A story of sabotage
Once upon a time…
Ahhhh those words sound great, don’t they? Us humans, we love stories. We tell them, we connect with them, we find escape in them. We live in them.
And then we use them to sabotage ourselves and our happiness. So much for “happy ever after”.
Yep, those beautiful things that we’re programmed to love are also destroying our ability to live a life of possibility.
I’m not referring here to the phenomenon of the Netflix binge (I hold my hand high to doing this without shame or judgement), but instead to the stories that we tell ourselves in response to almost every encounter we have.
Here are some of mine:
Scenario: that guy hasn’t replied to my message for three days.
Story: he totally hates me, thinks I’m ugly, clearly believes I have bad breath, and thus I’m incapable of being loved.
Scenario: client says they can’t afford to work with me.
Story: I’m totally worthless and nobody will ever hire me ever again. And my dog will starve.
Scenario: my dog gives her ball to SOMEONE ELSE to throw for her.
Story: my dog hates me and thinks I totally suck at throwing ball and she’s going to run away and leave me to move in with another family.
Sound familiar?
While these are at the extreme end of the stories that I sometimes tell myself, the reality is that we do this constantly, even in micro-moments of our lives (“gah I just accidentally made passing eye contact with that stranger on the train… now they think I’m going to stalk them. I’d better stare at my shoes in firm reassurance that I am not a stalker.”)
These stories are rarely positive. They’re usually a voice of judgement, criticism or even the voice of victimisation.
At their best they sound like your irritating Great Aunt who we can shrug off. At their worst they serve in complete sabotage of ourselves. Those stories step right in the way of our ability to live free and powerful lives. They hurt our possibility of experiencing healthy relationships with others at work, with our friends, with our families and our romantic partners. Worst still? This is a default condition for most of us.
This condition of telling sabotaging stories is what Tracy Goss, in her book The Last Word on Power (1996), refers to as ‘the addiction to interpretation’:
Being “hooked” in this way, like any addiction, leads you to take actions that serve the addiction foremost. Those actions are always based on your interpretations from the past and serve your interpretations.
So, sabotaging stories - or interpretation - is an endless cycle with each experience we have in life influencing the stories that we’ll tell ourselves in future scenarios.
So, from that love interest whom you’ve convinced yourself has zero interest in you, to the co-worker who you’re sure thinks that you’re incompetent, to the person who just glanced up and down as they passed you in the street and now you’re sure they’re judging you as slutty. All of these are your interpretations.
The reality? You haven’t even told the love interest that you like them so how can you know what they think? That co-worker just asked you why you did something one way instead of the other. And that person glancing at you on the street, they just looked at you. How do you know what they’re thinking? They might equally have been thinking “what a great outfit”… or they might have just been staring right through you.
Our sabotage stories limit and disempower us. And they are all from within our own selves.
So, perhaps it’s time to start noticing when you do this. You’ll probably see it come up a lot! Then we can start to dig into what’s really going on for you in those moments. And through those reflections you can find a new, freer and more empowered way to see the world and live a life of possibility.
If that sounds like something you want, then perhaps it’s time to explore a coaching partnership.