The stories we tell ourselves are internal narratives, what psychologists call self-schemas, and they act as the lens we use for anything we do in life. They teach us how to think, what to expect, and what’s safe to attempt, which is how we build businesses and careers, and it’s also how they become the ceiling on what we’ll let ourselves do next.
Key Takeaways
- The stories we tell ourselves are self-schemas, generalizations about who we are that filter every decision, offer, and price through a version of us that may no longer exist.
- The story you built your business or career through was an asset. You haven’t failed it. You’ve outgrown it.
- Research shows these stories resist evidence that contradicts them, which is why more insight, more courses, and better strategies don’t update them.
- Changing the story is a development process, building the skills the next chapter of your work requires, and most of them aren’t informational.
- Feeling stuck while everything looks fine on paper is usually a growth signal. It means you’ve grown past the story, and that’s workable.
What are the stories we tell ourselves?
The stories we tell ourselves are what psychologist Hazel Markus called self-schemas, generalizations about who you are, built from past experience, that organize how you process everything that happens to you. They’re the lens you use for anything you do in life.
In the 1980s, psychologist Theodore Sarbin went further and proposed that narrative should be psychology’s root metaphor. Humans aren’t best understood as machines or computers, the popular metaphors of his era. We’re people acting out roles in stories we wrote for ourselves, or that someone else wrote for us.
These stories are useful. They tell you how to think and help you anticipate what might happen next, so you don’t have to figure out every situation from scratch.
A limiting belief like “I’m not a salesperson” isn’t a random thought. It’s a single line from a much larger story about who you are and what people like you get to do.
How does your story shape what you build?
Your story doesn’t build anything on its own. You do the building, and the story is the lens you build through. It decides what looks possible, what looks risky, and what looks like you, so a story like “be reliable, work harder than anyone, don’t get ahead of yourself” sits underneath a lot of client bases, reputations, and careers.
I’ve had many jobs, and in most of them the same point arrived. Things were good. I liked the people, the salary, the freedom. I still recognized I wasn’t living my fullest potential.
That recognition was the signal, and it showed up while everything was still good on paper. The story I was living had run out of room.
In one job I left because I wanted more pay and I wanted to bet on myself. I went out and started a company building websites, and there was a lot I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to sell. I didn’t know how to do most of what a business requires.
Here’s the part that matters for you. The story I’d been working through up to that point was a good one. I did the work, but the story chose the direction, and it made me dependable, skilled, employable. It just couldn’t show me the way to where I was going next.
The same is true whether you’re running a business or sitting in a career that no longer fits. Your story did its job. You’re not broken for having outgrown it.
When does a story become a ceiling?
A story becomes a ceiling when you’ve grown past it but every decision still runs through it. The tell usually isn’t failure. It’s friction around success, like a price you can’t bring yourself to raise or an offer you keep not making.
There’s a reason the story doesn’t update on its own. Markus’s research found that self-schemas make people resistant to information that contradicts the schema. Evidence that you’ve grown gets filtered out by the very story it contradicts. You can be a different person than you were five years ago and still be making decisions as the old one.
Gay Hendricks named the result in The Big Leap. He calls it the Upper Limit Problem, an internal thermostat for how much success you’ll allow yourself. Push past the set point and the old story pulls you back to the familiar level, usually through some form of self-sabotage that looks reasonable in the moment.
Some signs the story has become your ceiling:
- You won’t raise prices that you know are below your value.
- There’s an offer, a launch, or a conversation you keep preparing for and not having.
- Your niche fits like a coat you bought a decade ago.
- You describe yourself in language that’s smaller than what you actually do.
I see this with established business owners every week. Revenue is fine, the calendar is full, and the next version of the business needs a version of them their current story doesn’t include.
Why isn’t this a strategy problem?
Feeling stuck at this stage isn’t a strategy problem because the strategy gets executed by the story. A new plan run through an old self-concept produces the old results.
Performance psychologist Michael Gervais put it plainly in Harvard Business Review. The stories we tell ourselves set the parameters for what we can achieve. You can buy a better plan, but the story decides how much of it you’ll actually execute.
I spent more than a decade inside marketing, managing millions in ad spend and building funnels for businesses. The strategies were almost never the problem. The person running them had a story about what they were allowed to charge, say, and be seen doing.
This is the same territory as the knowing-doing gap. When you know what to do and can’t make yourself do it, the pattern underneath the execution is the story at work.
So the next course, the new framework, the business redesign, they all renovate inside the old parameters. The parameters are what need to move.
How do you change the story you tell yourself?
You change the story by expanding it. That means separating from what you know, naming the old strategies that won’t work where you’re going, and developing the skills the next chapter requires. Most of those skills aren’t informational.
Most advice stops earlier than this. Become aware of the script, then act despite your feelings. Awareness is the right start. It just isn’t the change.
When I started my company, I learned the informational skills first. Sales, websites, delivery. That part was learnable from the outside.
The real phase came after. I had to change the story I was operating from, and that required a different type of skill. I had to learn to believe in what I could do. I had to learn to set boundaries and set prices. I had to become the person who could ask a client a question and wait patiently for the answer, responding to the moment instead of a script.
Skills like that aren’t information. They’re development. If you don’t build them, you stay limited by old strategies, no matter how much you know.
Here’s the process I use with clients and in my own work:
- Name the story you’re living. Write down the rules you operate by, the ones that feel like facts. “People like me don’t charge that.” “I have to earn rest.” Then give the story an archetypal name, something like The Hard Worker, The Good Student, or The Nice Guy. Once it has a name, you can see it as a character you’ve been playing instead of the whole of who you are.
- Credit it before you change it. List what living that story made possible and what it protected you from. A story you respect is easier to revise than one you’re at war with.
- Identify what the next chapter requires that doesn’t feel like you yet. Usually it’s a way of being rather than a tactic, like speaking directly, letting yourself be seen, or asking for something without over-explaining it.
- Practice one of those ways of being in a real situation each week. Pick something that doesn’t feel comfortable yet and give yourself a live chance to try it. Stories change through evidence, and each small act like this becomes a line in the new one.
This is what growth actually asks of you. It invites you to become a new person for a new type of business. That’s self-leadership in practice, and it’s the work I care most about.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are examples of self limiting beliefs?
Common self limiting beliefs for business owners include “I’m not a salesperson,” “my clients would never pay more,” “I need another certification before I can offer this,” and “if I’m visible, people will find out I’m not as good as they think.” Each one sounds like a fact about the world. Each one is a line from an older story, written by a version of you with less evidence than you have now.
Why do I feel like I’ve outgrown my job?
Feeling like you’ve outgrown your job usually means you’ve developed past the story your role was built around, even when the job itself is still good. The people, the salary, and the freedom can all be fine while you recognize you’re not living your fullest potential. That feeling is information worth taking seriously. It often arrives before you can articulate what you want next, and it’s the same signal that tells business owners they’ve outgrown the story that built their business, which makes it worth examining before you decide a midlife career change is or isn’t the answer.
How do I stop telling myself negative stories?
You stop telling yourself negative stories by authoring the next story. Trying to silence the current one leaves it in charge of your decisions. Name the story, notice where it came from, and start practicing small actions that belong to the story you want to live. The negative version loses its grip as the new one accumulates evidence.
Is feeling stuck a bad sign?
Feeling stuck is usually a growth signal. When your life or business looks fine on paper and still feels too small, the most common explanation is that you’ve outgrown the story you built it from. The discomfort is the gap between who you’ve become and the role you’re still performing. Treated that way, feeling stuck is information about what wants to change next.
If this named something you’ve been feeling, the next step is figuring out what your story has been protecting you from and what you actually want next. That’s exactly what my free guide, Step Back to Move Forward, walks you through. It’s not another strategy. It’s a structured way to see the story you’re running and decide, on purpose, what the next one will be.