Why Story
Stories We're Paid & Praised For
In the first half of our lives, some of the behaviors and thoughts we express are approved or shamed by our environment. The approved ones get consolidated into our persona, which is the face we show the world. The shamed ones are banished and sent to the basement not to be seen again.
The approving and the shaming came through stories. The first half of life is full of them, stories about how we’re supposed to behave, what to think about the world, and what we’re supposed to accomplish in it.
Many have called the expressing of allowed behaviors the “first half of life” because it’s about building an identity or a sense of self that allows us to go out and pursue goals. Whether the goals are important to us is largely irrelevant, because the importance is on building capacity and developing skills to live.
In the first half, we’ll normally pursue goals that satisfy our parents, society, or expectations that others put on us. This keeps everyone happy, doesn’t rock the boat, and is perfectly normal because we didn’t create the world we live in (so we need others to teach us how to live in it).
Some people live their whole lives in the first half of life. They are 80 years old and still live according to parents’ expectations. For others, it feels unsustainable to continue living for others and they want to start letting some of the disowned parts they banished to the basement have a say. But, because they lost touch with that side of themselves they usually express it immaturely or recklessly (think of the 50-year-old lawyer that closes his firm to become a full-time artist with no art experience).
That clumsy reaching is usually our first glimpse of the “second half of life.” The second half isn’t about building another identity. It’s about uncovering what we neglected while we built the first one. That reaching, done well instead of recklessly, is the work of the second half of life.
Our unlived potential wants to be expressed in this world, and that’s hard to do when we’ve never done it before.
The things we’re paid for and praised for become our limiting stories, because we’d rather keep the praise and keep the pay. If we’re unwilling to give up either one, then when we need to change we will find it impossible.
The Parts That Protest
Those unlived parts are still parts of you. There are ways you’d love to show up in the world, and you feel you can’t, because they’re so far from how you’ve lived and what you’re known for. That distance creates a difficult relationship with those parts of yourself.
Most of the time, though, your unlived potential doesn’t wait for you to reach for it. It announces itself with restlessness, frustration, or feeling constricted. This is how the unlived parts of your life protest. They are done being silent.
Where This Becomes a Problem
Your one-sided development works. It’ll keep working for decades, right up until you need to change.
Said another way, this is where stories of the first half go stale. They were written for building an identity and establishing a life. They were never written for what comes next.
Often that need to change shows up as a shift, away from pursuing success and toward pursuing meaning. Sometimes the world forces it with a layoff, a health scare, or a role you’ve outgrown.
Sometimes it rises up from inside you, with a question like, “is this all there is?”
Either way, it collides with the story you’ve been living, and the story is what has to change. This is where people struggle, and it’s common in modern life.
When we need to change, we reach for the side of ourselves we already developed, because that’s where we’re competent. Our old strategies were our strengths that got us here. Letting go of them feels like losing a part of ourselves, so we keep reaching for them even after they’ve stopped working. The persona that produced our success is not what our change requires.
There’s one more reason this is hard. Most of us were taught that when something is broken, you go get information. Another certification, another training, another video. As if every problem is a technical one, a fix waiting to be applied. What I’m describing isn’t a technical problem.
Transformation is adapting and changing your perspective enough to see differently and be different. Most of us have no experience with that.
What A Story Problem Looks Like
In work, it might look like watching other people get promoted and not being able to figure out why it isn’t you.
In business, it may look like the owner who says she needs to market her business, but never does because deep down she wants something completely different than her current business.
In relationships, it can look like doing the same thing over and over, wishing you could do it differently, and not being able to figure out how.
What do these have in common?
You know what works, you try what works, it stops working, and you feel out of answers. So you go look for more information and it doesn’t work either. I’ve come to believe it’s not a knowledge problem, an effort problem, or a discipline problem.
It’s a story problem, which involves reauthoring better stories to live from.
When you have problems like these and you’re already using everything you know, they’re likely pointing at your unlived potential wanting to have its say.
That’s where a growth journey starts. Not everyone takes it, but some do.
Why Story Is the Compass
Think about how stories work. A person leaves what they know and goes into the unknown. That’s where things get difficult and the character’s task is to learn to transform.
The first half of life handed us stories to live, and we lived them. The second half doesn’t hand us anything and its stories are unwritten. We live into them, using the parts we once banished.
What we do first on a journey is try to fix things with what we learned before we left, our first half of life strategies. We want to use the same beliefs, responses, and patterns in which we have great competence and comfort. After all, others have likely praised and paid us for them.
But the old ways don’t work where we are going. If we keep trying to use them, we stay stuck in a story that costs us dearly and exhausts our mental, physical, and emotional resources. And when we finally stop using our old ways, it can feel like being lost in a forest, wandering around, concerned with getting out as soon as possible.
This is what I mean when I call story a compass. A coordinate gives a destination. A compass gives you direction from where you are, which is what you need when you have to move before you know where things will end up.
Act I
Confidence
You're living your current story. It feels coherent, familiar, and workable. You know what works because it's been working.
Act II
Curveball
Something interrupts the story. A crisis, an opportunity, a realization, a question that doesn't fit your old assumptions. The curveball isn't just the surprise. It's the disorientation that follows, when your old instincts stop working and you need something to navigate by.
Act III
Continuous Cycle
You don't arrive at a final version of yourself. You keep revising the story as life brings new challenges and possibilities.
When you stop living old stories and reauthor new ones, you realize you didn’t need coordinates for where you were going. You just needed a calibrated inner compass that was there the whole time. It was hard to find your direction, because finding it meant releasing part of the persona that made you feel like you’d die if you did.
When you can see the stories you’re living, you can begin to change them.
The more you learn to see your stories, the more you catch the moments when you’re inside one that needs to grow. These are the moments where we uncover where our life has become too small for an emerging story. And when you change the stories you’re living, you begin incorporating the parts of you that were fractured off, shamed, and disowned.
Growing through this process in a moderate dosage allows you to welcome unlived potential into your life in a positive way.
One thing this is not, it’s not about learning to tell better stories. It’s about seeing the stories you’re already living.
What Changes When You Include What Was Left Out
You get unstuck from the stories holding you, and that alone is great news. But the changes reach further than the problem that brought you here.
You make better decisions, because more of you is available when you make them.
In your work and business, you stop solving every problem with the same persona, and you can meet demands your developed side can’t meet on its own.
In your relationships, the people close to you get to meet more than the face you’ve shown the world.
Your goals change too. You start pursuing goals because they’re important to you, not because they were expected of you. That’s a big part of what makes life feel more meaningful.
And meaning works in both directions. The more of it you find, the clearer it becomes what your stories should be.
The purpose is never to replace the side of you that got all of the love and praise. The goal is to add what was left out. Changing your story isn’t about becoming someone different, it’s about becoming whole.
Finding the thread that connects who you are with what you do.
A few times a month I write on life, meaningful work, and Story.
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