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  "title": "Your life is not a story: why narrative thinking holds you back | Psyche Ideas",
  "note": "When I went to the Human Performance Institute in 2020 one of the frequent sayings was a line from Dr. Jim Loehr, one of the founders:\n\n\"If you want to change your life, change your story.\"\n\nI liked this so much that I even put it up right by my coffee machine where I would see it every morning.\n\n![](http://files.thingelstad.com/weekly-thing/300/change-your-story.jpg)\n\nSo this article caught my attention because a story is definitely a narrative. And those narratives, those stories that we tell ourselves, can be limiting and can reinforce negative outcomes. \n\n> So, what does it mean to reject a narrative? Living in a [non-narrative](https://aeon.co/essays/let-s-ditch-the-dangerous-idea-that-life-is-a-story) way means rejecting a particular identity, and instead seeing life and meaning as a set of open choices. For the waiter, rejecting his narrative identity would mean acting in a way that reflects his choices and sense of self, not just the story he tells about himself.\n\nBut the suggestion here is to think less about a story, and more about a \"perspective\".\n\n> Perspectives, it turns out, don't have a linear, ordered structure. We can't think of them in terms of sequences of events, like stories. In some ways, perspectives are better represented by the non-linearity of poetry.\n> \n> Poems, particularly lyric poems, are inherently perspectival; they unify words, images, thoughts and feelings to express value. Poetry captures _a way_ of seeing and feeling, not just a sequence of events.\n\nSo maybe if you want to change your life, read poetry? ",
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