What We Miss In The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Are you dealing with relationship tension or conflict this holiday season? Feeling bitter or resentful toward anyone? Consider, just for a moment, that there may be another side to the story you’re telling yourself.
Here’s an example: A client recently hired me to coach their leadership team, a process that started with me interviewing each of the leaders and their direct reports. During the course of the interviews, two people described to me how the VP of Sales got special treatment from the CEO.
For his part, the CEO said friendship played no role in his working relationship with the VP of Sales. He did note, however, that the VP of Engineering was too tactical, which constrained the contributions from others.
As for the VP of Engineering’s version of events? Well, no question — it was the CEO who was too involved in operations, and that’s what was forcing the VP of Engineering to get into tactical details.
And on and on went the contradictory perceptions…
The team wasn’t a mess. They just told themselves different stories to explain what was happening.
Everyone Chooses What to Include in Their Version of the Story
Human beings make sense of their lives by telling stories. We name characters as heroes and villains, laying out the plot of major life events, along with challenges faced and suffering endured. But there’s a problem with telling ourselves stories. Sometimes our stories are different from the stories that the people we live and work with are telling themselves about the same characters and events. Same facts. Different narratives.
In their book Make It Stick, Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel write:
We gravitate to the narratives that best explain our emotions. In this way, narrative and memory become one. Narrative provides not only meaning but also a mental framework for imbuing future experiences and information with meaning, in effect shaping new memories to fit our established constructs of the world and ourselves…. Memory can be distorted in many ways. People interpret a story in light of their world knowledge, imposing order where none had been present so as to make a more logical story…and we fill in the gaps with details of our own that are consistent with our narrative but may be wrong.
Regardless of the pain or difficulty of the circumstances, people will apply either positive or negative meaning to the events in their story, shaping what Julie Beck calls a “redemption sequence” or a “contamination sequence.” So, while one person might conclude the worst about someone’s intentions or the outcome of an event, another person might assume positive intent or be optimistic about the outcomes. Even with the same events and characters, the story could end up as a comedy, drama, or horror. It all depends on who’s telling it.
What to Do with Competing Storylines
Conflicting narratives can create enormous tension in workplaces, families, and communities. How do we go about resolving it? Here are a few steps to consider:
- Accept that we all have a narrative…but no narrative is perfect. Realizing that you’ve developed a narrative about the people around you should soften your approach. Don’t be too quick to criticize, judge, or diagnose a situation. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman illuminates the cognitive biases that we all apply to understanding and making decisions too quickly. Human beings take pieces of information about people and circumstances and make fast decisions — usually flawed ones.
- Listen to other stories without judgment. What’s the best way to mitigate your own flawed story? Listen with curiosity to other stories. Legal proceedings should include more than one witness. Important medical diagnoses should get a second opinion. You and I should be open to another perspective. The book Crucial Conversations, a top-selling guide for dealing with high-stakes dialogue, advises listening to each other’s stories as a way to diffuse emotionally charged conflict.
- Tell your story with an openness to revision. When it’s your turn to tell the story, be receptive to edits. Try saying, “This is the story I’m telling myself. I’m sure I’m not getting it all right. What am I missing? How are you seeing it?” This humility opens dialogue and reduces defensiveness.
- Work with someone outside the story. Consider whether you might need a counselor, therapist, minister, or human resources department to facilitate discussion without bias. As long as they aren’t invested stakeholders in the story, they can help by creating a psychologically safe environment, asking questions to generate dialogue, and offering objective insights about what’s happening.
- Redeem the story. Will the story be told as a redemption sequence or a contamination sequence? Ultimately, it’s our choice. Even the worst crimes, the worst tragedies, and the biggest disappointments can be viewed perhaps not as positive, but redemptive nonetheless. In other words, goodness can be derived from even the hardest narratives. This goodness can transcend conflicting narratives with our family, friends, and colleagues. We may have different stories, but we’re not resentful or bitter, because we can redeem the pain and hardship.
You and I tell stories to make meaning of our lives. It’s good and healthy to do it. Just recognize that we don’t have the only side to the story. It will lead to better relationships.
What stories have you been telling yourself?
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