Storytelling - Choose your narrative - Tell a better story

What stories are you telling yourself?

It's storytelling time !!! How you talk to yourself matters more than how you speak to others. Stories you tell yourself matter more than the stories you tell others.

Your boss gave you negative feedback because you misunderstood the assignment and delivered incorrect work. Your heart sinks during the call, and your mind immediately starts thinking about all the negative outcomes—a low performance rating, getting laid off, etc.

After you get off the call, you have two options:

React via a negative mindset -

Place of judgement -

After you get off the call, you are angry at yourself and ask yourself how you can be so stupid. You go into a negative spiral that then impacts your work that day, that week, that month.

So when you were down, instead of lifting yourself, you kept kicking yourself, which hurt you more. Do you know humans are the only living beings who punish themselves for the same mistake again and again? Like, please, one time punishment is enough, or why are you even punishing yourself?

You are telling yourself a story here: I am so stupid. Why didn't I ask clarifying questions? What's wrong with me?

or

Place of victim -

After you get off the call, you tell yourself that you are the victim here and that negative things keep happening to you. You do not take responsibility and blame your boss instead, saying he/she did not explain things to you clearly. You spend the whole day angry at your boss and thinking about leaving the company altogether.

You are telling yourself a story: Bad things keep happening to me. Why can't I get a break? What's wrong with other people?

Respond via a positive mindset -

Place of empathy -

After you get off the call, you try to change your energy to positive. You do an activity that helps increase your energy and change your negative to positive mindset - listening to music, going for a walk, going to the gym, etc. Once you have changed your perspective to positive, you think about what happened and forgive yourself. Instead of blaming yourself throughout the day, you spend some time thinking about what you would do differently next time, and write an email to your manager on how you would re-work the deliverable, clarifying the objectives and adding details on how you would avoid this happening in the future

You are telling yourself a story: I made a mistake,, which is OKAY! I am going to work on correcting it and learning from it.

or

Place of opportunity -

Everything is an opportunity for something. This isn't easy to do in the first attempt, so I will say start with empathy and then slowly move to the place of opportunity.

Your mind cannot think straight in a negative mindset, and empathy for yourself helps you make that switch from a negative to a positive mindset. Once you are in a positive mindset, think about what the opportunity is here. For example, there is a big opportunity here to learn from your mistakes and get better at what you do.

There are three different ways you can think of opportunity in a situation -

• Ask yourself what knowledge I would gain from this adversity, which will result in a larger pay-out in the future.

• What power or strength must I grow to handle this challenge?

• What skills am I learning from this mistake? How is this helping me grow?

In every situation, you have a choice in which story you tell yourself - the one that increases your energy and changes your mindset to positive, or the one that decreases your energy and gives your mind a reason to go into a negative spiral.