Weaving a thread among your purpose, passions, experiences, and interests creates a personal story that inspires your motivation, meaning, and mindset. Unfortunately, many people love the idea of having a personal storyline but feel pressured to define it in a manner that may be too structured or explicit for them and they end up abandoning the idea altogether. Instead of setting unrealistic expectations, view your personal story-capturing experience as nonlinear, flexible, and ever-changing. As you accept more experiences into your repertoire, you will have more colors with which to paint your story on the canvas of your life. And the best part is that there is no wrong way to go about it.
Let’s address some popular questions around personal storytelling and dive into some exercises that will help us along the way.
1 – Can you only have one personal storyline or can you have several?
You can have as many as you need to capture your true self!
For example, if you have one career aspiration in life – to be a doctor, let’s say – you may think of yourself as having one storyline that captures your experience in becoming a doctor. But when you truly break it down, your path toward being a doctor may have involved different types of experiences, such as classes vs. on-the-job training. Or maybe your journey was nonlinear and you tried a different venture first before honing in on one career focus. Even after you consider your entire experience of becoming a doctor, you might remember that you’re not only defined by your career – you are so much more than that. You may love to read or write or knit or watch sports or play video games or practice yoga or redesign your home or bake cookies. Maybe you even join a community in one of those areas that makes up part of your daily happiness – even if work goes poorly, you can come home and relax with an activity in one of those areas or a conversation with someone you met through those endeavors. That’s an important part of your life’s story.
Even then, if you were to draw a line on a piece of paper and map your experiences to your personal story, you would probably draw many branches to capture various passions or directions, vary the length of each line based on length of time, draw dots and other shapes to distinguish among categories, use a different thickness for each branch based on how important it is to you, and find yourself scribbling lines in and out and erasing and redrawing and maybe even putting question marks in some spots. And all of that is perfectly fine. As my high school Chemistry professor used to say, “Nature favors entropy” – in other words, life is random and messy and wild.
These are all parts of the one storyline of your life with different branches or they can all be viewed as separate storylines – a career path, a personal path, a family path, etc. You may appreciate envisioning a tree with many different branches or you may prefer to think of yourself as a forest with many different types of trees within. You can choose how you would like to plot your story, much in the same way you choose how you live it out.
Activity:
Plot your story. Start with a blank piece of paper and draw whatever comes to mind (then adjust it based on how it feels). You may prefer one tree with many branches, or one forest with many trees, or a completely different analogy. Maybe you just want to draw a timeline from left to right and plot your life’s events on it, or maybe you want to draw a huge web and see how different parts of your life connect to others. The structure is totally up to you; the power is in the exercise of drawing it out, which asks you to think about the different parts of your life and how they work together to make you who you are – to tell your story in the way you choose to live it out each day.
2 – How do I know if something is part of my story or just an occurrence?
One question I receive frequently is how to determine your true storyline versus what you may cast off as “just another experience.” In truth, every experience is part of your story! Every thought, emotion, belief, value, attitude, feeling, reaction, interaction, conversation, gesture, setback, and success makes up your being – and comes together to form your unique story. It’s a truly amazing exercise to deconstruct your life and think about at the most basic level, because once you strip away the fluff, you find that every moment of your life is as such because of every moment that came before. (Nature vs. nurture debate aside, we’re focusing on your experiences here. You may believe that fate brings you the story you were meant to live no matter what, but your sheer belief in fate is a result of something in your past, making your story what it is. Mind blown.)
Let’s continue along the idea of plotting your story like a tree with many branches or a forest with many trees. If you are only considering the career part of your life, then you will find yourself weeding through your daily happenings and only plotting the relevant occurrences. You may prefer to segment out your storylines into different “trees” so that you can more clearly see the path of each one. (How very PMO of you.) That technique works great for career pathing or personal development, but don’t forget that we are very complex beings and we are stitched together into one cohesive quilt with many different pieces, each with a different size, shape, pattern, color, and texture. Each square in the quilt may be a different part of your life, but your life can only be viewed holistically when you look at the quilt in its entirety.
In other words, if you are putting everything together on one canvas, things can be segmented out into different categories or storylines if you so choose, but everything on the canvas constructs the overall story that makes you you.
Activity:
In studying emotional intelligence, I learned a self-awareness framework that helps us explore our identity, and I’d love to share that with you here.
Name five roles that you fulfill in life.
Here are mine: Wife, daughter, sister, leader, writer.
(Putting them in order of importance to you will make the next step easier, but if you don’t know the order, you’re about to figure it out!)
Next, take one away.
Uncomfortable but doable, right?
Now, take away another one.
This is getting more difficult.
Now, take away another one.
Ouch – that hurt.
Now, take away another one.
This one might feel impossible.
Our identity is made up of many different roles, relationships, experiences, thoughts, feelings, and storylines. These do change over time – before I got married, while I was still in grad school, “student” was on my life, and “wife” was “fiancé” (or “girlfriend” before that) and was admittedly lower down on the list. When I one day have children, “mother” will be added to the list, and something else will have to go. Thinking about our identity in terms of roles can help us segment out the various subplots within our overarching story.
3 – How often do our personal stories change?
Your story changes every day!
With every experience, you are given a new opportunity to change the course of your story. When events present themselves in your life, you can choose how to react, what to seize, what to let go of, or what to accept. If on a Monday you accept a situation at work that didn’t align with your ideology but you felt pressure to grit your teeth and bare it, that experience is part of your story. Then, say Thursday rolls around and a conversation occurs, and you take it upon yourself to speak up (constructively!) and inspire a change in the route of the project, you have just changed your story. Perhaps the following week you are made a project lead, you are invited to different types of meetings, or you are asked to complete different tasks as a result of the point you brought up in last Thursday’s meeting; as such, your story has changed course again because of your recent experiences. And whether you accept those changes or not will determine yet another step in the building blocks of your story.
Something to note here is that you may be looking for an overarching purpose, so the idea of your personal story changing each day may seem too messy to you. It’s undeniable that our lives are made up of every passing moment, but there’s something else you can do to distinguish between the two – you can define your purpose. Your purpose in life may be to inspire others to learn and grow positively, and this may be manifested in your career as a teacher, your personal activities as a leader of a book club, and your side passion as the owner of a lifestyle blog. Maybe your purpose in life is to help others heal holistically, so perhaps you are striving to achieve certification as a yoga instructor and you want to become a contributor to a spiritual journal. Our purpose tends to drive our story forward and drive the direction of each new branch that sprouts out of the tree of our life as we move through our days. Maybe you have one underlying purpose (which can evolve throughout your life as well, though usually it is fairly stable and tends to change more marginally than dramatically) and many different storylines that support that purpose (as well as a few storylines that don’t have anything to do with the overarching purpose, such as if the doctor in our previous story also participated in a fantasy football league – that activity is not related to his purpose to heal others but is still part of his story).
Activity:
Define your purpose. Write it out as one sentence, using one of these frameworks:
I aim to __(action)__ by __(doing this)__.
I work to cause/inspire __(outcome)__ because __(reason)__.
My purpose is to __(action)__ in order to __(outcome)__.
My __(trait/skill)__ helps me do __(success)__ well.
Spoiler alert: Storyhaven plans to run a training to help people define their purpose and align it with their work. More to come on that soon!
Hopefully the answers to these questions and the related activities to help you experience them for yourself provide some insight into how we can determine, map, and embody the various storylines of our lives in a way that contributes to our happiness and aligns with our deeper values. You may even find yourself consulting your map when making a decision, adding to your map as new experiences occur, or recognizing something in your current story that you want more or less of, proving that awareness can lead to positive action.
Every passing moment makes up every new moment, and every thought we have is a result of every thought that came before; as we live our lives out loud, our stories are made up of all those that came before weaved together with the anticipation of all that is yet to come.
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