Are you a character in your stories—or the author?
Pen on paper by Aaron Burden
We are always scripting the stories of our lives to make sense of the world and assign meaning to it — defining what we like and dislike, who is a friend, who is an enemy. Our stories take an unpredictable world outside us and make a narrative that is predictable.
We can use those stories to produce happy endings. But if we’re not self-aware, the stories take charge and can lead us to bad endings.
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush seems to have told himself and others a story that compared the way he broke rules in the design of the Titan submersible to the way the Wright brothers pioneered air flight. The story doesn’t stand up to scrutiny — any more than his sub did — and it led him and four others to their deaths.
That story had a very visible and dramatic fatal ending. But we are more often authoring less dramatic bad endings. For example, executives frequently make themselves a victimized character in their stories when they blame colleagues for a communication breakdown. Such stories lead them to justify the ongoing breakdown.
Here’s an example of two executives blaming each other:
Jon: “I’ve had it with Kate. I’ve tried to be supportive but she is poaching my people and making it harder for me to get my job done. I don’t trust her — she is dishonest.”
Kate: “I don’t trust Jon. We’ve talked about moving some of his people over to my group to help with the workload, but he’s hoarding them and being evasive.”
Notice the way they caricature each other. They are both on a path to producing antagonism, not partnership. And each is a victim of the other. Life isn’t the stories we tell ourselves, but we make our life a result of them — whether because a hubristic story has us dive too deep down in the ocean with a fragile sub, or because a self-deprecating story has us stay small and hidden, or because a blame story disempowers us.
Effective leadership means becoming more aware that we are not characters in a story we’ve made up: we are authors — and so we are in charge of getting these stories to work for us.
Are your stories helping you partner better? Are they helping you generate a result more effectively? Are they helping you avoid a disaster? Are they helping you express your enthusiasm and passion?
Your authority also applies to stories you have inherited from others. Think of the people who rejected the story handed to them early in their lives, and crafted their own — going to college as the first in the family to do so, starting a company to challenge the status quo, defying stereotypes of race, gender, sexuality to lead others.
Our work helps clients see that they are the author of their stories — and that they can edit them to produce happy endings they hadn’t considered.
To being a conscious author of your life,
Tom and team