Day 10: Discover Your Stories

Today you will learn about the stories you tell yourself about yourself, why you must understand the way they effect progression towards purpose, and the how to process for uncovering your own stories.

Summary

What are Stories?

Stories are patterns of actions and behaviors that we may apply to our own lives in order to fulfill our dreams and aspirations.

Using stories we:

• Pass down ideas and ways of living. These ideas are encapsulated and represented in the narratives that we share and sit at the base of our culture.
• Develop a system of watching ourselves act across eons of human history and distilling essential patterns of for actions.
• Examine where we have been, where we currently are and in what direction we are headed. More importantly, they exhibit what happened and why in simple and practical terms. It's how and why we derive wisdom from the risk taken by those before us and who have lived to tell the story.
• Hear how other people succeed and realize their aims or how they got knocked off their path and the tragedies they encountered and the mistakes they made.

We value stories, particularly if they can be generalized to many people, across many situations because they provide templates for living that can be imitated.

• In stories, we capture observations of the ideal personality and how it fits in with particular circumstances.

Why are Stories important to purpose?

One of the most important elements to your success in fulfilling your purpose will be the stories you tell yourself about yourself

• These are the foundation of your identity, the beliefs about yourself and your abilities that have been created based on your experiences.

Some stories do not serve you well and will hinder your success:

• Limiting Beliefs: These are stories at one time may have helped us to overcome certain obstacles that we were experiencing as we were growing up.  They may have helped you in the past, but if you want to reach the ideal you that you envision for yourself, you're going to need to rewrite those old stories to better serve your purpose.
• Trauma & Suffering: Pain cannot always be avoided. Sometimes it not only must be accepted, but must be transmuted into something meaningful, making us stronger, resilient, and more confident.

How to discover your Stories

It is difficult to know who you are, where you should go, or how you should get there, unless you know where you came from.

Exercise: Past Authoring Program

• The Past Authoring Program has therefore been designed to help you write a structured autobiography.
• First, you will divide your life into seven different time periods or epochs.
• Next, you will identify the most significant events that occurred during each epoch.
• Then, you describe how each of those experiences has shaped who you are today.
• Note: As we will use all the journaling exercises in this program in upcoming lessons, I recommend buying the entire Self Authoring Suite ($29.90). If you already purchased the Self Authoring Suite in the lesson on Day 6: Personality, then you do not need to purchase it again.

It's not always easy to rewrite stories by yourself. If you struggle with identifying your stories and rewriting them to better serve, I recommend asking for help from a therapist, coach, mentor, or someone close to you.

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Activity

Complete the Past Authoring Program or freely consider the major events of your life, writing them in detail about what happened, what it means for your life, and how they have shaped who you are today.

Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.