Stories As Scaffolding

It’s my job to help leaders become more conscious. Whatever the intentions of the day, that’s the goal. If not, they are working with someone else.?

The approach is as unique as each person, but stories are always the way in. How someone tells a story… what they go on and on about… what they omit... what they are afraid of. It doesn’t take long to see where the greatest challenges live.?

Here’s the problem, though:

No matter how conscious any of us might be, we still need an identity to roam around the planet with others, and our stories are the scaffolding that holds up our identities. If we dismantle our story scaffolding too soon, or too much, or too anything, we are in trouble.?

Learning that a powerful story isn’t true can make us question all of our stories.

How do we know anything is true at all? Is our life a house of cards? Since we cling to our most deeply ingrained and long-standing stories (good and bad), deconstructing an important story can be downright scary.?

Unless the identity is solid enough to withstand losing important stories (meaning there has been a lot of inner story work already), we who help bring consciousness to stories have to be sure we are ready to replace an unhelpful story with a helpful one.?

So even though I’m in the business of putting our unhelpful stories out of business, part of my job is to discover more helpful ones to replace them with. Those won’t be completely true either (no story is true at the highest levels of consciousness), but they should feel more true than the ones we are dismantling. At a minimum, when we move from unhelpful stories to helpful ones, we begin to see that all stories are malleable.?

This is not quick work, but over time, it is life-changing.?

The first step, naturally, is to excavate our unhelpful stories. (Not, by the way, stories about what is wrong with us, but about what is wrong with the way we are holding a story. At least that's my style.)

When we move from being critical to being a visionary who can see a brighter future in detail, as an example, we can begin to work on the visionary work instead of the background “I’m a critical jerk” self-talk. Interestingly, this almost always leads to - you guessed it - acting less like a critical jerk.?

Moving a story from being a soft pushover to being a kind and generous person who has not yet learned boundaries, we can drop the disempowering identity to focus on acting with effective kindness. When we move from thinking we aren’t able to learn a new skill to recognizing all the new skills we have learned just this year, we can begin to deconstruct how we learn and perhaps adjust our story to one where we learn differently.?

It's Storytelling 101. Even so, many working with consciousness miss this critical step in any transformative story shift.

Eventually, with great levels of consciousness, we will realize that we don’t need a story at all. We can show up, be ourselves, do what we do, solve any present-moment problems, forget the rest, and go about our business.?

Until then, I’ll have a job.?If you are in the business of bringing greater consciousness to others, so will you.

(100% human written by me, Robin Rice.)

Before you go:

Last week I very soft-launched the early bird free offer to get my latest audio book of Stories About Stories (Chapters 1 & 2) at BeWhoYouAre.com before the podcast comes out. When you sign up, you’ll also get my Sunday Story Prompts by email, also free. This way, you can learn to unpack your stories alongside mine. I’ll be honest, this book-as-podcast won’t be for everyone. It’s tough going emotionally at first (great for those who feel alone in their struggles or have had a difficult early start) and then highly mystical once my own story of awakening arrives. But if those kinds of things are your jam, please join me.