Love Your Story: Stories and discussions about personal growth, mindset and living with intention

Today we kick off a month of adventure interviews; stories with adventurers about their feats and stories.

Interview with the Higgenbotham brothers (twins)

The Higgenbotham twins are lifeguards from Southern California, endurance athletes, and surfers. Deciding, on a handshake, to undertake the adventure of a lifetime, the two brothers set out to prone paddleboard, using only their hands to propel them, from Alaska to Mexico, down the entire West coast of the United States – 2200 miles, in 2016. A feat never before done, the two experienced, cold, deprivation, broken boards, lost equipment, storms, the kindness of strangers, and moments where they made life affirming decisions. Join me for the live interview with the Higgenbothams after their completion of their trek, and to hear some of their stories.

Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Story power serves you best when you know how to use it.

For more information on the Higgenbothams and this trek you can check out their website:

www.northamericanpaddle.com

Otherwise, they say the best place to find them is “on the water.”

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Story power serves you best when you know how to use it.  Today we’re taking a quick visit to the stories we tell ourselves and how these create our entire reality. Let me start with a story:

When I was 10 years old my mom and dad went out for the evening and I was put in charge of babysitting my younger brothers and sister. There were 4 of us. It was dark outside and we were getting ready for bed when suddenly there was a knock on the front door. Who was it? There was no peephole and we looked back and forth at one another. We whispered little questions like “do you know who it is?” “was someone supposed to come over?” “what if it’s a murderer?”  Our body language and big eyes perpetuated the story that there was something to be afraid of.  I, the one in charge, also created fear with my own fear.  Our little kid stories of being alone in a house after dark with the unknown on the other side of the door took over our young minds. We ran, all of us, into my bedroom and hid under the comforter on my bed. The four of us hunkered under the covers, eyes wide.

When the rap, rap, rap came on the door again…the fear escalated, but I felt someone needed to answer it.  I was babysitting, so I felt it was my role to assign someone to answer the door.  I pointed at my sister, and with a sweep of my finger I assigned her the task of answering the door. She shook her head no, and so I pulled out the threats…”You go answer the door or I’m going to punch you in the nose,” I demanded.

Her fear of what was behind the door was more powerful than her fear of me, but I had to follow through, so I pulled back my fist and punched her in the nose. She started bleeding and crying and the energy escalated to the next notch. Now there was blood AND fear, and yelling, but no one answered the door.  The four of us lay there, under the covers, yelling at each other and refusing to budge until my parents came home and we could run into the safety of their arms.

There is a mechanism in our minds that creates gratitude, happiness, unhappiness, envy, joy or jealousy, fear or peace.  Not many of us pay too much attention to this mechanism, despite the fact that it is working all the time, in everyone alive on this planet.

It is the stories we tell ourselves all day long, every day, about every interaction we have, about ourselves, about our friends, about our spouses, about the things that happen to us! By calling them stories I am not giving them a value of true or false, rather I am acknowledging that they are narrative interpretations we create about our experiences to make sense of our lives.

Ryan Clarkin, one of my favorite life coaches said, “The most powerful stories we’ll ever tell are those we tell to ourselves.”

I asked him to go into more detail about this topic, for this episode – here’s Ryan…

–To hear Ryan’s message, listen to the audio version of the podcast.

Let me share some examples of how we create stories:

The resulting response from the person telling these stories is obvious – If you are telling yourself you’re ugly every day, you will no doubt go out into the world full of self-doubt, most likely more withdrawn and less outgoing as you strive to go unnoticed. If you tell yourself the repeated story of your lazy good-for-nothin spouse your treatment and attitude toward your spouse will be very different than if you are creating a caring space for them at the end of the day. It also changes their response to you and the outcome of your stories. These stories change everything about how you interact with the world and the people around you – how you see the world. In fact, these stories create your world.

We create stories to define our existence. We create stories to make sense of the things that happen to us. We create stories to share our live events with each other. In my master’s research, I studied the functions of the personal narrative, and there are a litany of functions – we use them to teach – like when a speaker in church shares a story about how helping a neighbor made a big difference in the neighbor’s life. We tell stories to warn, like when we tell someone about the time we got in a car with a bunch of people we didn’t know in Europe and ended up in places previously unimagined, and are lucky we didn’t end up in the bottom of river somewhere or as part of the sex slave trade. We tell stories to share awe like the story about climbing to the peak to watch the sunset and the resulting transcendent experience. We tell stories to create boundaries clearly laying the story about how the last guy that tried to grab your ass got slapped. We tell stories to brag in an acceptable way – like when I tell the story about climbing the Grand Teton in one night – it’s a mix of look what I did as well as a great story. I could go on and on….but the key here is that we CREATE the stories – the perspectives and angles, even in the retelling we create the scene, the moral, the meaning.  Now, most of the time they are our best attempt at honest creations, but they are definitely created from a chosen perspective and the reality is that we have the ability to change our perspectives, on all our stories,  in order to be happier.

We are the Gods of our stories. We are the creators who define who we are and what we will do and where we will go. There are a lot of stories going on around us. The story we create every day as our narrative of living unfolds. The stories other people create, about themselves and about us, and about the world. But the very most powerful stories, for which we have complete control, are the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves.  The stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, define the potentiality of our existence and the reality of our experience.

If you wake up in the morning and you remind yourself that it’s going to be a fantastic day and you are looking good, feeling good, and bent on creating some love in the world today. You’re going to be heading out, starting ripples in the story of life that will create beautiful things. This is just the start of your day’s story.

If you start out the day with the voice in your head, –that sounds like fact by-the-way—focusing on your insecurities, creating stories that you’re not enough, you’re too fat, you’re too old, you’re too short, your friends don’t really respect you… well, you can see the difference. The day starts/the story starts, according to the way you let it start. You get to create your reality.

Zen Habits website – suggests 3 steps for learning to get away from the stories we are hooked on. I’ve taken their suggestions and mixed them with my own experience and understanding of the process – here are my two-cents:

First step: Start noticing the stories you are creating about the events that go on in your day, and the people you interact with. START NOTICING.

It’s important to become aware that they are stories you are creating and to notice how they are affecting your happiness or unhappiness. Notice when you get stuck on a story and it plays over and over in your head. Notice the power that creates within you.  What story are you creating right now about your current situation: Is it critical and fault finding, or are you finding the good and the positive going on around you? Just notice the story.

Second step: What can you do? 1. Consider the story as an option – a filmy possibility, a dream possibility – one way of telling it. 2. Then, consider another option in how you might tell or frame the story. What are other ways of looking at it, other possible perspectives? Is your interpretation really a fact? Did you boss really say he hated your work or did you just interpret his foul mood that way?

Third step: Don’t react. Sit with the story, don’t cling to it. Don’t lash out – even if you’re caught up in the story. Just be aware of the moment and story as it is without interpretation. This allows you to just be with it and be less attached to it. When you can get to a place of accepting possible options openly consider which story serves you best. Which story approach creates happiness for you and those around you? Then choose the story approach that serves you. This is not about ignoring reality or sticking your head in the sand, it’s about realizing the power of your own mental creations to create your world and your experience, and then choosing how to create it.

The Love Your Story podcast had its roots in the fact that I had let the events of my life create a space of shame about how my life seemed to have turned out. I wanted to find out if other’s lives had turned out as they expected, and my preliminary qualitative doctorate research indicated that 19 out of 20 people’s lives had NOT turned out as they expected.

Life is messy, across the board, and that’s okay – but there is a mental badassery in actively creating your life story; in actively reframing the parts of your story that feel broken and hold you back; actively seeking to create your best story and actively loving yourself and your story, because you can!

Questions: 1. What stories have you made up about yourself? – Remember, you’re going to think these are facts. Let me ask it this way – What do you say to yourself when you look in the mirror? When you think about doing something new? When you think about you?

We can create stories that generate fear, that paralyze us, like my brother’s and sisters and I did.  The poor harmless neighbor standing on the other side of the door had no idea the ruckus they had caused that night 35 years ago. It was probably someone coming to say hello to my mother, or someone checking in on us, but through our words and our body language, we created a story about the situation that quickly turned to fear, violence, and chaos. Or we can create stories that empower us, that help us conquer the world and whatever small part of it we inhabit – and by conquer the world I mean the worlds of fear, of lack, of judgment, of shame, of not-enough that are a part living this thing we call life. To me, that’s what I see as conquering the world because once we have conquered the limitations and stories that create a limited and sad world for ourselves, we have indeed conquered our own world.

 When I created the Love Your Story podcast, that’s what I had in mind. Opening conversations about topics that will help us to create our very best life stories – because we can. We ARE THE CREATORS OF OUR STORIES.

Thanks for tuning in today. If you haven’t already, please subscribe, rate and review the podcast. And, if you’re interested in one of our new – top notch t-shirts, they are available now on the website. Also your challenge for the week –Everyday this week try to get super aware of one of your stories and run through the 3 steps mentioned in this podcast. The more you practice, the more aware you become, and the more you gain the badass skill of creating your biggest, best and most satisfying life stories on purpose. See you next week on the LYS podcast – oh ya, and share this with a friend – spread some good in the world.

References

Mental Badassery: becoming Aware of the Stories We Tell Ourselves; Leo Babauta; zenhabits.net/narrative/

Interview with Rob Holmes – Founder and Chief Strategist of GLP Films

How to Identify Your Next Great Story

Welcome back to the Love Your Story podcast! Today we are back in business interview land where we talk with professionals who have learned the true value of story in business, and they share their knowledge and ideas with us on how to use story in our professional spaces.

Today we get to talk with Rob Holmes – the Founder and Chief Strategist of GLP Films, the leading content marketing agency dedicated to authentic storytelling and digital content strategy within the travel and outdoor industry.  Robs authentic approach to storytelling helps his clients identify and develop the best way to grow their business, and usually, that’s by helping them tell their story. He has a diverse background in multimedia production, conservation, marketing, and entrepreneurship. Rob has spearheaded partnerships with global travel brands including international and domestic tourism boards in Peru, Mexico, Chile, to name a few. He’s created partnerships with media publications like National Geographic and Travel and Leisure. Rob holds an MBA from the University of Washington in International Business, Marketing, and Environment Management.

So, with that introduction, stay tuned for my discussion with Rob about HOW TO IDENTIFY YOUR NEXT GREAT STORY.

Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Story power serves you best when you know how to use it.

Listen to the podcast to hear my discussion with Rob and get his tips for finding your next great story.

For more information on Rob Holmes and GLP Films:

Watch the full Mina Guli film: www.glpfilms.com/mina-film

Website: www.glpfilms.com

Youtube: www.youtube.com/greenlivingproject

Facebook: www.facebook.com/glpfilms

Instagram: www.instagram.com/glpfilms

Twitter: www.twitter.com/glpfilms

Interview with Star Coulbrooke the Poet Laureate of Logan, Utah.

Our life stories are poetry in the making.

Poetry is story at its most distilled; story where every word matters; story rich in image and sound and power. Today I am excited to introduce Star Coulbrooke, Poet Laureate for the City of Logan, Utah, she is also the co-founder and coordinator of Helicon West, a bi-monthly open readings venue. She is published in literary magazines and anthologies, her poems are also available in chapbooks, notably Thin Spines of Memory and Walking the Bear. Star is also the director of the Utah State University Writing Center.  Poetry is a genre that is close to my heart. I have written poetry since I was a child, so I’m especially excited to discuss how poetry and story align. Stay tuned for our interview with Star – a wisp of a woman with spiky red hair who has a story you won’t want to miss.

Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee and I’m excited about for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. The power of story serves you best when you know how to use it.

Listen to the podcast to get the details of the discussion with Star.

To contact Star Coulbrooke:

[email protected]

Send requests for the Poet Laureate to Diane Buist [email protected] the USU English Department media specialist. Or, to Joseph Anderson [email protected]  the Logan Library adult literature director. Or, Teresa Harris[email protected] –the Logan City recorder–for posting on the Facebook sites they maintain for the Logan City Poet Laureate. 

Poets take language and weave it into a story that explores the dark corners, the emotional epiphanies, the roller coaster ride of living and dreaming, and the mundane.  Poets weave truth, imaginings, blessings, and riots of color. They weave the raw, the vulnerable, the real,  and then they sleep on it and start again in the living of their own stories and watching the world and the stories unfolding all around us.

David Carradine said, “If you can’t be the poet, be the poem.”  Your challenge for this week is to live poetically or maybe find a moment to sit down and put some of your thoughts on paper. I find when I write and write, unedited, that I find poetry as I sift through the words.  You are a poem. Your life story is a poetry all its own. You can write it out to make sense of it – very therapeutic, or you can just keep on living the richness, the simpleness, the greatness of each smile, each moment of gratitude, each brave moment of acceptance and daring, each small and poetic tear and tantrum, each day in your own way. Have fun creating your story this week. Share this podcast – subscribe, rate and review! Thanks for listening.

Episode 51: A Political Story about the newly designated Bear’s Ears National Monument and those who are willing to fight for its survival.

For contact information for Utah senators, go to: http://senate.utah.gov/

When President Obama designated the Bears Ears National Monument he gave the following speech – The White House; Office of the Press Secretary.

Today, I am designating two new national monuments in the desert landscapes of southeastern Utah and southern Nevada to protect some of our country’s most important cultural treasures, including abundant rock art, archeological sites, and lands considered sacred by Native American tribes.  Today’s actions will help protect this cultural legacy and will ensure that future generations are able to enjoy and appreciate these scenic and historic landscapes. Importantly, today I have also established a Bears Ears Commission to ensure that tribal expertise and traditional knowledge help inform the management of the Bears Ears National Monument and help us to best care for its remarkable national treasures.

Following years of public input and various proposals to protect both of these areas, including legislation and a proposal from tribal governments in and around Utah, these monuments will protect places that a wide range of stakeholders all agree are worthy of protection. We also have worked to ensure that tribes and local communities can continue to access and benefit from these lands for generations to come.

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For the state of Utah this has caused great controversy between government officials, Utah citizens, visiting tourists, outdoor recreationalists and industry professionals, and Native American Tribes. Listen to the whole podcast for real interviews with those who took to the streets to declare their support for public lands in an attempt to get the Utah governor and other Utah government officials who are opposed to it, to understand that there are many people who want the designation to remain; people who support public lands and the beauty and history the designation protects for generations to come.

Creating our stories is something we do on a personal level. It’s also something we do on the big picture level. It’s those who dare to fight for the things they believe in, the heroes that stand up against the antagonists to create the world they believe should exist that determine how that world evolves. This podcast episode talks to some of those people who are out creating life stories backed by their ethics, principles, and sense of adventure.

How to Reframe Your Difficult Stories: 5 Part Workshop Series: Step 5– The Final Reframe

At any given moment you have the power to say, “This is NOT how the story is going to end.” Join us today as we discuss the 5th and final step in reframing the chapters of your story that feel broken. Today we’ll put all the previous steps together to come to the final reframing of your story. Get ready to rewrite the broken chapters for good.

Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Story power serves you best when you know how to use it.

If you are just popping into this episode, I suggest you go back and listen to episodes 46 through 49 before moving onto this one. There are five steps in the process to reframing the chapters of your life that feel broken, or shameful, or you’re just not okay with them. This is the 5th and final step. The step where everything from the previous 4 steps is brought together to help you create your final reframing and advanced understanding of your story. So, if you haven’t you’ll want to listen to the previous 4 episodes, each one dedicated to one of the steps. Now for step #5 – the actual reframe

Reframing is looking at a story or event in our lives through a different frame of understanding: hence, the RE frame. Often we are very stuck in our own interpretation of our stories, despite the fact, as we discussed in step 4, that there are many ways to interpret a situation. We see things only as we see things and it’s a process to discover other options. When I was doing the work to reframe my stories, I could not see another way to interpret the things that had happened to me. It took another person to help me see what I couldn’t see on my own.

In 2010, in The Huffington Post, Lifestyle Blog, Racheal Freed posted a blog post titled “The Importance of Telling our Stories.”  She tells a story from her life journey and why she feels it’s important to tell our stories. She also had a friend help with her reframe. (quick note – sometimes this in NOT a one person job because we are so stuck in our story. This is where you may need a coach or the right friend or a therapist)

Let me tell her story in her words:

“The first morning after arriving in Tunis, Oct. 1, 2010, my two sister travelers and I ventured deep into the Tunis Medina (an ancient walled city) to visit the home where I lived some 44 years ago. (At the time, my then-husband and I were New Peace Corps volunteers, and we “inherited” this palace of a 19th-century minister from Peace Corps architects who’d lived there during their service.)

In our first week in Tunisia, during September 1966, we made our way, with great naïveté and some trepidation, into the hills of the romantic blue and white Mediterranean coastal town to negotiate a lease for this house with its owner, a shrewd old patriarch. We were served tea, our new language skills were tested, and the rent was agreed upon — exactly what the old man asked for.

The house, traditionally built, was completely invisible from the street except for its tall, arched doorway and decorative door. Its rooms were designed on three sides of an interior courtyard. Its arched plaster ceilings, lavishly sculpted in plaster was hung with ornate crystal chandeliers, and the lower halves of the interior walls were encrusted with tiles set in colorful geometric patterns.

Its 30-square-foot, marble-paved courtyard had its own well; its walls were tile-decorated and its windows to the interior rooms protected and ornamented in painted metal grill work. This was a space made for entertaining and displaying its ancient Muslim architectural tradition!

Our first “reception” was a coffee and croissant breakfast for 80 to 100 people on Thanksgiving morning of 1966. Peace Corps volunteers from Massachusetts and California and those working in Tunis were invited along with the American Ambassador and other American officials to meet and greet young Senator Ted Kennedy and John Tunney, the boxer’s son and House of Representatives member, as they traveled North Africa.

Back from memory to my 2010 journey: A taxi deposited us on the street. We walked a short distance and turned onto my narrow, unpaved street. I found the huge door at #14 and entered its dark corridor that led to our door. My heart was racing, my long-anticipated visit laced with fears that the house had been left uncared for and had fallen to ruin, that no one would be at home to answer the door, that my long-forgotten language skills would not be persuasive enough for us to be allowed in, or that the house, in reality, would not be as I remembered it.

It felt strange for there to be so much light at the end of the dark corridor I remembered. I reached its end and turned right to knock on the door, but there was no door, just a gaping opening — the light was not from my fondly remembered courtyard. There was nothing there!

What had been was no longer there and was, in 2010, an open field filled with three-foot-high weeds, some plastic bottles and trash. The outer walls were somewhat intact surrounding this weedy lot and on them were markings where outer wall arches had once been. Not a tile, not a remnant of plaster sculpture, not a piece of marble. There were no remains.

I stood amidst the weeds, stunned, paralyzed into complete silence and disbelief. My memory held all these years, my beloved Ben Mustapha home of beauty and place of welcome to so many, was gone. Collapsing into the arms of my fellow volunteer, friend and traveler, I wept…

When I returned home, my closest friend listened to my story. She said it reminded her of what concentration camp survivors must have experienced when they returned home after World War II to find their old reality gone, just a memory. This jolted me to begin to put my experience into perspective. My heart opened beyond myself. I felt compassion as I considered the many millions over centuries who have lost their homes and way of life because of wars and catastrophes as recent as those in Darfur, in the Gulf after Katrina, in Port-au-Prince after the earthquake, from tsunamis and floods all over the planet.

And what have I gained by sharing my story? The ability to see beyond it. To notice that I’m not the only one who experiences disappointment and loss. I feel deeper compassion for those sustaining great losses. My respect for human resiliency has grown, as has my commitment to help people who must start over completely after devastating loss: rebuilding lives, homes, and hope.”

The five steps of reframing your story allow you to step onto a path and start a process in a healthy and healing way, taking it one step at a time. It’s a process designed to specifically assist in dealing with our difficult stories. This final step: the reframe, is actually the combination of all the pieces you have created with the following four steps: If you have fully accepted, releasing any shame, your story to be what it is no matter how much you wish it was different. If you have claimed it and allowed it to be, then you are prepared to be able to tell it, out loud, in words, in a safe place. Saying it aloud, with less cringing, with the acceptance from the previous step, the story loses some of its hold on you. Bringing it into the light naturally does that. Once you have completed those two steps, and it may take a little time, you then start the work of finding the meaning behind the experience. With this meaning there is something beyond pain and disappointment that come from our most difficult experiences. We figure out what that is, and often the great power in this step is that we begin to see the strength and power, the growth and the beauty rise from the ashes. After step three when we can see some of the gold being sifted out from the dross, we move on to the fourth step, and maybe the most difficult, of taking apart our lenses and the truth about the way we interpret things and the ways others may have been interpreting events, and reconsidering that our interpretation is not necessarily fact, but that there are other ways and perspectives available and probable, and perhaps that understanding can help you find the new frame. Step five is the process of putting them all together, getting clear on what your reframe looks like. From here, I suggest writing it down or recording it so that you can reset in your heart and mind.

An article in Inc. magazine says that those who write things out by hand have better recall and conceptual understanding of the material.  Research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer demonstrates that students who write out their notes on paper actually learn more. Across three experiments “Those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who took notes with their laptops.”

When you are trying to reprogram a long held story and carefully guarded story there can be great power in the process of rewriting it – flushing it out in the new frame, and in words rather than just ideas.

Step five is taking all the previous work you’ve done and synthesizing it into the final reframe that serves you in a more productive way. For me, shifting from looking at my life as broken, because it didn’t live up to the expectations within my religious teachings, or within what felt like acceptable and respectable bounds culturally, me coming to peace with it because I could look at what I had gained and how that had made me better instead of broken, it changed everything. Instead of shame and embarrassment, there was acceptance and realization of the process of living – like the making of a pearl – when an irritant, an invader into the mollusk becomes covered in lacre, layer after layer, a valuable item of beauty is created. This frame allowed me to find an inner peace, to share my story more openly when needed, to accept myself and my life path rather than constantly wonder how in the hell I got here.

Your reframe may be like Rachael’s where you gain an insight into life that deepens your understanding in deep and beautiful ways and helps to change the world through your efforts in new ways. It may be like mine where most important was the move to loving my story with all its broken parts as well as its extravagant blessings and joys. Your reframe gets to be what it is to you, but if it provides a way to love and accept your journey or yourself and moves you toward loving your story in any way, then it’s worth every effort, because the stories we tell to ourselves, about ourselves, determine who we become. Determine our own confidence, our own peace, our interactions with the world and the good we do. This work is important!

Martha Beck, renowned life coach said, “No part of your experience is wasted. Everything you’ve experienced so far is part of what you were meant to learn.”

I hope you have enjoyed and found value in these five steps. I would love to hear how the process goes for you, what you need continued guidance in, and suggestions and ideas you come up with during your process. Please go to www.loveyourstorypodcast.com and hit up the Contact Us page. We want to hear from you. And, stay tuned for coming episodes where we listened to you and are bringing in more stories, as told by those who lived them. See you in the next episode.

How to Reframe Your Difficult Stories: 5 Part Workshop Series: Step 4– Changing Lenses

A farmer stood with his dog overlooking his fields. Behind them in the grasses peered a small brown rabbit, and above flew a lark. The farmer looked across the field and saw cows, milk, provisions for his family, a new car. The dog saw frustration because wild things could so easily hide and escape his chase. The rabbit saw security. To the lark flying overhead, the field was home.

While we may all be looking at the same thing, standing in the same story, the lenses we look through to interpret that story are vastly different for everyone. Join us today as we discuss the fourth step in reframing your story – understanding lenses, and being willing to swap them out every now and again.

Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Story power serves you best when you know how to use it.

Today we are on the 4th podcast episode in a 5-part series: The 5 Steps to Reframing a Difficult Life Story. Welcome to Step #4 – A discussion about the lenses you look through and how they determine what you see, and considering the lenses others look through as well. You’ve heard of putting on rose colored glasses, because it changes the way you see things, makes the world look a little brighter. The way you see the world is certainly affected by different tinted glasses. Well, today we are discussing first of all, the fact that we metaphorically wear lenses and that these lenses form how we interpret what goes on around us, and second of all understanding that we can swap lenses if we need to. Choose a lens, any lens, the lens you look through determines what you see, how you interpret, and often whether you are happy with the story you are creating, or the story you have lived. Understand this concept and you begin to realize that your story CAN change.

Like magic, we conjure our stories from the ether of thought. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves form from numerous things, one of which is a set of criteria and lenses that we have adopted, usually as fact – right and wrong– from our culture and family, from our religion and the things expected of us because of our gender, our economic status, our social standing, our race, education or political beliefs, sexual experience, sexual preference, and moral codes.  There are any number of these lenses that we each, individually look through when we engage in any situation.  Picture if you will a pair of glasses with maybe a dozen lenses stacked on top of one other for us to look through. Everyone has a pair of these glasses that they are wearing. These are the lenses through which we see right and wrong, through which we judge our own stories, through which we judge the stories of others. Everyone around us is also wearing a set of these thick glasses, only a different set, with different lenses.

An example of a lens – Brock Dethier, in his book 21 Genres, points out that because of his age (older than draft age) and his education (University professor, so he has enough education to compare wars from history to current situations) BOTH OF THESE ARE LENSES – his education and his age, he is bound to think differently about war than perhaps an uneducated 19-year-old man.

Lynn Langer Meeks and Carol Jewkes Austin, in their book, Literacy in the Secondary English Classroom, call these lenses the “Cultural Eye.”  These beliefs, or ways of seeing the world start solidifying themselves from the time we are children, learning and interpreting our world. It’s important to realize that we wear these lenses and that everyone around us has on a different set of lenses. Next, it’s important to recognize that not only do we wear these lenses, but also how our lenses create our stories – the ones we tell to others and the ones we tell to ourselves. Because then we can start to recognize that there are perspectives beyond our own, and create possibility beyond one way of seeing things.

Let me share an example of two cultural lenses. A friend sent me an article called  Two world views: romantic and classical. The article starts out with a description of what romanticism is – “a movement of art and ideas that began in Europe in the mid eighteenth century and has now taken over the world. It’s hard to go far on almost any issue without encountering a dominant Romantic position,” it starts out.

I bring this up in conjunction with the cultural eye, because Romanticism and Classicism are schools of thought created by cultural lenses and adopted as ways of approaching life. The power of these approaches is hard to overestimate because they create the very basis for which we make our life decisions and thus create our stories.  Let me explain.

“Romanticism,” it says, is at its core a willingness to trust in feelings and instinct as supreme guides to life – and a corresponding suspicion of reason and analysis.” It points out how we expect that in relation to love the romantics believe that “passionate emotions will reliably guide us to a partner who can provide us with 50 years or so of intimate happiness.”  This belief alone can influence life choices away from possibly suitable mates unless the passionate chemistry and euphoric infatuation is present. These are major life choices made not on reason but on the heart and the chemicals that cause the feelings of passion to flare. This belief changes life trajectories.

As it applies to work, the romantic mindset is one that suggests that all people will feel a pull toward a specific and meaningful vocation, holding a passion for something they must follow. When I read this section it was almost a relief to accept the opposing and classical view that not all should look to their instincts to solve the problem of what one should be doing with their life on a productive basis, rather it accepts the understanding that all work will have moments of tedium and frustration, and that the idea of an “ideal” job is folly.  Like most things, I usually come down somewhere in the middle of these topics – I most certainly believe that some people are very much driven by a clear vision of what they want to do—they feel destiny tug and must follow, and many most certainly build their dream jobs through the sheer determination of their own vision and persistence. I’ve seen it happen, I’ve done it.  I personally know a great many coaches and people who believe in the romantic approach to the story of life. It’s often taught that we must follow our dreams, and shoot for the stars. Follow your heart is a common refrain. In fact, it’s become part of the American Dream. But, it must also be said that I know just as many who are desperately seeking to find that “passion” for a vocation, that intuition that will lead them to their greatness, that clarity of purpose toward the perfect job, because culturally this romantic approach to vocation is espoused so strongly that to not find it is, for many, to interpret failure.  People in their 40’s still not certain what they were supposed to be when they grew up. People desperately trying to figure out what their passion in life is, and having no idea, but feeling that they somehow missed the boat because they never felt completely driven toward a particular vision or vocation. Just this past week a woman in a Facebook group that I am a part of, was bemoaning the fact that she needed to take time off work to find her direction, to find her passion, and she just wasn’t sure she could find it.  The reason the classic train of thought felt liberating, was that it gave all those who have never felt a singled, focused, passionate longing toward a specific vocation a get-out-of romantic jail free card. Good news – not every life story need be crafted around the romantic idea of a foreordained purpose – that’s just one lens. If you’re not feeling it, the classic lens allows for great meaning and honor in all walks of life. Life, from a classic perspective isn’t about constant thrill and passion, but fulfillment in and an appreciation for the slow and messy process of life rather than the sudden impulses of emotion.

Stories can be told from the romantic perspective – stories of intuition, of love solving all, but also it can create unreal hopes that blind us to the dangers of feeling that we must obey instincts in love, work, and life rather than considering such classic traditions as the idea of the intense frailties of our human nature, and that our emotions often overpower our better judgment. In love classicism councils “a gracious acceptance of the madness inside each partner. It knows that ecstasy cannot last, and that the basis of all good relationships must be tolerance and mutual sympathy.” Classicism regards domestic life and chores as deeply worthy of care and effort. It suggests that financial considerations in choosing a marriage partner are not unworthy and unromantic, but necessary consideration as it plays a role in the “good life.”

The article is much more detailed and it’s fascinating to compare the two different life approaches. Your lenses will lead you toward one side or the other, or maybe you’ll be sitting somewhere in the middle with me. Depending upon your other lenses the breakout of how much romanticism and how much classicism you agree with is an individual creation.

Our stories, the most powerful ones, are the ones we create in our own heads. Ryan Clarkin said, “The quality of your life is determined by the quality of the conversations going on in your own mind.” That is a powerful statement. The stories going on in our minds are stories based upon our cultural eye, based upon learned or adopted attitudes, like romanticism’s idea that we should  follow our instincts, or classicisms deep mistrust of instinct and the missteps of the human mind. What you believe gives you the framework for how you position your story, which often then creates a space of judgment about the success or failure of your story. Then that judgment gets replayed over and over in our minds.

Let me share some short examples:

If you have been raised in a culture where eating dogs is considered normal dinner fare, then your interpretation of a dog barbeque festival may not raise your eyebrows. On the other hand, if you are from a culture where dogs are considered beloved pets and family members then eating a dog might not only seem like vomit worthy discussion, but anyone who would eat a dog may be considered to be cruel and disgusting as you look through your own cultural lenses. If you come from a family where everyone went to an Ivy League school and only the highest levels of education will do, to choose a trade school may feel like a failure because of familial expectations, and your judgments of yourself and others will most likely be tainted by those lenses and expectations, when in reality the labels you place on such a situation can only make you feel inferior or superior if you assign them and buy into that value assignment.  If you come from a family where modesty is strictly adhered and taught as a must-do, then you are likely to have judgments about people or families who do not adopt your same dress code. These concepts get pulled into the stories we create about other people and into the stories we create about ourselves. Often providing labels of “good” or “bad,” “right” or “wrong,” but all are created due to the lenses we look through.

I want to propose, as I have done before, that our stories are not fact, but a fluid interpretation based on fluid concepts that can be reframed. If you’ve often felt like a failure because you could not find a particular job that knocked your socks off, the romantic notions provide that you’ve missed something. The classic notion provides that you have not missed anything, on the contrary, if you have found meaning in honest work that has good days and bad days, that you’re pretty normal. I don’t provide this as an excuse for those who know they have a dream and are dancing around the fear of moving forward. I provide this concept for those who genuinely do not feel drawn to a passionate purpose in their choice of profession. If you need permission to be okay with that, Classicism gives it to you. Tell your tale from a classic perspective, because truly you are creating your own reality. If one lens makes you feel inadequate or shameful, there are other lenses through which to view your story so that you can see it in a healthy way.

So, how does this help you in reframing your story? The fourth step in the process of reframing a story, after accepting your story, being able to tell it, and finding the meaning in the things you experienced (the first three steps in this process that we’ve discussed the past 3 weeks), is to start to take it apart with the realization that the power you have assigned to the events in your story is determined by your lenses.

Here are a few questions to help you consider this idea:

Look at your story – what lenses have you been looking through that have defined that part of your life story? Where did you get those lenses? Is there a possibility that the thing you are absolutely sure is fact, isn’t really fact if you shift the lens? How does your story change if you looked through someone else’s lens or lenses? How do the unfulfilled life expectations programmed into you by your culture, religion, gender, family, etc affect your current self perception? What would happen if the expectations didn’t exist? What would your life feel like without them? Would it feel better or worse? How would your self perception change? How would your life story change? Were the people involved in your story doing the best they could at the time? Considering their lenses, how might they have seen the situation? (that’s a hard one because we have no way of truly understanding another’s lenses.) If you had been in their shoes would you have behaved as they did? What do you feel for the other parties in your story – hate? Anger? Empathy? Nothing? Fear? Understanding? Sadness? Forgiveness?  Do those feelings serve you? Does feeling that way about them hurt them, or you?

Go back and write down those questions and spend some time finding your answers.

Let’s look at the breakdown of my lenses in my story. The lenses I wear include a staunch religious upbringing involving strong ethics, morals, and family values. As a member of the LDS church, family is of predominant import. We don’t marry until death do you part, we marry in a special ceremony that seals us to our spouse for all eternity. We believe in family, in morality, in love and service. With this lens there are a great many right and wrongs. My family lens is one that is strongly based in these same principals. My grandparents stayed married, my parents stayed married, most of my siblings, cousins and aunts and uncles are still with their original spouses. (I’m directly addressing these lenses as they have to do with my issues of my divorces – of course there are other aspects of all of these lenses).  So, with these two lenses, and living in a community in which these same values are espoused, the decision for my first divorce was gigantic. The decision for my second divorce was mortifying. The dissolution of my third marriage filled me with almost a hands-in-the-air holy-shit there is no way to recover from the shame. Everyone will think I am so broken.

Now, we’ve been discussing how we assign value to our life stories according to our lenses. What at first felt like shame and failure I was sure never to recover from, when I stopped  and took time to consider the perspective or lens shift that allows for growth and learning through these experiences, rather than a fear of being seen as a failure, fear of judgment and disgrace in my own culture, I removed my own feelings of victimhood, shame and fear of what others think of me ( I still struggle with that one occasionally, if I’m completely honest).  I have no control of the lenses of others, but I do have the ability to realize that while my life trajectory was not ideal in my culture, it did not and does not have anything to do with my self-worth. I fully realize that this was my story, my issue and we all have our own stories around our stories, but it is these that we need to make peace with. Because they are our own stories around the events in our lives, we are the creators, and so we can recreate the ones that make us feel small, fearful, ashamed, or unhappy.

I knew the inside scoop about what had happened in my marriages. I knew I had stood up against abuse, that I had stood back up after abandonment, that I had made brave choices not to stay in situations that didn’t make me happy. I knew I had fought hard to work out every relationship, that I had tried to love well. The reality of my story was one of strength and courage. It was one of trying hard, of making mistakes sometime, but always of doing my best with whatever I was dealing with at the time. None of those things are shameful – they are things to be celebrated. And I also got to accept the mistakes I made as learning experiences.  I figured out that the feelings of shame I was feeling came from cultural, religious and familial expectation within those realms, but I was creating a story of  self consciousness over my life trajectory which created massive self doubt.

Here’s the key, because I know these lenses are mine due to nurture, not fact, there is a fluidity to interpretation that allows for me to take the lenses off for a moment and allow myself to see my story with less judgment. Now, let me be clear, there were not people in my culture or religion or family telling me I was a loser. It was my own self consciousness and the stories of failure and fear of judgment I created within my own mind. But this is where shame resides – in our own minds.

Another example, which I shared in the first step of this workshop series, is the different lenses between the Native Americans and those who were moving in to the new land conquering and developing it. The differences in attitudes toward nature between Native Americans and the settlers were opposites. While one culture held great reverence for the land and the circle of life involved in the natural system, the other considered a good life to be one of taming the land, expanding and clearing the land, building edifices to call sacred, rather than finding the sacred in the mountain or the wildlife. Depending upon which culture you were born in, a “good life” meant something very different.  Two different sets of cultural lenses defined a completely different way of approaching a situation. Each felt strongly that their way was correct. What if you had been a Native American who favored expansion and conquering? You may have been exiled from your tribe. But did your approach diminish your self worth? Not to the settlers and expantionists. What if you had arrived on a ship from England and aligned more strongly with the ways of the Native Americans and their deep respect for the land, and the needless slaughtering of millions of bison turned your stomach. Did that make you a bad person? Not to the Native Americans. It’s all a matter of perspective and lenses.

This process of considering, honestly, the lenses you wear, allowing for the lenses the others in your story may

How to Reframe Your Difficult Stories: 5 Part Workshop Series: Step 3– Finding the Meaning or Purpose Behind an Experience

When Becky Andrews  (episode 22) found out that she had a degenerative eye disease that would cause her to go blind, I’m sure she wondered, “Why me?.” When my son was diagnosed with Leukemia and had to return from his mission where he was teaching others about Christ’s love for them and serving them, a journey he had worked, waited, and saved money for, I wondered, “Why him? When Rusty Lindquist (episode 21) was living with his mother in a trailer, in the woods, with no electricity or running water as a child because she had to hide him from a father who was trying to sacrifice Rusty, like Abraham was asked to sacrifice Isaac, in order to prove to God that he was to be the next prophet;  then one day his mother didn’t come back from work and he sat there all alone, day after day wondering what happened to her…these are not the moments when we see the meaning. These are the moments when the tornado hits and the pain rises and the rubber meets the road. But later there is a space where we must find the purpose, the meaning behind the experience in order to make peace with our path. Pain without purpose is just pain. Join us today for an in depth look at the third step of reframing our stories – Finding the meaning and purpose behind an experience.

Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Story power serves you best when you know how to use it.

A crucial step in being able to find peace in our most painful stories is the step of finding some purpose for them, some meaning, something that we can take away from the darkness, sacrifice, or pain that paved the path we walked.

The Buddha taught that all life is suffering, that suffering comes from holding on to selfish desires, and that selfish desires can be overcome. The Christian dogma indicates that God uses our suffering to refine and teach us. If you Google suffering you will find that almost all results lead you to some religious reference, which to me indicates that when it comes to our suffering we turn outside ourselves to find answers. We want help. We want to find a peace in the storm, which is often what we turn to religion for.  This is not uncommon, in fact, it’s completely common, hence the Google search results. When we go through the chapters of our stories where we battle the dragons, the antagonists, the sorrows and disappointments we desperately want to believe that there can be something good to come from it. We hope against hope looking for answers and asking the questions…why?

Joan Borysenko said, “We cannot wish old feelings away nor do spiritual exercises for overcoming them until we have woven a healing story that transforms our previous life’s experience and gives meaning to whatever pain we have endured.”

Philip Zimbardo, one of the most respected psychologists of the twentieth century, and past president of the American Psychological Association taught at Yale and Stanford and authored over 50 books. He was born in 1934. When he was 5 years old he got whopping cough and pneumonia. Steve Kotler, in his book The Rise of Superman, retells Zimbardo’s story pointing out that “In those days before antibiotics 63 percent of all children with whooping cough or double pneumonia did not recover. A friend Zimbardo made, as a little boy in the hospital, died there, next to him, and Zimbardo found that the only way to fight off the depression and fear of the situation was to use his imagination – he just kept imagining better possible futures. Today we call this visualizing – visualizing the outcomes we want. Creating our desires, first in our minds. Eventually, Zimbardo recovered and was released, and he was shocked to realize, as he looked back and viewed his time in the hospital, that it had turned out to be a positive experience because he learned self-reliance, he learned to create a perspective in difficult times that would benefit him. Though it was a difficult, terrifying, and painful time in his life, he had gained something from the experience. Something very, very important that would affect the rest of his life.

This is an example of the ever important step on your way to reframing, of finding the blessing, the takeaway, the lesson from the tough experiences of life. It is also an example of choosing to actively direct perspective instead of letting raw emotion and reaction to the situation at hand determine your attitude.

Viktor Frankl, a Jewish Psychologist who was interred in a concentration camp and survived, shares an experience where a client came into his office distraught because his wife had died and he was lonely and lost without her. Through Viktor’s deep understanding of suffering, he quietly asked the man a question – what would have happened if your wife had passed before you? “Oh,” said the man, “that would have been horrible. She could never have handled it.”

“Well,” said Viktor, “you can be grateful that you have been able to spare her that difficulty and suffering, by being the one to stay behind.” Though the man had come in for an entire session or more to find some relief from his deep suffering, this one question, this one answer was all he needed to be able to move forward. He had found the purpose in his suffering – the opportunity to walk this path so his wife did not need to.  He stood up, walked out of Viktor’s office, and Viktor never saw him again.

One of the reasons this is so important is that if we can change the negative stories we believe about ourselves, it then affects our interpretation of ourselves and our lives, and with that change behavior changes. Weights lift, outcomes shift. Our hard stories become not just about pain, but also about growth and learning or whatever the purpose or meaning turns out to be. We are talking about acceptance, freedom, and an expanded view of events and outcomes.

Here are a couple questions to start with:  1. What did you learn from your difficult experience (the story you are reframing)?  2. What positive things came about because of the experience? 3. Did you gain an understanding of things you had previously not understood? 4. Did this experience allow you to get rid of a person, thing, idea that no longer served you? 5. What meaning or purpose starts to become clear? 6. What positive piece of gold can you pull from the dross?

In his Ted Talk, “How the worst moments in our lives make us who we are,” Andrew Solomon shared an experience of a woman who was thrown in prison over a political issue in Burma.

Listen to the episode to hear the excerpt from this TED talk.

Later in his talk he made a profound statement, “If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes.”

When we do this step of the reframing process we are not denying the reality of events, rather, we are looking for the silver lining. You are strong, you are resilient, you know yourself and your heart – admitting that you learned something, that you gained something, is not about saying that it’s okay that the event happened, it is simply taking up your power to say, “I WILL NOT let this keep me down! I WILL find every last takeaway because I’m worth it and I want to be free in my own heart to accept my story with all its dents and scratches. There is meaning in MY story.” In August of 2016 my son was out serving an LDS Christian mission serving others, teaching about Christ, and basically out to make the world a better place. He’s 20 years old and he’s saved his money since he was little so that he could afford to do this when he graduated from high school. So here he is, out in the world, thousands of miles away from home in Utah, and he’s working with Spanish speaking people in the Philadelphia, New Jersey area when he gets diagnosed with Leukemia. For seven months he had worked 12-14 hours a day teaching and serving, thinking he was incredibly tired because the work was hard. He had no idea that his white blood cells had become mutated so thoroughly that his bone marrow was so thick it could not be pulled from his bones, and his spleen, taking over the work of trying to create the blood cells, had become so large it transformed from this small organ that can usually not be felt from the outside of your body to one that was so distended that it took up the side and front of his abdomen giving him the look of a being 4-5 months pregnant (which of course varied depending

In August of 2016 my son was out serving an LDS Christian mission serving others, teaching about Christ, and basically out to make the world a better place. He’s 20 years old and he’s saved his money since he was little so that he could afford to do this when he graduated from high school. So here he is, out in the world, thousands of miles away from home in Utah, and he’s working with Spanish speaking people in the Philadelphia, New Jersey area when he gets diagnosed with Leukemia. For seven months he had worked 12-14 hours a day teaching and serving, thinking he was incredibly tired because the work was hard. He had no idea that his white blood cells had become mutated so thoroughly that his bone marrow was so thick it could not be pulled from his bones, and his spleen, taking over the work of trying to create the blood cells, had become so large it transformed from this small organ that can usually not be felt from the outside of your body, to one that was so distended that it took up the side and front of his abdomen giving him the look of a being 4-5 months pregnant (which of course varied depending upon the body – but it pretty big). This distention is what tipped him off that he should check in with the doctor, and he was sent home the next day with a leukemia diagnosis.

He had worked for many years for this goal – to serve a mission. He was out serving people, teaching them about Christ, he was creating good and sharing love. Why would God do this to him? Amidst great disappointment at not being able to serve, he began treatment at one of the best cancer treatment centers in the country. When he felt well enough that he could get out of bed and function in a relatively normal manner, he took another angle with his story – he began serving in the temple, a place of worship important to him and his spiritual journey. He worked six hour shifts twice a week and then went through to do his own sessions on other days. What it looked like to me was that he had transitioned his mission service into the temple itself. While the prayers, fasting, treatments, bone marrow biopsies, weekly blood draws, sleepless nights and his own independent spiritual journey unfolded, his story was developing into something beyond what he could see. His faith was tested, his patience was tried, his body was pushed into severely difficult spaces, but his example shone like a bright star for many lives who watched and were inspired. Stories started rolling in from people who had watched him and been inspired to live better and try harder. His work in the temple was deeply satisfying and when eight months had passed and his response to treatment went from almost total mutation to .3% mutation, he went back out into the mission field, filled with joy and utter excitement to return.

While he was not allowed to return to Philadelphia, he was allowed to move an hour away from home in order that he be in close proximity to the Huntsman Cancer Center. This less adventurous option was at first deeply disappointing for he’d grown to love the people and the area in Philadelphia, but in the end, as we looked at his story to find the meaning in what originally felt so unfair, we found beautiful purpose.  We recognized that instead of serving in one area he was actually able to serve in 3: Philly, the temple, and Orem. We recognized the lives he had touched through his experience and example, and we, his family, gained from his light and example as he walked his path with strength and faith. And I have no doubt that there is more meaning to be uncovered in the story that at first seemed so tragic. We don’t know all the people he will meet and impact in his new area. We don’t know what other gems of meaning may yet be found in this side road that turned out to be part of the journey. It is these pieces of meaning and purpose that clarify the stories of our lives.

Brene Brown said, “Nothing is wasted. It’s all part of the process.”

And we get to embrace this idea and do the work to spin the straw into gold.  Rumplestilskin has nothing over a person who becomes skilled in recognizing, finding, or creating purpose in the journey.

Have fun out there creating your big, bold, wonderful story! And pass this podcast series along to someone today who might find great relief in learning how to reframe their stories. Do a little good in the world and share the love. Also, go to www.loveyourstorypodcast.com and sign up for the free mini-ebook on the five steps for reframing the parts of your story that feel broken. It can serve as a notes on the process we are going through in this series. See you next week for Step 4 in this 5 step process. Lata’ fellow story creators.

How to Reframe Your Difficult Stories 5-Part Workshop Series: Step 2 – Tell Your Stories

Those stories hidden in the dark of night, kept under cover, the lid closely guarded and locked, cannot breathe or break free from shame, guilt or sadness that are a part of their very nature. Until the lid is opened, until the light can shine down upon the dark shadows, to chase them out and loosen the ties that hold the story closed, there will be no healing. Join us today for Step 2 of the 5 part reframing process. Tell Your Stories!

Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Power serves you best when you know how to use it.

So, here we are in week two of our five-week series. I hope your work with the acceptance of your stories has been productive this past week. Moving onto step two this week, we come to the point of TELLING OUR STORY.  It’s time to say it out loud. To put it into words. Before some of you start hyperventilating with the idea of this type of exposure and vulnerability, this does not mean you should run out and post your most shame filled or difficult stories on Facebook, or announcing them in the city square. It means coming to a point of claiming them, where you can put into words your stories, in a safe space. A space where you are able to put words to even your deeply disturbing stories that have remained silent, in one way or another.

Becky Andrews, a therapist at Resilience Inc, a guest we’ve had speak on the podcast, episode 022, explained to me, telling our stories is invaluable, we must talk and share our stories, she said. We know that studies indicate that talk therapy – thus sharing our stories, actually lessen the intensity and stress in our brain.

So, I asked a woman who had done the Next Level emotional intelligence leadership workshop about her experiences in telling her stories.

Jamie said, “There was one experience in particular where I had already had my turn to speak, but I had a very clear realization while listening to the rest of my group take their turn.  I knew without a doubt that I needed to say it out loud to my group.  I was able to share and while sharing, the pain and heartache that had started with one experience so many years ago, left me.  It was so freeing.  I obviously still have the memory, but it does not have the same effect or hold over me that it used to.  The other thing about this experience that was interesting was that there were so many other experiences in my life where other people treated me in a similar way as the person did in this initial experience. These experiences just piled up on each other over the years leaving me feeling unimportant and unloved.  By sharing this initial experience, the pain from these other events in my life left as well.  It was amazing! It was huge for me.”

She went on, “Another experience was an exercise where you were forced to just keep talking while you really got to the bottom of things.  This gave me the opportunity to finally say out loud how I feel about my mothering.  It has been tough dealing with my son’s Aspergers, ADHD, and mood disorder.  I experienced shame and heartache over how I had handled different situations in weakness, and heartache over the situation as a whole.  Saying it out loud to a male that was there representing my son was cleansing. Saying it out loud is a necessary step to healing and moving on,” she finished.

Often times the thing we will gain from telling our story, from putting it into words, is not something we will fully understand until it is done. Perhaps it is like Jamie, where saying it out loud, giving it voice releases all the stories tied to it. Perhaps it is her experience of putting into words, in a mad unorganized rush, her story and guilty feelings about dealing with her son’s difficulties that actually give the story form and increased understanding. But sometimes it’s just the bravery of claiming it that sets you free to accept it, to accept yourself and your deeply personal identity that is foundationally built upon our stories. Sometimes in the telling you find others with similar stories and you are able to find support and community.

You’ll notice in the examples I shared earlier that there were others listening or prodding, or bearing witness to the stories being told. I have found that reframing a story is most often NOT a one-person job. We are so entrenched in our stories that often the view of an outsider is what gives us another angle to consider. I did not reframe my stories without help. Becky Andrews, as a therapist, helps clients get perspective on their life stories all the time. Sometimes it is the perspective brought by another that serves as a key that unlocks the stuck story, or it is just the words, open to the light, that allows release. There is no question that claiming, accepting, and reframing our stories is a process, but this process cannot be done with stories that are buried and held hostage in our own fear.

Sharing our human experiences, has always, throughout all time, been a way of connecting. It is not new to share our stories, but sometimes it is extremely uncomfortable or painful, especially when shame or guilt is involved.

Lisaa Rankin, MD, in Psychology today, wrote an article called The Healing Power of Telling Your Story.  She says, “When we tell our stories and others bear witness, the notion that we are disconnected beings suffering alone dissolves under the weight of evidence that this whole concept is merely an illusion and that millions of others are suffering just like us. The minute you discover that someone else is suffering just like you—or even better, that they’re celebrating their wholeness just like you—that sense of disconnection eases and you start to glimpse the truth—that we are beings of vibrating energy, connected on the energy internet through processes like quantum entanglement, with overlapping consciousness that connects us to a divine Source and to the Inner Pilot Light of every being on this planet.”

She goes on to comment on the Power of Vulnerability. “In order to benefit fully from the healing medicine of telling your story, you must resist holding anything back. You must strip off your masks, be unapologetically you, ditch worrying about what “everybody” is going to think and let your glorious freak flag fly. Otherwise, your story becomes a watered down, milk toast version of who you are.”

“Why?” she asks, “because telling your story—while being witnessed with loving attention by others who care—may be the most powerful medicine on earth. Each of us is a constantly unfolding narrative, a hero in a novel no one else can write. And yet so many of us leave our stories untold, our songs unsung—and when this happens, we wind up feeling lonely, listless, out of touch with our life’s purpose, plagued with a chronic sense that something is out of alignment. We may even wind up feeling unworthy, unloved, or sick.”

Find a safe place. Put words to the stories that are hard for you, the ones that have you listening to this podcast because you want the reframe. The one you don’t want to tell most of all. These are the ones that need to be told so that you can find support, freedom from shame, acceptance. Pull them out from under your bed, open the door and let the light in. Be brave enough to claim your own stories. There is a deep liberation and release from the chains we let bind us in our hidden stories when we say them out loud and claim the story only we know how to tell. These stories don’t define us, they need not hold us hostage.

In Step #3 we take the next crucially important step of finding the meaning and purpose behind the experience. Join me next Wednesday for Step #3 – maybe the most satisfying of all five steps.

Have fun out there creating your big, bold, wonderful story! And pass this podcast series along to someone today who might find great relief in learning how to reframe their stories. Do a little good in the world and share the love. Also, go to www.loveyourstorypodcast.com and sign up for the free mini-ebook on the five steps for reframing the parts of your story that feel broken. It can serve as a notes on the process we are going through in this series. Lata’

REFRAME YOUR DIFFICULT STORIES – 5-Part Workshop Series

Do you want to be free of the stories in your life that make you feel small or that you find shame or guilt around? These stories often affect our self-perception and thus our interpreted self-worth. This workshop is to help you reframe and resee your life in healthier ways.

Workshop Step #1 – Accept It

Debbie Ford said, “The greatest act of courage is to be and own all that you are. Without apology, without excuses, and without one’s masks to cover the truth of who you really are.”

Stay with us today as we launch into the 5-week Series outlining the 5 steps to reframing your story. Today we will discuss the first of the five steps that take you through the process of reframing your stories for a new space of freedom, peace and a new appreciation and love for your own story. This process is not always easy. In fact, if you are truly doing it correctly it could prove to be a painful process, but make no mistake, it is worth every brave step to dig deep and do the work to love your story, which leads to a fuller acceptance and love of yourself.  And what is more important than that foundation?

Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Story power serves you best when you know how to use it.

As I was finishing up my masters degree and my research on the personal narrative, and considering where I wanted to go with my doctorate work, I found that I wanted to further my work with personal narrative in an effort to make sense of my own life story, for which I did not feel complete comfort. There were spaces of shame, of disappointment and of failure that I wore on my back, everyday.

I designed a research plan before I was even finished with my MS work and jumped into the research by interviewing women to discern if their life stories had turned out as THEY expected. It turned out that out of the 20 women who agreed to be part of the research project, only one of them said her life had turned out as planned. These women were diverse. They had different belief systems, they came from different parts of the country, they were different ages, had different careers, different marital statuses, etc.  As I became privy to their stories I felt less alone, but I also realized that there was powerful work to be done in how we view our life experiences.  After graduating with my MS degree I went into a space of consideration – where would I go from here? Would I pursue my Ph.D. and the Love Your Story research? Would I start consulting with businesses on how to use story? What would I do next? As fate would have it, I began an emotional intelligence leadership conference that lasted the entire next year as I went through one program after another. At each step, I learned more about the stories we tell ourselves, about how to reframe, about how to let go, and about how to live big. I worked with personal coaches and I eventually coached others. It became clear that what I wanted to do with my writing, my research, and my tools and understanding of story was to share them and empower as many people as were ready to stand up and love their story. People, who like me, were ready to embrace the tools and take the action for coming to a place of increased peace with their own powerful, disjointed tales.

Brene Brown said, in her book Rising Strong, “So much of what we hear today about courage is inflated and empty rhetoric that camouflages personal fears about one’s likability, ratings, and ability to maintain a level of comfort and status. We need more people who are willing to demonstrate what it looks like to risk and endure failure, disappointment, and regret – people willing to feel their own hurt instead of working it out on other people, people willing to own their stories, live their values, and keep showing up.”

This 5-step workshop is for those people who are “willing to feel their own hurt instead of working it out on other people.”  It is specifically for “people who are willing to own their stories, live their values, and keep showing up.”

The first step in the process of reframing your story so you can love it is to ACCEPT IT.

I want to make four points about this, the first is that most life stories don’t turn out as expected. When we are children and we picture our lives and set our dreams, we don’t envision the tests, the trials, the losses. We picture scenes that are laid out for us in childhood stories and Disney videos, we see the unfolding of cultural iconic stories – finding true love, family, safety, prosperity.  You are not alone, indeed you are in a world full of people who have lives that look nothing like they expected. As affirmed by my research mentioned earlier. 19 out of 20 people did not have their lives turn out as they thought they would. While this is just one study, and a small one at that, in all my informal inquiries it’s far a few who claim a life resembling their youthful expectations. What needs to be understood is that it’s okay, in fact, it’s normal.

Which brings me to my second point: Life is Messy and that’s okay. In episode 8 we discuss this very topic – for the entire podcast. I go into detail with examples of some of our greatest icons and revered figures like Christ, Oprah, Abraham Lincoln and we look closely at the messiness of their lives. The messiness is part and parcel of this whole thing called life. There is real importance in embracing the mess and letting it be what it is, because in the mess is the beauty.

Scott Peck said, in The Road Less Traveled,

“Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.”

Did you hear that? Mess is part of Creation.  Embrace it. Love your mess. Love your story! It’s the only one you have. And, let’s not forget the whole point of this podcast…the idea is that we get to decide how we interpret, use, and accept our own messy stories. It’s okay that it’s messy, in fact, you want it to be messy because that’s where you find the courage, wisdom, and strength. Accept it with a gentleness for yourself and give yourself the basic dignity you deserve.

My third point is very important, but one most people don’t stop to think about.  It is that the parameters for a good life are defined by cultures, religions, and families. What a “good life” means in one culture or religion may differ quite extremely from what another deems a “good life.” This becomes important to realize because “good” becomes a fluid concept created by a set of beliefs taught to us as fact from the time we were small. It is subjective. An example of this can be seen in the differences in attitudes toward nature between Native Americans and the settlers who were bent on expansion. While one culture held great reverence for the land and the circle of life involved in the natural system, the other considered a good life to be one of taming the land, expanding and clearing the land, building edifices to call sacred, rather than finding the sacred in the mountain or the wildlife. Depending on which culture you were born in, a “good life” meant something very different. While you may have your opinion as to which is accurate, the point is that it is subjective. European cultures are much more open about nudity than American culture. Middle Eastern cultures control their women with a heavier hand than would be accepted in Western cultures. In each of these places, what defines a “good life” becomes a little something different.

With this understanding we realize that when you are looking at your life, if being acceptable or “good” is part of the disconnect you have with your story, then it’s important to realize from a big picture perspective that while in your neighborhood, in your family, in your sphere, your stories may not fit all the parameters of a “good life,” it does not mean that there is only one way to create a good life. Maybe your family and religion are very set against divorce at all costs, and when you left the man who was abusing you, you got black listed. There are other spaces where leaving an abusive spouse is perfectly acceptable and supported. It does not make you “bad.”  While in some spheres being subject to the control of your husband is considered the only way to be respected in the community, in other spaces in the world it would be considered a ridiculous expectation bordering on a loss of human rights. You get the idea. Let me say it this way, there are 4000 ways (arbitrary number) to create a “good life.”  There is not just one way to do it.”  A good life can be one that is lived to the best of your ability at each turn. One where you learn, grow, and stand back up and keep on fighting the fight. In earlier episodes, we spoke with a man, Adam Chase, in episode 32, who has created a life where he and his wife live in different states. Not because they don’t love each other, in fact, they newly wed, but because they chose to create a life that works for them and looks a little different, and that’s okay. In episode 23 with Marvin Cassler, we meet a man who lives in a storage shed so he can save his money for travel in the summer when he’s not at work. There are so many ways to build a good life, and if you need more models, listen to the stories of other people around the world. Listen and learn.

Which brings me to my fourth point, which is modeling. Not too many years ago, ever aware of the intricate mental pathways and musings crowding around in my head, I realized that when a situation came up in my life that I had no precedent for handing I would scan for models. If I couldn’t find a model from how I was raised or a personal experience I had had, my brain would turn to movies. Now, right off the bat, we can see all sorts of problems with this go-to, but I suspect we all do it. If I needed to figure out how to handle an interaction with my teen, (and I have a different type of relationship with my kids than my parents had with me, so I often don’t have a model for how to handle it), then I’d think about how some character in a TV show or movie handled a similar situation. Since I’m fully aware of how unrealistic most TV and movies actually are, and how they often propagate a lack of morals that I don’t agree with, you can see how problematic this becomes. And yet, if I have no other model to look to, how do I figure out what to do? Heaven forbid we forge our own way forward using our own judgment.

Occasionally, when I don’t have a model, I get creative and choose a route of my own making, but the fascinating idea is how the human mind always looks to models to determine how to move forward. This is one of the functions of story. Culturally stories are shared to show and teach others how things can be done. This is a universal tool across the world in all cultures. The “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series was a set of true stories captured to show people overcoming and achieving positive results. Models that lifted and made people feel good. Stories used in church settings are to provide models for what it looks like to be charitable, to forgive, to be kind. Family histories can model for us how our ancestors did things. In the interview with Amy Donaldson-Brass, episode 15, she shared her story of finding her own voice. This serves as a model of how someone else did it, and how we can do it. We love empowering stories that show the underdog winning because it models for us how the seemingly impossible becomes possible.

We learn this as children as we speak to adults and they model for us how things are to be done. Dan McAdams, in his paper on the Psychology of Life Stories, says, “In conversation with adults about personal memories, young children become acquainted with the narrative structures through which events are typically discussed by people in their world.” By listening to the way adults tell stories, and to the stories they tell that model how the world should be, they/we are taught what is acceptable, what is not, how things should look, how situations should be handled.

Now, let me point out the obvious: these stories are passed down multi-generationally, or at the very least from an adult to a growing and learning child. While this does not guarantee accuracy in the story, in any way, it does reflect life interpretations of what is acceptable. It is an actively constructed model of what the people before you and around you believe to be an acceptable life story. This interconnectedness between a human life and the culture in which that life is lived are often difficult to separate, and indeed the narratives “allow us to see lives as simultaneously individual and social creations,” according to the Personal Narrative Group article Interpreting Women’s Lives from the Bloomington and Indianapolis University Press. Vast numbers of influences play into the interpretation of a life, and these forces exert their power at a very early age. For example, Mary Gergen in her paper, Feminist Reconstructions in Psychology, points out that simply from a gender perspective, “…boys and girls are raised to regard their life trajectories differently.” The social, cultural, familial, religious and class expectation combine to prescribe a set of values that are acceptable and expected for each of us.

So, identity is a cultural as well as an individual construct. The power in understanding this is, as we discussed in episode 001,  that this realization creates an understanding that at the very least, allows for a step away from absolutes. If you were born in China and your culture provided reason and expectation that women should have bound feet, or if you came from a culture where female circumcision was expected, or just because you were raised around prejudice or grew up with stories where “others” were marginalized, criticized, or harmed, doesn’t mean that we can’t seek for other models. While much of the world considers all of these atrocities, those within the cultures have accepted those actions and interpretations of life and people as acceptable and often even crucial to living in the way life is supposed to be lived for them. It is the understanding that these expectations are created by people who came before us and around us, and that that doesn’t necessarily make them right ways of thinking or being that becomes crucial. In fact, doing the work of stepping away from those culture constructs and finding other stories and models becomes crucial to examining life possibilities and the easiest way to expand our minds and to look at other ways of being is to find new models. This is where we begin to listen with open hearts to stories from people all over the world. To consider all the ways of living and to not define or marginalize our own lives because they didn’t turn out exactly as was prescribed by the culture we were raised in.

I believe that part of accepting our stories is this understanding that there are multiple ways to live a life well. Understanding the fluidity and the man-made nature of expectation also gives us the understanding that because others say our story is not acceptable, does not make it so. If you need logical reasons to accept your story, there you have them.

A more emotion based reason to accept your story is that you are beautiful and perfect. Your authentic self, the self before the experiences of living drug you through the mud a bit and had you wrapping yourself in protective armor, is fantastic and brilliant. You get to accept yourself just as you are – with all the scrapes and bruises, bullet wounds and scars, because there are the marks of living, learning and growing.

Let’s close with the same quote we opened with: Debbie Ford said, “The greatest act of courage is to be and own all that you are. Without apology, without excuses, and without one’s masks to cover the truth of who you really are.”

We live, we love, we fall, we try, we are, and we are doing our best. Accepting what is becomes crucial to moving forward and accepting your path, your life, your stories, yourself. Embrace your path and own it!

We’ll see you next Wednesday for Step #2 for reframing your story. Work this week on accepting your story and Have fun creating your big, bold, wonderful story today! Pass this podcast series along to someone today who might find great relief in learning how to reframe their stories. Do a little good in the world and share the love. Also, go to www.loveyourstorypodcast.com and sign up for the free mini-ebook on the five steps for reframing the parts of your story that feel broken. It can serve as a workbook on the process we are going through in this series. And if you would like to go to the next level, and take onlineline workshop with activities and exercises to help you get into more detail with these steps, go to the website and sign up. Lata fellow story makers.