Why a Story?

We’ve been using stories in our lives for eons to make sense of the world around us, from myths handed down through generations and pictures on the walls of caves, to parables in the Bible, our family photo albums, and info on the company website. Stories are the way we communicate as humans in the world. Stories are how we connect. Our brains are hardwired for connection through our stories, always looking for how we matter to each other. We crave connection. It’s as important to our lives as food, water, and security.

Our stories matter. Like an epic book or film, they are full of dreams, emotions, struggles, lessons, meaning, and purpose. Our stories are even more valuable than our classroom education, degrees, and certifications.

Our story doesn’t wait for us to be enough, to earn enough, to acquire enough. Our story doesn’t wait for us to finish the degree, find the husband, or start the job. Our story doesn’t end after the divorce or when you leave a company.

Our stories are being written each day, chapter by chapter. The question is, who’s holding the pen? Our story to this point may have been written from someone else’s script, such as our parents, teachers, coworker, or boss. To begin writing your own story, there is some undoing, some re-scripting. This isn’t starting over. We don’t go back and erase the past; we use it to teach us and propel us forward.

Take the pen and write the next chapters of your story with intention by listening to your head and heart. It’s time to look within, to reflect on who you are and what you want the next chapters of your story to be. You’re the lead character in your story, no more standing back and playing the supporting role or the stagehand.

You know the phrase about loving something from the bottom of your heart. I want you to fall in love with your story by reaching down into the depths of your soul, the bottom of your heart where those tiny embers can be fanned into flames.

You may be thinking, “Rebecca, I’m too old to start over,” or “I’ve invested too much time in my career to make any changes,” or “I’ve screwed up so much I don’t know if I’ll ever recover.” You’re not starting over; you’re starting with a wealth of knowledge and experience you’ve already acquired. None of the life you’ve lived to this point is wasted or wrong; it’s all a part of your story.

In fact, your story increases your value. This is an inherent truth about story. My absolute favorite illustration of the value of story comes from writers Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn in their experiment Significant Objects. Walker and Glenn purchased thrift store items for no more than $1.25 each. Writers were assigned to write descriptions, crafting beautiful fictional stories about the items. Would a powerful story increase the value of an otherwise common or even useless item? Turns out, yes, a story increases the value. Items purchased brought in over $8,000, which was then donated to charity.

A white mug with a black smiley face, originally purchased for $2, coupled with a beautiful story written by Ben Greeman, author of several books and an editor at The New Yorker, brought in $32.08. That’s a 1,604 percent increase. Story adds value to our lives—and even to smiley face coffee mugs.

My favorite of the significant objects is the Tiny Jar of Mayo. You know those tiny individual serving jars of condiments you get when you order room service? A tiny jar of mayonnaise, acquired for free, sold for $51! Obviously they weren’t buying the mayo, they were buying the story. The item’s story, written by author Rick Moody, is full of passion and expletives.⁹ I’ve read it several times, and it still doesn’t completely make sense to me, but every time I read it, I get a little something different from it—and isn’t that the marker of a great story? Isn’t that the way we’re supposed to live our lives, as one big story, written chapter by chapter, and as we read back over those chapters, we get a little something new from it we can use to take us into the next?

All of our experiences, hopes, and dreams are stored in our brain as stories.

Picture your brain as a giant story center. This is the library of you. With all the experiences and information we’ve gathered in our lives, our brains are a busy place. There are stories we hear, stories we tell ourselves, stories we dream and imagine. There’s the wall with all the books you’ve ever read, the viewing room of all the movies, TED Talks, and videos you’ve watched. There’s the community room with all your past relationships and random chance encounters, the bosses, the neighbors, the family, the loves you’ve lived, and those you’ve lost.

The senses room holds the heat and smell of blazing summer sun melting hot asphalt underfoot as you walk the country road to Grandma’s, oozing with independence and the perfume that brings back all the anticipation of new love. The smell of the art room at school calling you to create, the glide of a new pen across a new journal page, signifying new beginnings. The warm smell of a child’s hair after a sweaty day of playing outside. There’s the nerves and sweaty armpits from your first job, the victory of your first promotion, the thrill from the meeting where you spoke up and they loved your idea.

The imagination room overflows with the stories you make up. This room has a full range of darkness and light. It includes your dreams for the future, and the worries of catastrophes you dream up while lying in bed waiting for your teen with a new driver’s license to come home. The story center is full of happy stories, angry stories, scary stories, hurt-and pain-filled stories. We’re using our stories to make choices every day. Our lives are a constant of emotions. The more emotion attached to the story, the more likely we will recall the information when we need it and often when we don’t. Emotions strengthen memory.

We are continually taking in information and organizing it into the story room. Picture a crazy librarian running around trying to put all of our stories away and figuring out how to catalog them. In fact, our brains catalog and consolidate our stories as we sleep. This is a significant reason to get plenty of sleep so the librarian can do her job. How many times have you said to someone you love, “If you’d just put it away, you could find it when you need it.” The same goes for you and your sleep. When you sleep, the information from the day gets filed away to find it when you need it.

As a high achiever, sometimes the story room is stimulating and exciting. Some days the story room won’t let us sleep, either with the bright light of our dreams shining in our eyes or the shadowy dark corners of our mistakes haunting us through the night.

Some stories won’t go away even if we want them to. In my story room is the embarrassing time I brought cola products to a meeting I was hosting at a plant that is run by an opposing cola company. The plant manager asked who had brought in the drinks lined up on the table, the table full of their competitor’s cola products in large two-liter bottles, their labels billboards of insult. I slowly raised my hand while turning ghostly pale, wishing to magically disappear. This story reminds me always to know who’s in the room, which has benefited me in thousands of interactions since. All of your experiences go into the story room: the child of you, the awkward growing up of you, all of your business decisions, successes, failures, interactions with your colleagues—all of it.

Let this image of your story center inform you of the complete ridiculousness and impossibility of separating our personal lives and work lives. We have one life, full of all of our experiences and stories. It’s the collective of these stories we call upon daily. Sometimes these stories inspire us forward into something greater, and sometimes they hinder or halt us, keeping us striving or stuck.

I’ll be going about a regular day and think of a random story from twenty years ago. Sometimes the memory is an inspired one, like the time I had the opportunity to work directly with Dr. Stephen R. Covey, one of the most outstanding thought leaders of our time. There’s a particular exchange with a prominent place in my story center. After traveling together for three days speaking in three cities, Dr. Covey looked at me and said, “You’re a teacher.” Today, more than two decades later, his comment continues to give me confidence and affirms my desire to help and serve.

Some voices create troublesome memories that threaten to hold us back. Nearly everyone I know has a story from a coach, teacher, or parent that haunts them today, giving them pause about their truth, their worth, and their potential. I use these troubling memories as a reminder of the immense responsibility I have in choosing the words I share with others, knowing how our stories connect and influence each other. Genuine and affirming words are a powerful force in the world. Own this role as the writer of your story. Take full use of the power you possess inside you right now to write the next chapters of an epic story.

As an executive coach, I have the privilege of meandering through the story centers of beautifully powerful humans doing important work. I recently worked with a marketing executive at a rapidly growing tech start-up. She struggled to see herself as the leader she needed to be, facing growing responsibility and demands. Without an executive title on her résumé prior to this role, her days were ruled by feelings of inadequacy and impostor syndrome. I was able to pull the story out of her archives from the days she played collegiate soccer. As an athlete, most of her days were leading winning teams. As she discussed a challenge with the business and her employees, I asked how she would have handled this on the soccer field. A smile of confidence washed over her face immediately as she realized she had the skills for the challenge and this role. She’d been leading and building teams on the soccer fields for more years than she’d been in business. Newly equipped with her own story, she walked into the next board meeting as the leader she truly was.

This story center is our soul. It is the collective of our humanity, personal, emotional, and social. We’re feeding our souls through stories and experiences throughout our lives, and all of it matters.

Will you do something with me for a few minutes? I’d love you to go on a quick tour of your story center. Take three big deep breaths, all the way in and all the way out. Let your shoulders, your face, and your jaw relax. Now close your eyes and wander around in your stories for a few minutes to reflect on the awe of you, which is the all of you. Feel those stories. I’ll be here to continue as your Thrive Guide when you get back.

How did it go? My hope is that you’re seeing how much love, life, and experience you already possess. I hope you’re feeling this sense that life is long and you’ve got so much more to explore. Yes, this contradicts the “life is short” messages we tend to throw on our social media pages. “Life is short” is from a quote in a William Shakespeare play,¹⁰ which would have had much more validity in 1500s England when life expectancy was thirty-nine years.¹¹ Sure, some circumstances end beautiful lives early. But the “life is short” message puts us in striving mode with the hurry to “have it all and do it all now” approach. Hurry and figure it out, rush, get rich quick, hack, better, faster, more, command and control! This gives me shivers of anxiety just thinking about it. We dive into the world expecting quick success and putting pressure on ourselves to do it.

A life lived curiously, noticing what we love and why we love it—that’s how a story unfolds. It’s the intentional act of being curious of our thoughts and emotions that takes us on a journey to discover our depths, our soul, and our essence. This journey takes time. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. The hustle and hurry culture needs to end. Let’s get excited to wonder, wander, and to explore our interests and ideas. When you begin to see your story for the whole life journey that it is, life is long. A woman’s average life expectancy in the United States is around eighty years.¹² That’s plenty of time to explore.

This hurry up and get caught up isn’t helping us to explore and appreciate our story. All the years matter. We’re not wasting time; we’re exploring. We’re only wasting time when we stop listening to our soul and stop respecting our thoughts, ideas, emotions, and struggles. As we reflect on our lives, we learn more about ourselves; this informs us and leads us forward to explore more, evolve, change, and grow.

Ready to write a story of growth? Ready to take the pen even if your hand shakes? It’s okay because we’re all a little afraid.

We’re All a Little Afraid

As we evolve, we face resistance. We feel the pull of old scripts and patterns asking us to stay: stay stuck, stay struggling, stay safe. This is where I remind you that you’re not a machine here to produce; you are a beautiful human, and writing your own story makes you an artist and a creator. Ask anyone who creates, and they will tell you there are two aspects of creating:

1.They can’t “not” do it—it comes from deep in their soul.

2.Sharing your creations with the imperfect world takes vulnerability, grit, and guts.

Some of the greatest creators don’t make it past number two. There are life-changing inventions, solutions, and works of art buried in someone’s head, their heart, their hard drive, or their basement because they didn’t make it past the fear and uncertainty to bring it into the world. When the story of your life and career come from your soul, it is so personal and emotional. And because we are social beings, we desperately want people to like it. This is the challenge that often separates those willing to write their own story from those who are seeking permission, copying someone else’s story, or letting someone else write it for them.

Because we’re human, with the human ability to think and overthink, every one of us has fears and insecurities.

Everything we want isn’t actually on the other side of fear; it’s on the other side of the Sea of Uncertainty.

Dr. Joan Rosenberg, author of 90 Seconds to a Life You Love , teaches us on a podcast episode that fear is only the appropriate word if there is physical or imminent danger. If a tiger walks into your office, you should be afraid. If there’s a tornado coming at your house, you should be afraid. Otherwise, what you’re dealing with is uncertainty. Uncertainty is that blank space between what you know and what you don’t know. Fear requires immediate action. Get out of the room where the tiger is, get in the bas...