THE POWER OF YOUR STORY

Five days to discover the story you are living — and the story you want to live.

Your story is your life.

Every day, we tell ourselves stories about who we are, what has happened to us, what is possible and what is not. Stories about our work, our families, our health, our friendships, our happiness. Some of these stories give us courage and direction. Others quietly keep us exactly where we are.

The difficulty is that we rarely notice that we are telling them.

For decades, I have asked people one question before we take a single step:

In which areas of my life is it clear that I cannot achieve my goals with the story I’ve got?

The answer is where your journey begins.

A five-day journey into your own story

The Power of Your Story is a five-day personal journey through the stories that shape your life.

We don’t spend five days sitting in a classroom talking about storytelling.

We walk.

We explore cities filled with extraordinary stories — the lives of writers, artists, entrepreneurs, leaders, rebels, lovers, outsiders and visionaries. Their lives become mirrors through which you can look at your own.

Along the way, you will explore five essential dimensions of your story:

Your Story Around Work

What story are you living about success, ambition, money, contribution and achievement?

What would you still want to do if you no longer had anything to prove?

Your Story Around Family

Which stories did you inherit from your parents and family?

Which of those stories still shape the choices you make — and which ones are ready to be rewritten?

Your Story Around Health

What does your body tell you about the life you are actually living?

Are the choices you make today taking you towards the life you want to live, or away from it?

Your Story Around Friendship

Who are the people with whom you become more fully yourself?

What stories about friendship, belonging and connection are you carrying with you?

Your Story Around Happiness and Purpose

What does happiness mean to you now?

What would make the next chapter of your life genuinely worth living?

And what is the purpose that would make you willing to take a risk for it?

The stories of others become mirrors for your own

In Paris, we might stand before Notre-Dame and ask what Victor Hugo’s story teaches us about loss, exile and creation.

We might walk through the streets of Passy and discover what Honoré de Balzac’s extraordinary relationship with work tells us about ambition and the price of achievement.

At Père Lachaise, Chopin can make us question what we are willing to sacrifice for our work — and what we are unwilling to sacrifice for our health.

At Montparnasse, Baudelaire can make us look differently at the stories we inherited from our families.

At a Parisian café, the friendships of Hemingway and his contemporaries can become a mirror for our own relationships.

And in front of the memorial to Jean Moulin, we can ask the most important question of all:

What is the purpose that would make you cross the plank?

These are not history lessons.

They are invitations to look at your own life differently.

Your story is not finished

The most important story you will ever work on is not a novel, a business story or a presentation.

It is your own.

During these five days, you will look at the story you have been living, the events that have shaped it, the characters who have influenced it, the choices you have made and the stories you have told yourself about them.

And then you will begin to write differently.

Not by pretending that the past did not happen.

But by deciding what meaning you give it — and what happens next.

Because your past may explain your story.

It does not have to determine its ending.

Testdrive your story

Take the first steps towards making it real.

Go out and walk.

Look at your life through other people’s stories.

Discover the hero or heroine you have already been.

And decide what story you want to live next.

What Story Are You Living Now?

PRACTICAL INFORMATION