How to tell yourself a better story

Article by Adam Klein , Managing Partner and Faculty member at New Ventures West

What is life about? Yours, others, and what is to be you??

What are you concerned about??

What help do you need?

What joy did you experience today? What sorrow?

What other internal experiences did you have?

What events happened today?

In what ways were you impacted?

Which of these questions is easy to answer? Difficult?

When was the last time you sat down with a good question??

What has you be you?

What happens when difficulty arises? What do you wish to happen when difficulty arises?

What happens when joy, however small, arises? What do you wish to happen?

What question would you like to ask yourself?

What story do you have about yourself? Your life?

What story could invite you into you?

In coaching, one of the ways we interact with clients is through questions. Some like the above, and many others.?

When we bring a catalyzing question forward, more than an answer arises. We arise.?

As we—our heart, mind, and body—meet the question, a process begins in which our current, implicit understanding is asked to meet this container that is a question.?

As we answer, we fill into that container, unfurling and unfolding in ways we didn’t know we were capable of. It is the implicit becoming more explicit—but not completely so.?

The limitation of understanding

We’re in an age of bringing background influences into the foreground (e.g., economic and geo-political influences on inflation, the body’s way of storing our lived experience and influencing our current behaviors) and trying to dissect them.

Trying to understand the nature of them and pin them down—all toward a pre-set destination of changing them in a particular way.

It is that predetermined outcome that can become a limiting factor—a container too small.?

For example, maybe we have an unconscious, routinized way of reacting in difficult conversations.?

We want to understand why this is so it can be fixed—in other words, we want to respond in some other defined way. Here, we are looking to intentionally shape a response, which in and of itself is fine.?

The limitation, however, comes from missing what else could transpire.?

What if, rather than directing our behavior in a particular way in difficult conversations, we instead met it with nourishing inquiry, contactful presence, and a supportive living structure, allowing ourselves to morph into what comes??

It could be that we begin to embody a different way of responding to difficult conversations and experience ourselves as a new kind of person:

Someone whose spaciousness alters conversations altogether.??

Practice and ritual

I pose that development and growth are far more mysterious and endlessly implicit than simply making sense of our responses.?

What might help more is creating or discovering containers large enough to allow what was hidden below the surface to emerge into view—bringing with it the hidden gems that live just beyond what we can comprehend cognitively.?

One such container is practice and ritual.?

We can take up a sitting meditation or centering prayer practice in which we regularly spend 20-30 minutes once or twice per day at the mercy of the practice.?

It is the longevity and fidelity to the practice over a long time horizon that offers a space vast enough for the emergence I’m speaking about.?

In this openness, our inner inhibiting structures begin to loosen or dissolve, allowing more of our essence to come forward in all its texture and fragrance.?

Another container—one I’d like to emphasize as particularly pertinent to our times—is story.?

In our postmodern world, the narratives we once relied on to weave a thread of consistency are being pulled apart.?

In many ways this is a process of unwrapping both the hidden and known harms these stories have caused many peoples over time. Turning toward this unraveling can be the beginning of healing—and we need it.?

However, what is lost is a sense of cohesion, the larger frame that the story or narrative held. In its place, we look to name things—to codify and categorize and, in some way, make sense so we can move forward.?

All of this can be helpful, and what I see happening in that effort is the loss of mystery and possibility. The naming of things can too often come with a certainty (or be imbued with a desire for certainty) that makes the container for us to live into too small.?

As a result, our response—or we ourselves—become too small.?

In our endeavors to make sense of what is happening in our world and in our experience, I am inviting us to include space for the unknown.?

After all, we can only see and understand so far, and so may we allow room in whatever stories we tell for the unexpected to arise.?

Not only is that a way of creating bigger containers, but it is also a catalyst or impulse for unbounded unfolding.?

Getting Practical

Embark on two to three from the following list to help facilitate your own development of a larger container.?

• Reflect on Questions: Take time to reflect on the questions posed at the beginning of this article. Consider journaling your responses to gain insights into your concerns, joys, sorrows, and internal experiences.
• Embrace Flexibility in Responses: When facing difficulties, experiment with approaching them with nourishing inquiry, contactful presence, and a supportive living structure rather than seeking predetermined solutions.
• Explore Your Story: Reflect on the narratives that shaped your life. Explore how they were helpful and limiting. Begin imagining and writing a story that is larger, more encompassing of who you want to become.

An additional suggestion is, over the next few months, structure regular time to engage with one or more of the following artforms.

By doing so you create rituals that supports you grounding, opening, softening, and presencing yourself so as to encounter them freshly and with impressionability.?

Some examples, varying in length of time and experience given as possibilities and ideas include:

• Jazz music. Places to start: “A Love Supreme” by John Coltrane, “Ella in Berlin” by Ella Fitzgerald
• Epic novels. A few suggestions: Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien, Third Body Problem by Liu Cixin, Taduno’s Song by Odafe Atogun
• Visual art. For inspiration: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Soheila Sokhanvari
• Movies. Recommendations: Contact (1997), Waking Life (2001)

Go deeper with Integral Coaching

A core tenet of Integral Coaching is cultivating the capacity to be more present. This opens the possibility to bring our abilities, talents, and uniqueness more powerfully into the full range of our life.?

Want to go deeper? Connect with us and experience how Integral Coaching supports you by signing up for our emails .

From its humble beginnings to one of the top accredited coaching schools in the world, New Ventures West pioneered one of the deepest, most transformative forms of human development available for coaches, leaders, and anyone looking to bring people alive in possibility.?