How Our Stories Define Us

If I asked you to describe how you came to be who you are today what words would you use, what stories would you tell?

As a child were you well behaved or did you challenge the rules? In school were you fun-loving and popular, or the studious type, a bit of a loner?

What are your greatest accomplishments and most painful regrets?

Would you describe yourself as rich or poor, pretty or plain, professional or homemaker, successful or failure, married or single?

Has race, ethnic background, sexual preference, or religion become driving forces in your life?

These are just a few of the experiences and circumstances that may have formed the stories you tell yourself and others about who you are, where you’re from, and where you are going.

But just to be clear, no matter how compelling, experiences and circumstances do not define you.

It is your response to the events of your life that give your story context and determine how you see yourself and the world around you.

You Are Not What Happens to You

How you define yourself affects your relationships, the choices you make, and your overall perception of life.

What if the circumstances of your life change? What if the labels and stories you have come to rely on no longer fit?

People who are smart, well-liked, and successful in their jobs can still be laid off.

One study estimated that more than 400,000 small businesses closed in the first three months of the pandemic upending the lives of owners and employees alike.

Have you ever known someone who retired and instead of enjoying their newfound free time ended up feeling lost and miserable because their work had become such an integral part of their identity and sense of worth?

Maybe you have experienced a catastrophic illness or accident, the death of a loved one, or struggled with substance abuse.

Because of the consuming nature of such events, it’s easy to let them become who we are; the divorcee, the widow, cancer, or abuse survivor.

But these experiences do not define you, it is how you respond to the events of your life that represent the essence of who you are.

The strongest force in the human personality is the need to remain consistent with how you define yourself. ~Anthony Robbins

You Have the Power to Define Yourself

Recently I met a young man I’ll call Bill who shared the following story.

After years of struggle, failure, and misery, he finally managed to break free of the cycle of addiction and for the first time began thinking about the future and what that might look like for him.

He decided he wanted to go back to school to get his degree.

His years of addiction had left him with few resources and a diminished support system, none of whom supported his fragile new dream.

Well-meaning others felt going back to school might be too stressful, too much pressure, and urged him to avoid the risk.

But he believed he could do it, needed to do it for himself.

Today Bill is working on the final leg of his thesis and just a few months away from earning his Ph.D. in Psychology.

It wasn’t easy by a long shot, but he made the decision to take charge of his life, and he wasn’t going to do it halfway.

We can’t always control the challenges we face in life, but we always, always have the power to choose our response.

The clearer you are about who you are and what you stand for, the easier it will be to reach your true potential as you build a life that you can be proud of.

For me, the following quotation from Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. beautifully illustrates the power of choosing to define yourself.

When you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it.

Don’t just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead, or the unborn couldn’t do it any better.

If it is your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.

The reality is that if you do not decide who you will be and what you will stand for in this your only life, other people, and society, in general, will gladly do it for you.

I challenge you to give some thought to how you are defining yourself now and whether it might be time to write a new story and then ask yourself one question.

Will you be the passenger or the driver on the journey?