Stop the Story Telling
Posted on January 20, 2016 by Vic Beaudet, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.
How do you get unstuck?
Everyone is Story Telling.
Companies tell stories – sometimes called “narratives” — to communicate about their corporate reputations. Marketers create narratives to communicate the relevance of their brands and engage consumers in conversations about the “brand story.”
Politicians uses stories to sell their positions. Political campaigns create narratives to demonize opponents and manipulate how we think.
In his TED talk “Be Suspicious of Stories,” Tyler Cowen says that stories reflect our need to make sense of things and bring order to life. We like stories because they seem to bring order to chaos, make things simple and give us easy meaning.
Problem is, we sometimes buy into stories that reflect a too-narrow, too-simple, too-pat narrative of reality.
We have a lot of stories running around in our heads. Stories about what we can do . . . what we can’t do . . . why we can do it or why we can’t . . . what we’ve done and what it meant . . . why things happened and why things didn’t happen . . . what’s possible and what’s not.
Stories like these can come up when we’re looking to a new goal or facing something difficult. They can help talk ourselves out of doing the work we know deep down we need to do.
Stories can rationalize procrastination or enable us to avoid making big decisions. In my coaching practice, clients often operate with old stories that aren’t true. When they challenge their stories, they shift their mindsets and create new possibilities.
I’m really big on helping executives and business owners to see that being stuck where they are is because they’re telling themselves the same story over and over again. I get very excited when they embrace skepticism about the stories they’ve been living with.
That’s when they begin to write new stories about who they are and what they want their work and lives to be about.
Creating new stories is where the power is. Stop story telling. Instead, write new stories.
