Update: You can find the follow-ups to to this post here: The Secret Stories You Tell Yourself and The Lies You Tell The World.

I love stories. Captivated is far too weak a word to describe my fascination.  They enthrall me. I am so emotionally open to the power of storytelling that I will laugh, rage, cry and sigh with every chapter I read or scene that I watch. I love it when an artist can breathe human nature into a story.

We practice storytelling for many reasons: To learn, to grow, to be impacted, to emote, to communicate, to entertain, to give, to receive, to relate, to relax, to let go, to be, and for many more.

Storytelling is so ingrained in our psyche, that we weave stories for our past, our future and our present.

We each have three stories: The one we tell ourselves, the one we tell the world, and our true story. I’ll be writing a post on each of these in the coming week, but for now, I’d like to give you a bit of a taste for what each these are.

Think of these three as a book.  The story you tell the world is your cover.  The stories you tell yourself are the pages.  Your true story is the actual story, the words on the page.  A story is neither the cover nor the pages – it is the meaning of the words held inside each.

The Story You Tell Yourself

You run your life on stories. Many of them have labels. To use myself as an example: I’m an artist, I am creative, I am a blogger, I am a brother, I am a son, I am a boyfriend, etc.

While these direct a large part of your life, they don’t compare to the subconscious storytelling that you internalize. Sometimes these stories are secret, the ones that you tell yourself but no one else.

Do you need to be in control? Do you play the victim? Do you have to be everything for everybody so that you feel worthwhile ? Do you want to express love in everything that you do? Do you want to be a good example to your children? Do you just want to be happy?

These questions can run just below the surface of everything you do. They drive the choices that you make. The more you grok your stories, the more you will live a conscious, self aware life.

You can choose to write your own or you can let the world write a story onto you. The choice is yours. This story is powerful.

How it is written will change your life.

The Story You Tell The World

This story is your marketing pitch.

You’ve got it all together, everything is under control, and and of course, you’re doing wonderfully.

Or maybe you’re doing “fine”, but you’re never feeling like crap.

There is so much pressure in our society to have a perfect image. We all want the perfect life, so we tell the world that our family, our finances, and our careers are great.

Sometimes we find a little courage and we say they aren’t great, but we are working on improving them.

There is power in this story too; for better or worse.

Many bloggers leverage their life story to spread their message and to create authority and credibility. No matter how dark your life gets, there is a market for sharing life lessons learned, blogger or not.  Your darkness can fuel your desire to change the world.

You can also torture yourself with this story. The farther your life is from the story that you tell the world, the more pain and stress you will experience.

Your True Story

There are two parts to the true story. The first is purely historical. To put it bluntly, it is the truth that will be told about you when you die, based on the things you said, did and owned. Boring.

The second and more important: Your true story is the integration between the story you tell yourself and the story you tell the world.

The saying goes, “Ignorance is bliss.” Criminy, that’s tantamount to telling people to stay unaware so that others can keep exploi- woops, I shouldn’t go there

I’d prefer the saying was, “Authenticity is bliss.” When we drop the fronts and we live with transparent authenticity, our lives unfold in a way that is fulfilling.

“Authenticity is bliss”

When we give up the limiting stories we have about ourselves and we eliminate the gap between reality and what our lives actually are, we find our true story. We find ourselves, naked and beautiful and perfect.

Many people don’t even know what their true story looks like.  You can start to learn your true story by finding your One Burning Question.  Find your truth.  After many years of moving toward integrity, I’m beginning to see fuzzy shapes and colors of what mine is. I hope to help you move towards more clarity about yours.

Live your true story.

Stay Tuned

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If you can master your stories, you can master your life.

Excited?!  Me too!  There is much more to expand on in each of these stories, and I hope that you can explore your own story as I write about these. I’ll be sharing more about my own stories in the process, and sincerely hope that my example will serve you.

In the mean time… start thinking about your own stories. What do you tell yourself? What do you tell the world? What is your true story?

And if you get the itch… start sharing them in the comments.