We live our lives by the stories we tell. We walk in the door after returning from work and exclaim, “You won’t believe what happened to me today!” Or we have an experience and realize that it reminds us of another time when… and we drift off into the story of what happened in the past. We use our patients’ stories to understand the impact of their conditions. We share our own stories with them for the purposes of education, inspiration, or comfort. With everyone we know, we use stories to connect and to be known.
It’s often said that we humans are “meaning making machines. ” With any experience, we immediately construct a story about it to make sense of what just happened. These stories eventually lead to beliefs that often begin to run our lives. The problem is we are frequently unaware that these beliefs exist. They continue to influence our decisions much like the operating system of our computer runs our computer. We don’t know they’re there or how they operate, and don’t appreciate the impact they’re having.
If we were abused, neglected, or suffered significant disappointment in our early lives, we might have interpreted those experiences to mean that the world is inherently dangerous, that we weren’t worth caring about, or that we can’t trust other people. This belief will then influence our future decisions, possibly making it more difficult to take appropriate risks in our career, to advocate for ourself, or to maintain healthy relationships. Even if we had a less troublesome childhood, each of us has had experiences that resulted in interpretations that continue to affect how we think, what we do, and how we hold ourselves back.
Great Story Coaching is a brilliant, illuminating and highly effective process for uncovering your own limiting beliefs, based on the stories you tell. You will come to understand your stories as the guideposts they are to what you most need in life, and you will find compassion and love for yourself that may have eluded you up to now. The end result is that you will gain the confidence in yourself and the tools to truly become the author of your life, realigning it to reflect your deepest values and experiencing the joy of using your personal strengths and gifts in the world.
One participant in a Great Story group coaching program said this about her experience: