Do You Know What Your Story Is Really About?
Whenever I hear my friends tell stories, I am baffled by how great they are.
Their stories have detailed characters, rich plots, and vivid settings.
These stories are told without any preparation.
Every now and then, I’ll hear one of these friends repeat a story.
When they repeat a story, I notice that they think their story is about one thing.
While I perceive it as a wholly different thing.
A lot of the stories we tell are not fully understood by us.
We are looking at the surface level too much.
But if we peel back the layers, we’d see that the story was shedding a deeper insight into human nature.
Our human nature.
Our stories are fragments of our subconscious mind exposing itself to our conscious mind.
The Non-Promoted Friend
Last year, I was talking to a buddy who was venting about his work.
He said that for the last few years, he felt like he reached a ceiling at work.
He was heavily underpaid, and his bosses didn’t seem to care.
I was baffled by his analysis.
My friend told me that he hadn’t made much of an effort at his job.
He hated the 9-5 grind and wanted to leave.
So, he was working on a business on the side and giving his work minimal priority.
Of course, his bosses were going to return that same energy!
One day, the bosses took my friend to a room for an evaluation.
They gave him ‘okays’ on all of his assessment.
Getting “okays” was enough to not get fired but was definitely not enough to get promoted.
Once the evaluation was done, my friend asked his bosses about a raise.
The bosses processed what he just said and looked like they were about to laugh.
My friend asked what the matter was.
That’s when the bosses said.
‘We didn’t know you wanted a raise. We thought you were going to quit.’
The Quitter’s Mentality
I heard my friend share that story a few times.
He said that moment made him focus more on his career.
Each time he repeated the story, he kept talking about the “quit” part.
This was quite insightful because I’ve heard different stories from this buddy.
I heard stories of when he was playing basketball as a kid.
His coach said the same thing to him once.
After a game, the coach singled him out.
‘Y’all can thank Sam for us losing the game! He quit on me and all of you guys.’
He was labeled a quitter so young.
Each time he told the story, each time he showed the most energy on the “we thought you were going to quit” part.
The friend would ask for reassurance.
‘Can you believe it, Armani? He really thought I was going to quit.’
I thought:
‘He wasn’t wrong. If your business succeeded, then you would have quit. Your manager could sense that half-hearted effort in your 9-5 job because your side hustle was consuming most of your energy.’
What the Story Was Really About
On a surface level, the story seems like it was about a guy who wasn’t given a promotion.
He felt pain and decided he would do better.
But if you look deeper, the story was about something entirely different.
- It was about the child self showing its face in the adult self.
- It was about the fear of being labeled a label that we despise.
- And it was about not letting history repeat itself.
I was able to spot these insights because I had known this buddy for over 12 years.
I’ve seen many moments where this guy had a lot of pressure on him, and he came up short.
Then this guy would vent about how others criticized him.
Due to having information about his life, I was able to extract a pattern of what the story was really about.
How do you spot what the story is really about if you don’t know the person?
More importantly…
How do you know what YOUR story is really about?
A lot of times, we will be telling a story thinking it’s about one thing.
But if we share this story with someone else, they’ll get a different perception.
When we hear their perception, we’ll think:
‘Wait a minute! Their perception of what my story is about seems more accurate than what I thought my story is about.’
Here are a few ways to decipher what your tales are really trying to say…
Identifying the Central Theme of Your Story
One way to spot the theme of your story is to see which part gets the most reaction out of you.
There will be times when you’re telling a tale, and most of it feels like a job.
You are sharing these lines because you have to.
Then there comes a point in the story where you are flooded with enthusiasm.
There is energy.
Although this segment is short, it got the most energy out for you.
Look into that segment.
This part may be the main engine of your story.
Another way to find out what your story is really about is to share it with multiple people and see what they think.
I’m sure if my buddy shared the story of him not getting promoted to multiple people, they would have understood the deeper layers.
Not all of them.
But every now and then, someone would have spotted that the story was beyond the job alone.
The final way to tell what your story is about is to review that story at a later stage of your life.
When you consume old content as your present self, the interpretation changes.
The biases are removed.
You’re more objective.
You watch a video of your younger self sharing that story.
You sit back as your present-day self, staring at the TV.
Wiser.
Due to being wiser, you can interpret what you were REALLY saying back then.
