It's Time To Remix Your Stories To Serve YOU!
Most of us get into the habit of telling stories in a specific way. We might take a positive perspective, express them using neutral emotions, or perhaps, imbue them with negative undertones. Either way, our stories become self-fulfilling. Whatever we say becomes the story we live up to and, in some cases, live down to. So, here’s a reminder to Remix your stories into something that serves you, something you desire, the best representation of you.
Hold Truths Loosely!
People tell stories with an unconscious purpose in mind. We may want to evoke a specific emotion. We might want the listener to see us in a positive light or perhaps to empathise with us. Ironically, most of the time, WE are the listener! We are conveying the story to meet our own listening desires.
In actual fact, there are no truths about our past. Everything we perceive is done so through the lens of our emotions, beliefs, values, and any other associations we have with that memory.
Simply applying our current mindset (which is generally more expanded than our historical one) can deliver a more empowering perception.
Another insight that we might want to consider is the need to be right. Needing to be correct, or right is one of the greatest barriers to happiness, joy, and creation. This need is driven by a lack of trust and a presence of inferiority or a hierarchical mindset. Either way, it’s futile in the pursuit of creating a life we love. If you take anything from this article, accept my invitation to let this one go. We grow exponentially once we can!
I invite you to experiment with some of your past stories for the specific purpose of using what you learn to enjoy letting go of limitations, making better choices, and unleashing your powers of creativity.
What Is Your Truth?
Here’s a little exercise to get you started. Are you ready?
1. Tell a short story about your life, enough to fill a 2-minute time slot.
2 Now tell the story again as if it were the saddest story in the whole world. Speak quietly and slowly, in a low monotonous tone. Slump your shoulders, wrap your arms around yourself in protection mode and give your best melancholy performance.
3. Next, get yourself into the present moment. Notice what you see in front of you, raise your awareness of the sounds in the room, the temperature, and speak out what you can perceive with your senses. You might even choose to take a sip of water.
4. Then consider your original story. You’re going to tell it as if you were on stage giving a “Stand Up Comedy” performance or as if you’re writing the script for a farce movie comedy. Imagine yourself trying to make people laugh. What would make you giggle for 5 minutes or laugh if you heard this story?
5. How did each of those stories feel when you told them? Did you experience them in the same way or differently?
6. Now ask yourself, “What can I learn from that experience?” and more importantly, “Which one is my truth?”
It's Just A Habit And We Can Change Them
In Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), we think of remembering the stories of our past as just a habit of using a specific neurological pathway. As we run that particular route in our brain, we activate images, sounds, feelings, and sensations along the way.
This activation creates a specific representation of that event in our minds. Moreover, our perception of how we interacted with that event shapes the way we perceive who we are as a person.
The stories we tell ourselves and the meanings we give to these stories dictate where we go and what we create in our life experiences.
When that self-perception delivers us high self-esteem and self-confidence, it can be helpful to rerun those stories regularly. Conversely, where the way we remember your history compounds a lack of self-belief, it might be time to remix your stories!
The simple rule is this. If you tell a story to someone and it feels as if it has an unhelpful emotional charge, or it presents you as a victim or helpless being, you’re yet to identify or accept the learning and release the unhelpful emotion.
For those of you who are thinking, “if what I say is what happened, I can’t just re-write history and make it up!” I’m telling you that you can. Additionally, I ask you this, “what’s more important: to be happy or to be right?”
Only you can know. Clearly, only you can appreciate the emotional, belief, and values distortions operating in your world at that time. With that awareness in mind, is your truth still valid?
How Do You Remix Your Stories?
Have you noticed how cyclical the music industry is? If you’re old enough you’ll notice songs on the radio that listened to as a teenager and have now been totally remixed to sound quite different.
A remixed song often has a completely different vibe, emotional charge, and rhythm. Perhaps one part of the song has been changed to rap, or maybe additional lyrics have been inserted. These changes can convey an entirely different meaning, even though the original remains recognisable. The chorus frequently sounds similar to act as a memory-jog or trigger, making the song sound comfortable and familiar.
This is the exact process you can use to ‘remix your stories’.
Consider one of your stories. Pick an event that feels disempowering or embarrassing when you remember it. This time, speak out the story from the perspective of positivity. Why was so good about this experience for you? What did you learn? Was the event a useful way for you to develop new skills? Look at it through the lens of it being one of the best experiences of your life and tell that story.
How does it feel now? Perhaps you might want to change a few details, use different words, add more speed, or have a different rhythm to the story.
Also, remember that everything is relative. It’s useful to remix the story in a more factual way, rather than from the judgemental perspective we may have experienced it in. For example, rather than saying “he was mean” you might say “he expressed exactly what was on his mind”. Let’s put it in the context of lack of understanding. Rather than saying “I was too stupid to understand”, you might want to say, this concept was really hard for me to grasp in school and I still went on to study this subject at university.”
If you find yourself using limiting statements, for example, “I can’t do this”, you can use time to reframe it in your mind. “I just hadn’t found the trigger for understanding yet” or “I hadn’t discovered the easy way of doing that yet”.
Forgiveness Is The Icing On The Cake!
Negative or unhelpful storytelling operates in a similar way to a parasite or virus. The survival of the story kills our dreams and our potential.
It’s worth making empowering changes to your beliefs by taking the time to remix your stories. If you want to take it a step further you can simultaneously practice radical forgiveness of self and everyone else in your life; past present and future.
Forgiveness is the bridge to potential. The act of forgiveness supports us in releasing festering emotions, realising the learning opportunities in everything, accepting the situation and unleashing our authentic selves on the world.
When we forgive, we step into our power.
Empower Yourself Daily – Listen To & Speak Out This Daily RANTRA for 21 days and UNLEASH The Real You On The World!
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