The stories we tell ourselves

Imagine that you are undertaking a course of study at a university or college. You don’t think of yourself as particularly academic and you haven’t studied seriously before - only at school. You are very apprehensive about the course and wonder whether you will measure up. The first term of the course is very hard, and much harder than you expected. At the end of the term you sit an exam and you do badly. What story do you write to explain this situation?

You could write a self-sabotaging story about how you are not really cut out for academic study. You say to yourself, ‘I did find the course much harder than expected and I performed poorly on the exam, and that was just the easy stuff in the first term. I’m really not looking forward to the second term.’ These thoughts are at the forefront of your mind when you begin the second term and you feel even more anxious and apprehensive than you did when you started the course. Every time you look at the coursework you feel anxious, and so you tend to avoid it – procrastinating. Towards the end of the second term, you have to do another exam, an exam that you haven’t prepared for. Predictably, you do poorly – even worse than you did on the first exam. You think, ‘Well, what’s the point? I tried, didn’t I?’ And you end up dropping out of the course.?

However, what might happen if you were able to tell yourself a slightly different story? What if, for example, you tell the story of yourself as a person who enjoys pushing themselves and trying something new? What if after doing badly in the exam, you say to yourself, ‘Well, that was a wake-up call. If I’m going to do better, I’ll need to think about better ways of studying, and I need to work harder.’ Let’s say that this story spurs you on to make more effort, and by the end of the second term this has paid off and your exam performance and results improve.

But as we have already discovered, our stories are deeply rooted in our family history – so how can we possibly hope to change or edit the stories?

Timothy Wilson and Patricia Linville wondered whether it is possible to edit our stories and whether this might help reduce the level of college dropout in poorly performing students. They felt that if they could somehow help these struggling students to change their perceptions about college – in other words, edit the stories they told about themselves and about college – then their performance might improve. They carried out a very interesting and effective piece of research to test out this idea.

They took a group of first-year college students who were performing poorly and considering dropping out. The students were at a critical stage where they could tell themselves either a story of persisting through adversity or a story of giving up. Wilson and Linville set up a very simple intervention in an effort to help these students edit their internal stories. They gave them some information and statistics that suggested that many college students struggle in the first year and do poorly but often do better and improve? as time goes by. They also showed them videotaped interviews of students saying things like, ‘Oh yeah, I found the first year really tough. I did really badly on the exam. But I got some help and worked hard, and now I’m in the third year and I’m doing well. I’m really glad I stayed.’?

Wilson and Linville also had a control group of randomly assigned students who did not get the intervention. This allowed them to accurately track whether the information and videotapes had made a real difference to whether the students dropped out or not.?

This simple 30-minute intervention was very effective. The researchers found that the students who had been prompted to edit their stories had significantly improved grades and were significantly less likely to drop out of college than the students who had not received intervention. In a sense, the intervention nudged the students into a self-maintaining optimistic mindset (Wilson and Linville, 1982).?

One of the remarkable things about this study is that intervention only took 30 minutes. Traditionally, changing people’s perceptions of the world – the stories they tell themselves about the world – might take many hours of psychological therapy. This study shows that using very quick and simple interventions can make a massive difference to people’s lives."

This is an extract from my book, The Saboteur at Work, available here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Saboteur-Work-Unconscious-Ourselves-Organisations/dp/1032035889/ref=sr_1_1?crid=UVDDDZNA7D5W&keywords=saboteur+at+work&qid=1686056869&sprefix=saboteur+at+work%2Caps%2C93&sr=8-1