# Your life is not a story: why narrative thinking holds you back | Psyche Ideas

<https://psyche.co/ideas/your-life-is-not-a-story-why-narrative-thinking-holds-you-back>

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- Saved: November 7, 2024 (2024-11-07T13:25:40Z)
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## What Jamie wrote

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:

"If you want to change your life, change your story."

I liked this so much that I even put it up right by my coffee machine where I would see it every morning.

![](http://files.thingelstad.com/weekly-thing/300/change-your-story.jpg)

So 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. 

> 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.

But the suggestion here is to think less about a story, and more about a "perspective".

> 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.
> 
> 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.

So maybe if you want to change your life, read poetry?

## Facts

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## Appears in

- [WT300: Weekly Thing 300 / Traceroute, 34x34x34, Typst](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/300/), Notable

## Same host

- [How to be a man | Psyche Guides](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/373a4d0731c0/) (psyche.co, October 20, 2021)

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## Elsewhere

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