The Stories We Live By
We make sense of our lives through stories. They help us organize experience, understand what has happened, anticipate what might happen next, and decide how to respond.
Some stories are spoken aloud. Others are so familiar that we rarely notice them: what we believe about our bodies, what we expect from other people, what we think we can handle, or what we assume is possible for us.
Stories aren't inherently good or bad. They can help us navigate complicated lives. But they are ways of making sense of experience—not the whole of experience itself.
When a Story Stops Serving Us
A story may have made sense at one point in our lives and become less useful as circumstances change. It may leave out information, turn an uncertain interpretation into a certainty, or lead us to expect the same outcome every time.
Sometimes a story protects us. Sometimes it limits what we can see. Often it does a little of both.
The aim isn't to replace every difficult story with a positive one. That can simply mean exchanging one rigid explanation for another. Instead, we can become curious about how a story formed, what it helps us notice, what it leaves out, and how it shapes our participation.
The Landscape Gets a Say
Our interpretations matter, but they don't get the final word about reality. We can believe something strongly and still be mistaken. We can hold a story that feels comforting but doesn't fit what is happening. We can also find that a story is useful in one context and unhelpful in another.
Exploration means allowing our stories to meet the world: noticing what happens, listening to other perspectives, and remaining open to evidence and experience that complicate what we thought we knew.
We don't have to know the final truth before we begin. We can hold our explanations with enough care to learn from them and enough flexibility to revise them.
Making Room for Another Possibility
In coaching, we can explore the stories surrounding an experience without assuming in advance that they're wrong or that they need to change.
We might ask what else could be true, what the current story makes possible, what it makes harder, or what happens when we approach the experience from a different perspective. Sometimes a story shifts. Sometimes it becomes more nuanced. Sometimes we discover that the story wasn't the main issue at all.
The point isn't to find the perfect story. It's to develop a more flexible relationship with the stories we use to navigate our lives—and to stay in contact with the experience those stories are trying to describe.