What story are you telling yourself?

So, here’s a pretty mundane scenario—perhaps even one you’ve experienced.  Say you are competing with two of co-workers for a promotion.  You ‘just know’ from the beginning that you’re not going to get it, so you put in minimal effort (which you may or may not perceive as such).

One of your competitors is just a special person—everyone can see it.  She is upbeat, in excellent shape, takes on leadership roles whenever possible, has an inspiring personality and a winning smile.  You look at her as the embodiment as everything you wish you were, and whenever she is around, you unconsciously find yourself shrinking down to make more room for her brilliance—yet when you’re home alone later on eating chips and watching some dumb old Sonic cartoon from your childhood as a way to ‘turn your brain off’ (not me… okay?  I have never, ever done that before…), you find yourself incredibly resentful of this person.  You start wishing that they would just get some really serious illness so that they could ‘drop out’ and not be around anymore—and then you promptly proceed to beating yourself up for having such awful thoughts.

‘I really am trash,’ you say to yourself as you shove another pringle into your mouth.  Meanwhile, Dr. Robotnik still can’t defeat that speedy blue hedgehog and his two-tailed friend…

Your other competitor, however, seems perfectly fine and unfazed by the fact that she is competing with a literal shining star.  She still smiles, still shows up, and still puts in as much effort as possible… and in a stunning turn of events (stunning for you, anyway)—she actually gets the promotion.

You go home that night and mull it over in your head—you feel a bit of a sense of relief at first that it wasn’t ‘Ms. Perfect’ who got it—the coworker who did get promoted is a genuinely nice person who you can’t really hate.  But you’re incredibly confused about how they could not pick Ms. Perfect—it is self-evident, at least to you, that she is the embodiment of all that is good and right in the world.  The one thing you’re not confused about, however, is why you didn’t get it.  Of course you didn’t.  You’re a piece of nothing.

Back to the potato chips and the TV you go.

But wait… what is it exactly that makes you and the person who actually got the promotion so different?  She seems to be ‘made of the same stuff’ as you, yet she is able to remain calm and happy and doesn’t give in to envy.

This, my friends, is all about stories.  From our limited perspectives, we never know the full story—so we tell ourselves stories in our mind to make meaning out of what we see.

We often tell ourselves the stories that will best protect our egos—but this, in turn, can hurt us—our entire person—because we are more than ego.  How exactly does the story that your co-worker is perfect and you are trash protect your ego?  Well, as you start to dig deeper, you may see that what you are actually doing is placing yourself squarely into a victim role.  And when you are in a victim role—one that you have zero control over—you don’t have to take any sort of responsibility for the things that go wrong in your life.  Not to mention you may actually gain a sense of moral superiority for having endured so much hardship.

This type of story keeps us blind to the things that we can actually do to bring about the things that we say we want so badly, such as success, good relationships, or fulfillment in life.

When we start to see our ‘stories’ as just that—merely a perspective that is limited (none of us as individuals have the capacity to see the ‘whole truth’), we begin to realize that we can and should change our stories to ones that are more helpful.  I generally stray away from using the words ‘true’ and ‘false’, because usually both our negative and positive stories contain bits of truth mixed with loads of embellishment and speculation.  But we can tell ourselves stories that are more conducive to reaching the goals we want to achieve.

The story in the mind of the co-worker who got promoted may have gone something like, ‘I am going to focus on what I can control and will try to put in as much effort as possible.  And even if I don’t get the promotion, I know that I am still okay because my value comes simply from being human.  And I can always learn from it and try again next time’.

When you tell yourself a story like that, you will be able to better handle the difficult challenges that life can throw at you—because life is hard already.  Don’t add to your own suffering by needlessly being a bully to yourself.

And yes, it is certainly okay to wind down sometimes with a can of pringles and a cartoon, if that is your thing 😊