The stories we swim in
Posted on November 06, 2021 by Greg Myers, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.
We are influenced by the stories we grow up with, and our free expression is directly conditioned by what these stories teach us to accept and reject.
I recall reading an article about the immense pressure Japanese school children are under to do well in their college placement exams. When the pressure got too much, some students rebelled by sneaking out of their homes and down to a local park, where they practiced close-order marching drills!
Maybe this makes perfect sense to you, but it would not even cross my mind to rebel through precision marching. Nothing wrong with it, but the story I am making up is that there are a whole web of cultural factors that led to this group of high school boys landing on this particular form of protest.
I’m also making up that this precision marching idea arose organically, and that it made sense to the students who embraced it. They were exercising their creativity and free will – but that creative expression of free will was highly conditioned by a whole host of cultural stories. Without understanding those stories, their motivation is hard to determine (for me at least).
It is the same with us – we are programmed, to a large degree, by the stories we grow up with; the stories that explain who we are, who our people are, how a person succeeds, what we must avoid, who we emulate, and who we ridicule. Our free expression is directly conditioned by what these stories teach us to accept and reject.
What are the stories you swim in? Those stories you don’t really notice because, like a fish in the water, they become invisible because they are always there? By noticing your own cultural stories, you begin to better understand the choices you make, and perhaps discover how the stories you swim in impacts what you believe is possible.
