2. Narrative audits: do you want to keep buying your own BS?
The Rewired for Good podcast | Episode 2 | 8 October 2024
Notes
Our brain has a remarkable capacity to make up stories based on facts to help us make sense of the world and help us make decisions. The problem is, sometimes, those narratives are not always the ones we need to take action and move in the direction we want to go. In a sector as intense as humanitarian aid, no one needs more unecessary, stress, solely added on by our brain. The skill of auditing our own narratives, defining clearly which ones serve our purpose and which ones don't, and deciding deliberately which ones we want to keep choosing, can make the biggest in your life and in the humanitarian sector as a whole. This episode shows exactly how to do just that, step by step.
Transcript
Hi hi hi aid workers, how are we doing today? I am quite good actually, despite the continued news of course of apocalypse and heart wrenching pain that continues to unfold before us. As I'm recording this, I'm about to go on a short trip to the Middle East, which is a region that is extremely dear to my heart. I feel so at home there, so I'm really looking forward to that.
And I'm recording this podcast because last week's episode was a little bit of a soft, loving, caring letter to remind you to take care of yourself, to not fall into despair and hopelessness as we watch an important part of the world go up in flames with a lot of us having people there that we care about. And I wanted to encourage you to live into your personal power, to do as much good as possible.
But... the softness ends today. This week I want to invite you into a bit more of a tough love exercise. And I want you to come with me. Because this really is... I've been coaching aid workers for years now, hours and hours, and I can tell you without shaking one little bit that this has the potential to transform your life in a million amazing ways. So pay attention.
I called this episode Narrative Audits. I wanted to call it BS audits, but I decided to be a good girl. You'll understand why. This is probably the most frequent tool or exercise that I use with the aid workers that I coach when they come to their sessions.
They usually come with a problem. They're like, yes, I'm overwhelmed. I can't get to the bottom of my to-do list. I can't seem to land second dates. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I'm going through a breakup and it's hurting like hell. Why do all my relationships end so badly? I have someone at work who's making my life a living misery. I want to work out and eat healthy and lose weight, and I can't find the discipline.
Those are all examples. They tell me the whole story. And in that story, maybe 10% is factual and 90%, the vast majority of it, is their own interpretation, story, narrative, judgment.
So why I'm bringing this up and why this is important for us and for our sector is because I believe the humanitarian sector is an environment that is stressful enough as it is. And -- you know, that's a narrative, I choose to believe that the humanitarian sector is pretty stressful -- I don't believe that it needs to have more stress, more unnecessary heaviness, pain, or difficulty added to it that is produced completely optionally by our brain.
Recently I was in a really highly kinetic war zone, but I gotta be honest, the stuff that brought me to my knees in tears, wanting to scream into a pillow with zero dignity, were the little movies that my brain was producing. It wasn't the bombs, it wasn't the drones, it wasn't the paperwork, it wasn't how hard civil-military coordination was. I was prepared for that. I'm trained for that. I have resilience for that. What got me was the nasty email from this girl from another agency. It was the crappy answer that the girl I supervised gave me. It was the guy who kept addressing me like I was a little girl who didn't quite understand where she had landed and how dangerous everything was and felt the need to mansplain the crap out of everything.
All of these were narratives that were going and rolling in my head. They were based on facts, but a lot of it was then my own little like storytelling. And it was just not helpful.
So I want to help as many aid workers to think and believe thoughts more deliberately, because what you think and believe ultimately creates your experience of something and your experience of that thing determines then the actions that you're going to take or not take. And then of course, needless to say, your actions create the results of your life.
So I want you to take a minute and think across the various sort of envelopes and portfolios of your life, how many times does your brain make you believe unhelpful things, like "he cancelled the date" when he really just asked to "postpone" it? Or "they wouldn't hire me for that position", when objectively you meet 8 out of 10 of the requirements listed and you probably would be one of the best candidates if you applied.
I'm not making anything up here, I'm giving you very concrete examples that I took from my hours and hours of sessions with humanitarians, stuck in thinking loops that just weren't helping them, weren't helping them move forward, move in the direction that they wanted.
And it's important to note and clarify and emphasize that I'm not as interested in knowing if it's true, though it does help to take a look at that, we'll cover that in a minute, but I'm much, much more interested in knowing if it's helpful, if it's helping you move in the direction that you want your life to take.
And imagine a humanitarian sector where people would show up with clean minds, clean thinking, clean emotions, helpful mindsets that help us collectively and individually move forward. How much time would we save and be able to reallocate to other more interesting things like doing our best work or taking care of ourselves if we cleaned a little bit the mess that our belief systems and stories are.
So I'm going to walk you through the exercise. You can do it by yourself. It's always helpful to my mind to have a neutral sounding board. You can ask a friend, you can work with a professional. If you have a therapist or a coach, they're trained to differentiate facts from story and people's narratives. You can send me your story via email and I'm happy to take the time to, to help you sort through it.
But whether you do it on your own or with someone, there are basically four steps for the narrative audit or the BS audit exercise that I'm proposing here.
So pick a topic, one that occupies your brain a lot. I usually like to invite people to start with themselves. If you have something that's really, really consuming your mind, like a difficult working relationship or a break-up or a piece of work that you can't seem to produce. Pick a topic and write down by hand. There's something very important about doing it by hand, not typing it. Something about the connection from the brain to the hand. So I really do recommend you do it by hand, write down -- don't lift the pen, keep the thoughts flowing, think of this as a thought dump -- everything that comes to mind.
Don't choose a nice journal because when we choose nice journals, we tend to want to make it pretty and thoughtful and deep and meaningful and something we'll be proud to look back on in the future. So don't choose a nice, nice journal. Just grab a piece of paper and just vomit it all out.
The second step is that we move to identify the narrative, the story component, the BS component. And we're going to ask ourselves how true is what I wrote, right? So you're going to grab a highlighter and you're going to highlight all the facts, but the facts only sentence by sentence, you highlight the stuff that can be proven in a court of law and cannot be argued against. No adjectives, no adverbs, objective facts, provable facts only. You're going to be left with a lot of un-highlighted stuff. If you're doing this right that's how it should go.
And that stuff that isn't highlighted, that's the story component. That's your own judgment on the situation, on the circumstance, your opinion, your interpretation, your story. And a lot of it will be BS, which is great news because what it means is that it's optional. It's created by your brain and it's optional. And you may think, but Yas, I have a ton of evidence to back my claims and formulate my opinion. And sure, sure, sure. I have absolutely no doubt I go through the same stuff, but I promise you, I have years of experience with this now. You can always find thoughts that mitigate your opinion. And one super easy way to check how true something is, is to make yourself name three ways in which it simply isn't true. And you'll always find them. But anyway, whether it's true or not, as I was saying before, is not really the holy grail of this exercise.
The Holy Grail is step three. Do not skip this step. A lot of us want to skip this step. It is the most important step in the process. It is the process of identifying whether a story is helpful or not. Is it serving you and your life and your purpose and your destination or not? And how you define that, how do you define whether something is helpful is to check whether the story you're telling yourself is lifting you up or pushing you down. If it's pulling you forward or keeping you stuck in place and sinking. Now, this is not something you determine up in your head with neurons. That's what we did in step one and two. It was all about the brain. Step three is all about sensations in your body. You don't want to think your way through this step. You want to feel your way through this step.
You focus on your body below your eyebrows on reactions in your nervous system as you go through the different thoughts that you didn't highlight. You listen for drumming in your chest, for throbbing in your limbs. Is there any pressure in your throat? Can you feel restlessness in your fingers? Those are all signs that a thought is probably not the most helpful one you can choose. And if you think a thought that all of a sudden brings you a sense of lightness, of tension dissolving. That's a sign of course, that the thought is a little bit more helpful, more lifting, more pulling. And the recommendation here is to keep trying and testing modifications of the same thought as if you were going through your wardrobe.
The final step is to re-decide on purpose, deliberately, what truths you want to focus on and give airtime to. So if I were to take some of the examples that I mentioned above, like "I'm overwhelmed", you could choose to transform that into, "there's a lot I need to do and I probably can't do it all, so I should just really prioritize". Another example, "my job serves no purpose". You could transform that into, "parts of my job suck completely, but parts of my job are more interesting".
Now notice how I'm not recommending that you go nuts and go do unbelievable affirmations in front of a mirror with mantras and all that. I don't really believe in that magic. Don't go looking for thoughts that seem outrageously unbelievable to you and out of reach. Stay within the things that you already think, but feel a little less crappy about and focus on those. Redirect your mind to those.
If you think that your colleague is a total jerk. We're not going to do 180 degree turn and think that he's an angel all of a sudden. But what you might be able to focus on instead is "he's under a lot of stress also like me", or maybe "he's not aware of the negative impact that his behavior has". You know, just little thoughts that just get you unstuck from that sinking feeling.
And notice how that change of feeling and energy completely changes the way you'll be inspired to behave as a result and also the way you'll behave after.
So that's it, that's what I have for you this week. Think deliberately, audit your narratives, choose them with care and with intention because what you believe ultimately leads to act or not act in a certain way and will create a very different life one way or another.
So step one, do the thought dump.
Step two, highlight the facts, everything else is narrative.
Step three, do the body sensation exercise and figure out which thoughts are helpful and lifting and which thoughts are just poopy, poopy thoughts.
And then step 4, redecide on purpose and more deliberately what you want to choose to focus your mind on.
This is such critical work because I obviously have no clue but what if this is the only life you get. What if this is your only chance to live fully, to experience with different things, to add value, to make a difference, to leave a legacy? Do you wanna spend another minute creating a life that you don't want?
Do you wanna stay stuck? Keep buying your own BS.
But if you wanna move forward, you need a story that will pull you forward.
I send you so much love across the world.
Thank you for listening. Take excellent, excellent care of yourselves, my friends.
I'll see you next week.