...and keeping open to changing them
Transcript of this video:
I’ve been interested in the practice of storytelling for quite some time.
I’ve often been running online processes called story circles where we get to share stories and one aspect of this I’ve been more interested in lately is: are we telling stories or are our stories telling us?
Because I think it’s quite easy to get attached to stories of ourselves.
Oh, in my case, for example, the story that I’m an introvert, that I like these kinds of things that I don’t like those kinds of things.
And the other day I went to what most people would call a networking event.
And I don’t do that very often because my story is that I hate them and that they’re boring.
So I was sitting in this networking event thinking, oh, this, this is really boring.
I must remember not to come to these things.
But in that moment I decided to stay there and choose to be bored.
Rhen I thought oh that’s kind of interesting that I’m staying with boring.
What is it about this event this speaker in fact that’s boring?
He doesn’t seem to be very exciting and then I noticed that he was actually telling us about a very successful business that he’d been running but he was managing not to make it very interesting and I wondered what was going on
And I slowly perceived that this guy actually was quite interesting, that the matter-of-factness, the mundaneness, if you like, mundanity, with which he was narrating his life was sort of in contrast with his success.
And I started to think, oh, actually, this entrepreneur is quite intriguing because he’s not telling the conventional
pivot-laden driven version of entrepreneurship but it’s almost like his success happened almost accidentally or synchronistically to him and then I started to realis,e oh actually what he’s done is it seems to me like his business progress has been not massively effortful because he’s just a natural connector and things seem to come to him naturally
And then his story became more interesting and the story that I told myself that I don’t like networking events and I’m easily bored well that story about myself started to change and I started to tell a new story to myself, a more interesting one.
