Rewriting Our Stories

For a long time, I've worked with coaching clients to "rewrite their stories."  This language is certainly not unique to me and my coaching clients or even my own personal work.  The idea is that whatever we've told ourselves about what is possible is a made-up story, so we can make up a different one...and then step into the one we prefer.

I didn't start dancing until I had literally hardly survived a personal health crisis.  If I lived, there was a high likelihood that I would be a quadriplegic.  I had always wanted to dance, but initially my mother didn't want me to dance and later circumstances always seemed to intervene. (Excuses.) When faced with the possibility that I might never walk again, I knew that the one thing I really wished I had done was dance.

By the grace of God and the hands of a remarkable surgeon, I am both alive and mobile, a fact that goes in my gratitude journal every day.  As soon as I was finished with rehab, I went out and signed up for dance lessons.  The rest is history.  Thankfully, last night I danced almost every dance for three hours straight.  Nothing makes me feel more alive or brings me more joy.

But, when I was learning something many learn in childhood or early adulthood, shall we say at a much later stage in life, I struggled.  It felt to me like I took the same dance lesson over and over again.  I was clumsy and certainly not the vision of grace that I dreamed of being.  One day I heard that our brain needs to hear something 10,000 times before it believes it.  Well, I thought, if that is my only problem, I will just start saying, "I am a dancer," until I've said it 10,000 times.  Doing so became the soundtrack of my life.  While I was driving in the car, while I was running, while I was swimming, and while I was bathing: "I am a dancer."

I said it different ways:

• I am a dancer
• I am a dancer
• I am a dancer

Then I added pizzazz, spinning about with my arms wide to the heavens: I am a dancer.  One day it finally happened: in a split-second in the middle of a lesson I'd repeated over and again, the figure happened easily.  Then I couldn't imagine how I hadn't been able to do it. By force of will, I had convinced my brain that I was a dancer, and now, humbly speaking, I am a pretty darned good one. I don't know if I said it exactly 10,000 times, but it must have been close. (I am sure that I hadn't put in the 10,000 hours that some people say is necessary for mastery.)

Today I was listening to a podcast interview with Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., the founder and medical director at the Trauma Center of Boston and a professor of psychiatry at Boston University medical School.  He first worked with Holocaust survivors. More recently, he has worked with Iraqi and Afghan veterans and 9/11 and Boston Marathon survivors.  He described one of the essentials in transforming a person's trauma experience is the ability to visualize a different ending.  That prevents the individual from fearing a repeat experience.

He shared a story of a five-year-old who attended the childcare center at the Twin Towers and actually saw the planes fly into the skyscrapers.  When van der Kolk had the boy draw a picture, as you might expect, it included the tall buildings with planes flying into them, and it also included a trampoline in the foreground. When van der Kolk asked about the trampoline, the boy said that was so people jumping from the towers would bounce with they landed.  That boy experienced few traumatic after-effects that those who hadn't found an alternative resolution for the crisis did.

As I listened, I realized that what he had done was the same thing that I had done, as well as what my clients had done: the boy had rewritten the story.  The scenario changed from people dive to their deaths to something vaguely resembling a game that most kids would enjoy: jump on the trampoline and dismount so the next person can use it.

Yesterday's blogpost about being hypercritical was fresh in my brain as I listened to this interview. What occurred to me was that in my shift from viewing spiritual lessons as drudgery to slog through, I had rewritten my story, visualizing a different ending this time. The slogging is now a passage way to something I want in my future. It seems to me that what works in goal setting for coaching clients and survival tactics for trauma survivors is also a good tactic for making our way successfully through our spiritual work. Visualizing what it will be like on the other side of the lesson and writing that ending for our story seems to be the key.

Rewriting Our Stories

A visit to the local Farmers' Market has been a regular part of my summertime routine for at least 25 years.  I love the smells of fresh fruits and vegetables at their peak, and the taste of perfectly ripened produce, which hasn't been refrigerated and shipped, just can't be compared to any other human experience. 

While that is true of Farmers' Markets in general, my real weakness is fresh peaches.  The real secret though is to get the ones that are beat up.  In North Carolina, they call them "windfalls" because they are so ripe that they fall at the least wind.  Of course, the fall bruises them, but what is left is exquisite, so sweet that the juice literally runs out while I am peeling the fruit. 

Some people would look at that beat-up fruit and think it was garbage.  To me, it is the tastiest thing in the natural world.  The difference?  The story that the observer tells about what he or she is seeing.  It's the same fruit.  As they say, "One man's trash is another's treasure."

A coaching colleague emailed me a link to an NPR piece about rewriting stories* today.  The story was about a boy who was frightened by a statue of Frankenstein, but instead of telling about how the boy was frightened when he went passed the statue, his mother related that the boy had peed on the statue when he went back.

The ability to rewrite our stories in an empowering way allows us to exercise our power over our own experience.  For years, I've been helping clients rewrite their stories where they've created disempowering fiction.  Recently, a client told about something she didn't want to do because she knew that she wouldn't be successful at it.  One at a time she gave me excuses about why she wouldn't be successful. One at a time I asked her for an example of someone who had succeeded but didn't meet that particular success criteria.  By the time we finished, she realized that there was no legitimate reason why she, too, couldn't succeed.  Then she could rewrite her story.

Today I started working on my fifth or sixth book, depending on whether you count one that is started but not yet finished.  Although I've been writing quite literally since I could hold a pencil, I didn't start writing seriously until I was in my mid-forties because my mother always said to me, "Writers are poor and starving."  When a college professor commented on my talent and encouraged me to consider a writing career, I responded, "Writers are poor and starving."  I had made my mother's story my own without even being conscious of what I was doing.

For over four decades, I lived the story my mother had given me.  Then at some point, I could no longer run from my gift. Being an artist is a toss-up, but can the artist not be an artist?  If my mother were still alive, she would point at me and shake her finger and say, "I told you so," because I have struggled financially.  More importantly, I have occasionally been frozen with fear of doing what I am here in the world to do.

But today, I felt more alive than I have since I last worked on a book.  I am rewriting my story.  The work I began today is a memoir, and I am telling myself that it will be the next Eat, Pray, Love.  It's author, Elizabeth Gilbert, is living proof that authors need not be poor and starving.  A reader of this blog has said she could see me at the celebration when the book deal is announced. I've seen myself on the New York Times Best Sellers' List for years.  Maybe these too are fiction, but they are far more productive that an equal fiction than "Writers are poor and starving."

When my colleague sent me the link to the NPR piece, he said, "This could be useful in coaching."  It can, indeed.  I believe the ability to rewrite our stories is a basic life skill.  We should teach our children how to dress themselves, brush their teeth, balance a checking account, and rewrite their stories.

This evening I feel a deep sense of peace, joy, and power.  Writing does that for me.  Hmm.  Writing is where I find peace, joy and power.  That is a story I can live with.

 

*http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/01/01/258674011/editing-your-lifes-stories-can-create-happier-endings

Rewriting Our Stories

Our minds play tricks on us, and the really tricky thing is they can totally transform for either good or bad how we experience life. Events in our lives are by and large neutral. They only become positive or negative because of what our minds tell us.

For instance, there are number if stories about people who were distressed because they missed a plane only to later learn that the plane had crashed.

Or there is the story about the man walking down the street, who was knocked over by a skateboarder, only see a heavy flower pot land on the sidewalk where he would have been if he'd kept walking.

If we are to experience everything as a gift, I believe it is essential that we become conscious of our stories and then rewrite them so that they help us see the gift.

This morning I cheerfully headed out for work, and I was hardly out the door before I began encountering delays. When I got to the corner where I would normally enter the Metro, the entry was closed. I was directed to a different entry.

I was just inside the alternative entry, when I saw my train leaving the station. When I made it to the platform, there were no times for upcoming train departures. A disabled train had blocked the tracks, and trains were bottlenecked from coming into the city. The missed train was the last for a while.  A long delay ensued, thereby assuring that I will miss my first meeting.

I finally entered a train that was packed like sardines. When I was almost to the station where I would change trains, the driver pulled in the station and said, "This train is out of service." So, everyone on the packed train offloaded.

At this point, I decided to walk a long block to another line where I would catch the train I would have changed to if my train had made it to the expected change point. It seems that was not an original thought. Hundreds of others joined me in the race to the other line, pushing and shoving all the way.

I allowed myself only a moment's pity before asking, "What's the gift? What's the gift?" Then I laughed out loud. I'd been struggling to fit exercise into my schedule thus week. Each of my delays had added more walking or escalators to climb. Was this a serious workout? Of course not. But it did get my heart rate up for a bit. By choosing to see all the delays as a gift, I started the day with a smile on my face and grace in my heart.

I was proud of myself for being awake enough to notice and to rewrite my story. That is a powerful act, choosing how to experience life without regard to circumstances.

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