Self Improvement | Mental Health | Proof

It’s all in the stories we tell.

Humans are wired to make up stories about our circumstances. We want to understand our surroundings and telling stories give them meaning.

The stories we tell to our friends and children put our actions in context.

Sometimes we use them to justify our actions to ourselves.

We tell them because we don’t want to think about how we affect our lives by how we live them. We aren’t comfortable with big changes.

We tell them so we don’t have to take risks or make changes. We’ve finally carved out a safe place — a routine in our lives.

At first we tell ourselves a story to so we can feel better about our decisions.

Sometimes the stories aren’t exactly true, but we need to believe they are.

The stories justify how we act. We get to keep our view of the world if it matches our story. We think the story is probably true and then we repeat it so many times that we are sure it must be true.

Justification

Eventually, we are so sure the stories are true, we look for evidence.

We look for proof to justify the stories.

We forget that anything else could be possible. We don’t want to consider whether we could choose another way of living, a way where we could do what makes us feel happy and alive.

“Sneaky thoughts that perpetuate stories will kill my aliveness in a second.”-Seducing Aliveness, 2017

Our minds continuously look for patterns; they look for proof — things that fit the stories, instead of asking what is possible now. We make up stories that deny the way things really are.

We deny what’s happening in our lives and make up reasons for why things are the way they are.

Denial stories let us continue to do the same Aliveness Killing things we always do. These are the kinds of things that don’t let us experiment with life. They are judgments that separate us from other people.

“Is that true, or is it a story I’m perpetuating and gathering evidence for?”-Seducing Aliveness, 2017

We are so embedded in our stories that we dismiss the idea of anything else.

We are so busy gathering evidence we don’t see any other way to live.

As a result, we refuse to walk through the door of possibility.

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