How often have you stopped to consider that some of your beliefs about yourself or the world around you may be completely false? For most of us, it’s a rare occasion, unless a particular belief is overtly challenged in some undeniable way. We resist this kind of critical self examination as if our very identity is at stake. But it’s useful to set ego aside and consider that we may have a story about our life that is not only inaccurate, but is holding us back in profound ways.
Tabula Rasa No More
It is often said that we start life as a blank slate. While genetic science might prove this to be not entirely true, let’s assume for the sake of this discussion that it is mostly true. We are born as infants with a blank slate, just eating, breathing and pooping. Then we begin to accumulate experiences. With the guidance of well-intentioned parents and other teachers, we learn to perceive each experience as positive or negative, good or bad, happy or sad. We learn to ascribe meaning to these experiences and become very efficient meaning-makers. And while the experiences fade over time, perhaps even disappearing from our memory, we carry the meanings we have created into the present and use them to make decisions that affect our future.
Certainly this phenomenon has served a purpose from an evolutionary standpoint. Our survival as individuals and as a species required us to make judgments about the world around us, and ascribe meaning to these experiences, so that we could make future decisions more likely to result in our survival. But in modern life, where sabre-toothed tigers are rare and most of our perceived threats are social in nature, our meaning-making takes on a different value.
It’s the Bike, Stupid
When I was a child, my family lived in an idyllic rural neighborhood surrounded by dense pine forest. For Christmas one year, I got a bicycle. It was a Schwinn, very basic but a perfectly good bike for a child, and I loved it. I excitedly rode over to a friend’s house, and it just so happened he had also just gotten a bike. His was a Diamondback BMX bike with pegs on the back wheel and a gyro on the front. This was the height of the BMX craze in the 1980’s and the Diamondback was the bike every kid wanted. We met up with some friends to go ride in the woods, where the older neighborhood kids had built bike trails complete with berms and ramps.
When we raced, I was left in the dust, always lagging behind. When we jumped the ramps, I could never catch much air, crashing more often than not. “Well”, I thought, “I’m not very good at this. I must be slow because I can’t keep up. I must be weak, because I can’t catch any air.”
Never did I consider that their bikes were made for this. They were lighter, and therefore faster and more maneuverable. My bike was heavy and made for pavement. But my story, the meaning I assigned to this experience, was firmly in place. Even though the bikes were a big factor, it didn’t matter. This was my story now. This was my truth. “I am slow and weak.”
What decisions did I make in the formative years to follow that were influenced by my story about myself? A story that wasn’t even true!
Your Story: Fact or Fiction
As humans, we are constantly making judgments about ourselves, others, and the world around us that have no basis in objective reality. We ascribe meaning to events that simply isn’t there, never looking back to consider we might have gotten it wrong. We cling to these stories as absolute truth, even long after we’ve forgotten the experience that led us there.
In allowing these stories we have created to guide our decisions and shape our worldview, we give the past a huge amount of power and influence over our lives. Living out our long-held stories, based on mistaken conclusions, is yet another way we allow our past to rob us of our present. Instead of making decisions and choices on their own merit, rooted in the present, we place limits on ourselves and deny ourselves opportunities in all areas of life.
What would happen if we could revisit some of these stories, especially about ourselves, and let them go? It is impossible to overstate the level of transformation available to us when we learn to leave our past in the past.
Consider the woman who has been obese her entire life, and at 45 years old loses two hundred pounds and starts running marathons. Or the addict who gets sober, turns their life around, and goes on to succeed in career and family. It happens all the time. Some circumstance prompted these people to look beyond their story and question something they believed.
We don’t have to wait for that moment. Start right now. Look inside yourself and name the thing that’s holding you back. Behind it, you will find a story. It’s your story. And it’s probably a work of fiction.