STORY TELLING - TO YOURSELF

“I am always at a loss as to how much to believe the stories I tell myself!” said Washington Irving. How true! While we may not be great story tellers like our ancestors of the yore, we are adept at telling stories to ourselves – and negative ones at that. There is a constant chatter in our minds and if you step back and analyze these thoughts, you can see a familiar pattern. Most of it would be repeating things that you need to do (doing nothing about it and increasing your tension!), and a lot of it would be some “scripts” that you are playing out repeatedly. It could be some perceived injustice done to you in the past or how the world is unfair to you or how you were denied opportunities to grow and the list is endless. Unfortunately, by repeating the same thing over and over again, we perpetuate these stories thereby making them more and more real. This is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Cheri Huber said “That voice inside your head is not the voice of God. It sounds like it thinks it is!”. The worst critic you will ever encounter is the one who lives inside your mind. The way you talk to yourself has a profound impact on your emotional state and the resultant behaviour. For example, when you make a mistake, consider the tone of voice you use when you talk to yourself. We never say “Great, it has been a good learning experience!” Instead, it invariably would be “You, stupid idiot, you really screwed up this time” or “You will never learn” or words to that effect! Most of it would be critical or angry or sarcastic or even resigned. This is one of the primary reasons for low self-esteem, globalizing local events leading to depression etc.

In corporate life, it is next to impossible to avoid people who come up and say “Why does this always keep happening to me?” or “People only hurt me” etc time and again. There is lot of self talk going on in their minds and by repeating them time and again, it impacts their behaviour and the way people perceive them. Hence it is important that such negative self talk and scripts are avoided and rephrased so that we do not manifest circumstances that would fulfill our script!

I am sure all of you have seen “The Lion King”. It is a brilliant movie. The lion cub “Simba” leaves the forest and lives with a meerkat and warthog – Timon and Pumbaa. It lives a carefree life of “hakuna matata” meaning “no worries”. It starts to think and behave like other animals with which it is associated forgetting its true nature. Then Rafiki, the wise monkey adviser to Simba’s father tricks him saying that his father is alive and takes him to a pond. Simba sees his father’s apparition in the sky which tells him that Simba was born to rule and that he must take his pride of place among the lions. This changes Simba and he later claims the kingdom which is rightfully his.

Do we see parallels between this story and our life – at least I see a lot of truth in this narration. We do not rightfully understand who we are, nor the world around us – primarily because we are constantly running the “wrong scripts”. All we have to do then is to rewrite the faulty script just as Simba did. Is that possible – yes it is. Is it easy – maybe not? But remember that "One of the greatest of all principles is that men can do what they think they can do!"

How and when do we get our “Rafiki”, the wise one?