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

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.

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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 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?