Jim Loehr’s The Power of Story is a thinking bible for me. So many great concepts and framing that form much of my own mental construct of ‘story’.
I was re-reading this am (for the 100th time?). These passages stuck out.
In recent years, though, I’ve come to see that, amazingly, the key to almost all of our problems, more fundamental even than poor energy management, is faulty storytelling, because it’s storytelling that drives the way we gather and spend our energy. I believe that stories—again, not the ones people tell us but the ones we tell ourselves—determine nothing less than our personal and professional destinies. And the most important story you will ever tell about yourself is the story you tell to yourself.
And
Funny: We enjoy the privilege of being the final author of the story we write with our life, yet we possess a marvelous capacity to give ourselves only a supporting role in the “writing” process, while ascribing the premier, dominant, true authorial role to our parents, our spouse, our kids, our boss, fate, chance, genetics, bad weather, or lousy interest rates. Anyone or anything but us appears to have more influence in moving the metaphorical pen across the paper.
Don’t give yourself a supporting role in the “writing” process. Write your own story!
