Meet Roberta.
Roberta is a landscape architect. By all accounts, she’s good at it. If you need to create a beautiful outdoor space—a park, a cemetery, a residential community—Roberta would be your go-to.
Looking at her, you’d never know she’d recently beaten stage three cancer.
Or that her marriage had dissolved.
Or that she’d recently moved.
Or that she’d been laid off.
That’s a long list of obstacles for anyone. But there’s more. Roberta’s now in the process of reinventing herself as a health coach. A full-on career change. All I know is that Roberta has come to me with a problem.
The issue, Roberta tells me, is that she isn’t an entrepreneur. She’s a designer. Roberta doesn’t know how to sell things.
And, as a result, she’s not selling things. Including herself, which is a problem. Because after the cancer and the breakup and the layoff, this is now how Roberta is supposed to make money. And she’s not making any.
Roberta is standing on Cliff A, staring across what feels like an uncrossable distance, at Cliff B. The gap feels impossible, so much so that she’s considering throwing in the towel on pursuing her dreams and just getting whatever entry-level job she can find.
The crazy thing is that the gap isn’t actually that big. Roberta has everything she needs to succeed in her new work. Looking at her, talking to her, I can tell she’s perfectly suited for it. The more Roberta talks, the more I want her to be my health coach. She’s amazing.
But I’m the only person Roberta’s talking to. She’s not out there telling anyone else about what she can offer. And the reason is, you guessed it, her stories.
The question now is not whether that story is there. There’s a whole storytelling world at work within you. The question now is, why does that story matter? Right now, in your life today. Why and how do these inner stories have so much power, and what does that power mean?
Fortunately, a growing body of research has uncovered why stories do the weird and wonderful things they do—including predicting your future. And while there is still a lot of understanding and uncovering to be done, it seems the power of a story starts less with once upon a time, and more with once upon a brain.
Here’s a much-simplified version of what happens in your brain and body when you hear a great story:
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Storytelling captures your attention. Hearing a story triggers the release of cortisol, the hormone that grabs your awareness. What began as a tool to keep us focused on that rustle in the jungle or stealthy footstep in the night has been co-opted by story to keep you attentive.
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Storytelling helps you learn. Once the story-triggered cortisol has grabbed your attention, dopamine steps in. A part of your reward and learning system, dopamine gives the story the emotional charge it needs to keep you engaged to reach the finish and to help you remember the details for later.
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Storytelling helps you trust. Finally, oxytocin, the “trust” or “love” molecule, arrives on the scene. It makes you empathetic, helping you identify with the characters in a story and deepening your emotional connection to the outcome.
The result is something akin to a mental kidnapping, where stories grab your nervous system and hold it hostage.
If you’ve ever been spellbound by a film or been so immersed in a book that time seemed to vanish, you’ve experienced that power. If you’ve ever cried out “No!” at a cliffhanger in your favorite series that left you waiting for the next episode, you know what I mean. Try as you might, it’s unavoidable: a great story grabs your brain and doesn’t let go.
So what does all this mean for Roberta, our landscape architect turned health coach?
Roberta’s story, one backed by a lifetime of experience that she’s pointing to over and over, is that she’s not the kind of person that runs a business. She’s creative, a designer. She doesn’t sell. She doesn’t self-promote. That’s someone else’s job. But that’s a self-fulfilling story.
Her story is creating her reality. She is reaching the level of her limited expectations. Her current high-water mark is set by her negative self-stories.
But ultimately, our stories belong to us, not the other way around.
Over the course of a few weeks, Roberta learns to shift that story and replace it with a new one.
By the time I speak to Roberta for the third time, it’s like I’m speaking to a different person. Same Roberta, yet different. She’s timeless and elegant as always. But now she’s energized. Armed with her new stories, she’s taking action on the things she always knew she should be doing. And it’s paying off. She’s booked two new clients. She’s making money. She’s rewriting her story.
Like Roberta, we’re all facing the A to B gap. And in between that gap are stories—the stories that create that gap, and the stories that can bridge it. Although the particulars of her gap may look different from yours or mine, the struggle is the same: what to do about the space between where you are and where you’d like to be.
So if the stories you have been telling yourself have gotten you to where you are now, but you actually want to be somewhere else . . . what happens if you change them? What happens if you choose different ones?
