ONCE UPON A TIME IN A LAND FAR FAR AWAY… ARE YOU TURNING ON THE ENDORPHINS OR FLOODING YOURSELF WITH NEVER ENDING RIVERS OF CORTISOL?

What’s your spin on life today? Specifically, your life. It’s your call. Really, seriously it is.

Attitude is everything.

I know, you’ve heard that one a gazillion times if you’ve heard it once. In fact, it’s one of those things that’s said so often that at some point it just plain old stops meaning anything. But just for a few minutes here, let’s actually lean into it. Attitude is everything.

How you tell yourself the story of what’s happening to you sets the tone for that story, i.e. it sets the tone for your life.

Give the same 9 facts to 7 different story tellers and let them tell the story any way they choose, set a deadline and cut them loose….

…you’re going to get 7 sensationally different stories. A romantic comedy… A great Russian saga a la Dostoyevski… A Gone With the Wind epic… Or maybe a Huckleberry Finn ride down the river.

We get stuck in facts. The facts are the facts. Right? They’re the truth. Right? We should pay really close attention to them. Right?

Wrong!

The “story” sets the tone. It sets your mood. It determines how much cortisol is flowing through your body or how many endorphins (our happy little friends) are firing in your brain.

The facts of your story aren’t nearly as important as how you tell yourself about those facts.

  • Are you a victim?
  • A hero?
  • A martyr?
  • A helper?
  • Do people take advantage of you or are you on an epic quest?
  • A lover?
  • A hater?

Major game changers.

The lens you use to narrate your story actually changes your story.

Imagine that you run a huge newspaper. You’ve got a really creative, talented staff working for you. They’re bringing you stories all day long. You give some of them the thumbs up and you crumple and smash others into the trashcan. “We don’t print garbage like that!”

You have editorial control. It’s your paper.

It’s YOUR life. You have total and complete editorial control. No one, but you, can tell you how to think or what to think. Your are the storyteller supreme of your life.

But before you take off gang busters getting all Polyanna positive on yourself, let’s also be clear that you and I are human beings. And sometimes life comes at us and we react and we feel like we’ve just been broadsided by a truck full of manure! We’re most likely not going to sit, all bruised up, covered in sh*t in the middle of the highway telling ourselves a really cool story about how lucky we are that this happened and that we’re on such an incredible adventure.

But what you can do is start being aware of the power of your story and the power of how you tell your story.

You can start to become massively curious about what makes you feel good and what makes you feel bad. Next time you feel like total and absolute crap, just stop for a few moments and listen in to the conversation that’s going on in your head.

What’s your story teller going on about? I guarantee that if you’re feeling lousy, your little inner story teller is going to town with the victimy/”life is lousy”/”I’m no good and never will be” story lines.

So I really hope that you’ll start paying attention to the stories you’re putting out in your brain. I hope you’ll start getting uber curious about them and maybe even rewrite some of the ones that leave you feeling lousy.

And remember, this is a skill. If you haven’t taken a lot of editorial control over your life, there will be a bit of an onramp. Be gentle about it. It’s acquired. The more you practice it, the more you put it to use, the better you’ll get at it. And oh yeah, sidebar here, the happier and better you’ll feel.

And like everything else, the more you focus on something the more it grows. So if you start seriously focusing on positive story lines, the Universe is going to pitch in and start sending you ideas along the way of how to spin a certain situation. And then…. it gets even better… because as you start to feel better in general because you’re taking back the reigns of your runaway “newspaper” you start to feel better. And as you start to feel better… well, what you focus on grows, so you start to attract more “feels better.”

And so on, and so on, and so on…

Be easy about all this. Play with it. Have fun with it. Explore. Be curious.

And remember…. It’s a new moment.

It’s your moment. It’s your life. It’s your call. Tag, you’re it.

 

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