Is It Really Your Story You Are Living?

When we experience the world directly, our conclusions have immediate credibility. That is not to say that our intepretations are free of distortion and inaccuracy; we are, after all, spectacularly subjective creatures. But we trust that personally experiencing a situation yields a certain baseline of accuracy and insight.

Because of our unique capacity for language, however, human beings need not experience something directly to understand it, partially or sometimes even fully. Unlike other living creatures, who learn solely from their own experiences, man learns both from his own experienceas well as – through storytelling – the experiences of others. Someone tells us a story and we are touched, we sympathize, we empathize, we are outraged, we are outraged, we understand, we come to conclusions.

And that is also where we get into problems.

Faulty assumptions

Your story is made up of elements of which you had no direct experience; it is partly built, if you will, with bricks that are not your own. You did not buy them, you do not know where they came from, you do not know what is inside them. Much of the material of your life story is based on assumptions – in short, on information whose factuality and/or truth you cannot, to an extent, verify.

Even when we know we make assumptions, we continue to do so, unconsciously. Our brain does it for us.  We are very good in making assumptions. Some of our assumptions are shaped by narrative templates we have grown up with. We will take selected facts from our lives and assume we are inevitably living one or another kind of classic story. While each life story is unique, many people stick to culturally sanctioned scripts.

When we make faulty assumptions about major issues – work, family, health, happiness –  it can have devastating effects on our lives.  For example :

• The only way I can meet the demands of my business is to work longer and harder
• My business is who I am. Without my business and my money I am nodbody
• My drive for my business is what gets me out of the bed in the morning. Nothing else will.
• When i make more money I will be happier and feel better about myself.
• I cannot be  happy and be under so much constant stress. Happiness is freedom from stress.
• No one in my situation could find happiness
• My happiness will come when I achieve financial freedom.
• Success and happiness go hand in hand

Quest:  Identify three possible faulty assumptions you are probably making right now.

All assumptions have consequences in your storytelling. Faulty assumptions always lead to faulty, disfunctional stories. If we are to get our stories right, then we must acknowledge that much of the material we base our lives and business on is assumptions. Then we must verify the truth or falsehood of those assumptions.

So where did these faulty assumptions come from and how do we know for sure that they are faulty? It can be extraordinary difficult to trace the origin of our stories about the world, and coming to terms with the truth of our assumptions is a lifelong, never-ending pursuit. After all, have we not telling ourselves a story for a very long time?