Choose Your Story & Change Your Life.
We are constantly making decisions.
The average person makes around 35,000 decisions each day!
…from what to wear, to what to eat, to how to reply in any given conversation.
Of course, there are also big decisions that we all make as well - what to believe, who to marry, where to work, where to live, when to forgive.
Do you know the one thing that every decision has in common?
Whether it’s deciding when to have your first child or if you should upsize that fast food combo meal?
Every decision you make is an emotional decision.
Logical people hate that this is true. Often when I say this, they experience the emotion of anger and then decide to tell me I’m wrong.
That’s my favorite.
(By the way, I am a logical person myself. I am an INTP, the best personality type.)
Decisions are emotional. We then back them up with logic — usually in a split second. Logic can override our emotional decisions, but more often it tends to simply justify them.
All emotions are caused by the stories we believe — especially the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
If a person sees their story as being primarily a victim, then they will emotionally respond as a victim and make decisions as a victim.
If someone sees their story as primarily a helper, then then they will respond and make decisions that way.
There are all sorts of primary stories out there.
领英推荐
Maybe you can think of someone you know who fits one of these:
On and on and on…we all tell ourselves something about who we are in the world.
This isn’t bad!
It’s how we learn to survive and cope with life.
It’s only bad when we aren’t self-aware enough to know that we are doing it.
Once we are self-aware, we can process the world very differently.
We can say to ourselves, “I know I have cultivated a story that I am the fun person, but today for my sake and the sake of my family I need to be more serious.”
Or we can say things like, “I know that I have valid reasons to see my story as that of a victim, but it’s no longer serving me to get to where I want to go in life. I am going to tell myself a better, equally true, story about who I am.”
Working on our inner story has an immediate effect on our daily lives because it goes to the center of how we experience emotions. This, in turn, changes the decisions we make.
So, if you had to pick something today, what would you say is your default primary story that you tell yourself about yourself?
How is it serving you?
Do you need to adjust it to get to a place of more freedom?
Is there a better story to be told?
I write daily at https://calledforadventure.com. I only post weekly here on Linkedin. You can sign up for free there to receive daily emails about finding your unique calling and living a great adventure.