most sure path to a well-lived and satisfying life.?

The opposite situation would be a life in decay. One in which we?seek comfort, and maintain that comfort for as long as we can. One which includes only goals we have already achieved so as to not risk our comfort by taking on goals that might be a big stretch.?

Life stops pushing us forward eventually as adults. Perhaps it even starts pushing us in the opposite direction, for instance the push to “settle down” or “act your age” can put a stop to bold and interesting choices. Once that happens we can accept the decay, sit back and watch life go by, or we can react in the opposite direction by becoming active participants in establishing new goals for ourselves.?

We love comfort. We love state-of-the-art practice facilities, oak-paneled corner offices, spotless locker rooms, and fluffy towels. Which is a shame, because luxury is a motivational narcotic: It signals our unconscious minds to give less effort. It whispers, Relax, you’ve made it. - Daniel Coyle

Self-mastery is achieved by the creative-design process. Most people think it is willpower, but people with the highest self-control aren’t even using willpower. The triad that Bush outlines allows us the ability to completely become the self of our highest vision. Combining behavioral control, cognitive control, and emotional control. For Bush, people who have not questioned the assumption that their external life was all that mattered have failed to live a meaningful life, no matter their external accomplishments. Rather he says to build in your mind “a palace of clarity and peace within you that you can visit any time.”?

Place the development of your mind above all else. Make the psychitectural pursuit your highest priority, and watch your experience, your life, and your being transform. No matter who you are or where you are starting from, know that you have the power to transform … and gain self-mastery. - Ryan Bush, Designing the Mind?

I wish you well in your pursuit of meaningful personal narratives that enhance your life.

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