Change Your Narrative, Change Your World
A version of this post originally appeared on GovLoop on April 14, 2021.
By Jill Barrett, Evolve Impact Founder & Managing Partner
To be a leader requires more than self-awareness; it involves some understanding of how you became who you are, and where you are going. This is your story, your narrative. Your personal narrative influences your possibilities, including many of your experiences at work. Want to change your world? Change the story you tell yourself.
Why Narrative Matters
Our personal narrative is the story we construct about what is happening from our particular point of view. It’s how we make sense of our situation and the world. Our narrative is shaped by our biology, gifts and strengths, as well as our family, culture and language.
By consciously shifting our narrative, we can open up new possibilities that, when combined with new actions, lead to completely different outcomes. What a huge promise!
Step 1: Get Curious About Your Present Narrative
The thing about narrative is it mostly operates in the background so that we can focus on other things like solving complex problems, communicating with teammates and completing all the pressing activities of the day.
To change your life, take a good look at the story you’re living in.
Take out a journal or a piece of paper and run through these questions:
How do I see myself right now?
How do I see others?
How am I acting?
How am I relating to my environment?
How is all of this serving me?
How is all of this affecting me?
Another thing you can do is have authentic conversations with a diverse set of people (including your constituents and your stakeholders) where you are humble about your perspective. You can ask them: How do you see me? How are you affected by me? What you may be overlooking can begin to come into view, helping you develop a more honest understanding of yourself.
Step 2: Imagine a Different Way of Being
Many people are surprised to learn that their current narrative isn’t really serving them. What to do about it? You can begin to construct a different, more expansive story.
Good stories require a great deal of imagination, and this is the often-dismissed part of the change management process. So, we need to open up our minds. Research shows that spending time with art, nature, relationships, books, all of this actually transforms the pathways in our brain so we can think differently, think bigger, get inspired.
Good stories require imagination, and imagination is often undervalued in approaches to change. Experiences with art, nature, relationships and books can interrupt habitual patterns of attention and help us encounter different perspectives and possibilities. To learn more, see this article on the neuroscience of visioning.
Refer back to your journal and explore a new narrative that is more expansive, more invigorating. You can ask yourself:
Who do I want to be one year from now?
How will I be relating to others?
What will I be doing?
How will I be engaging with my environment?
How will this serve me?
What will it feel like?
Take time to really explore your passions and values and imagine what can be brought forth with compassionate attention.
Leverage Your Creative Tension
By looking at your current narrative and exploring a more exciting future narrative, you will leverage the concept of Creative Tension, which emerged from organizational consultant Robert Fritz and was expanded upon by Peter Senge at MIT Sloan School of Management. See your current state and ideal future state as opposite sides of a rubber band. The clearer you are about your current state and the clearer you become about your ideal future state, the greater the creative tension between them. That tension can become energy for movement and change.
Worth a try? Absolutely. But narrative does not change through imagination alone. New possibilities become meaningful when we begin acting from them.
Bring another person into the process. Ask someone you trust to help you notice when you fall back into an old story and when your actions begin to reflect the new one. Better yet, explore these questions with your team.
A different narrative does not guarantee a different future. But it can allow us to see and act on possibilities that the old narrative kept invisible.