044 | What’s the Story You’re Telling Yourself?

Most of the “factual observations” we have about ourselves and the world around us aren’t facts at all.

Really, they’re stories we’ve created about ourselves and the world through our interpretation of the facts and neutral circumstances we encounter.

Often these stories don’t serve us and lead to us not getting the results we want in our lives, including with our money.

In this episode, we dive into some examples of stories that don’t serve us and explore how to change the stories we tell ourselves to get the results we want.

Lightly edited transcript appears after the show notes.

 Topics Discussed

• how the stories we tell ourselves keep us from getting the results we want
• how to change the story you’re telling yourself

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Resources mentioned

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Lightly Edited Transcript

Hey friend! Welcome back to the show.

How are you? I hope you are doing well and having an amazing day.

So today I want to talk about the stories we tell ourselves. As lawyers, we come up with all kinds of creative arguments to reach the goals that our clients have.

Or, you know, if you’re not in litigation or doing something where you are crafting arguments like that, you still are coming up with creative solutions and things like that for your clients.

I know everyone thinks that, you know, because we went to law school, we know all the laws, and we know that that’s not true so I’m not gonna lie. I don’t know exactly how other practice areas work, but I do know that lawyers have to be creative in making sure that we reach our clients objectives.

And we do the same thing with ourselves, right. We create these narratives or stories about ourselves and the world around us. We take in different facts or look at different circumstances and then we give them meaning by the stories that we tell about them.

We think that we’re just making factual observations. My coach calls it “reporting the news.” You just told me that like you are reporting the news.

Because it’s things that we think are facts, but they are actually stories or thoughts that we have about facts, and the things that we just accept about ourselves as facts or things that we just accept about the world as facts are the things that we really want to question.

So I recently had a conversation with a young lawyer who was basically giving all of her power away to everyone and everything outside of her. She truly believed that life was happening to her, and that she had very little power to change it.

One of the stories that really stood out to me was, she was telling herself that she’s working 12- to 13-hour days just to hit her hours, and she was feeling overwhelmed and exhausted.

When I heard that she’s working 12- to 13-hour days just to hit her hours, I got really curious. What kind of firm are you at? What is your minimum hour requirement?

It turns out that her minimum hour requirement was 1900 hours for the year. And so then we dug into it a little bit deeper.

She was including in that 12- to 13-hours a lot of time where she wasn’t actually working. She was counting from the time that she woke up, and all of these different breaks that she was taking and all of that to get to these 12- to 13-hour days.

We reframed it and looked at how she is choosing to stretch her day out that long so that she could take these different breaks and things like that. Just that mental shift, I think will help her not feel so overwhelmed and so overworked and all of that because she’s not working 12- to 13-hour days, right.

Another conversation I had with a law student. She was telling herself this story that she’s a bother to people.

She had emailed me wanting to learn more about my practice and what I do, and she didn’t follow up or anything like that.

I happened to see it when I was cleaning out my inbox, like I’m typically an inbox zero type person, which has not happened. I haven’t kept up with that in the pandemic.

But I was cleaning out my inbox, and I see this email from like the month before, two months before or something like that.

I responded to her, and we set up a time to talk within that next week. The day that we were supposed to talk, she sent me an email to follow up.

I was working on something else and didn’t see it, so I was thinking that we were going to talk at the scheduled time, and that time came and went, and I didn’t hear from her.

I searched in my email to see if I had missed where she said that she was unavailable or something like that, and I saw this other email. I called her, and we’re talking.

She was not planning to call me because I didn’t respond to that email. Even though she had my number.

And that’s where it came out that, she doesn’t want to bother people, she doesn’t like to follow up, things like that.

All that to say she was going to not get what she wanted, right? She was not going to reach out and talk to me about my practice area because of this story that she was telling herself. She made me not responding to the email mean that I didn’t want to talk to her.

These are just two examples of how the stories that we tell ourselves don’t lead to the results that we want. These specific ones were work related, but we also tell ourselves, all kinds of stories about our money.

I’m not good with money. Budgets don’t work for me. I’m just a spender, you know, that kind of thing.

And the stories that we tell ourselves can cross over into multiple areas of our lives. For example, if you’re telling yourself that you’re not disciplined enough to lose weight, that’s probably crossing over into “I’m not disciplined enough to stay on a budget.”

Or if you’re telling yourself that things are just hard for you, then you’ll probably see that show up in all kinds of areas in your work, your relationships, money, etc.

The good thing though is we can change the stories that we tell ourselves to achieve the goals we want. So how do we do this?

Number one, you need to identify the stories that you’re telling yourself. Mindfulness techniques like journaling and meditation can be really helpful here, because they help you learn to separate yourself from your thoughts and really see the stories that you’re telling yourself.

I find it helpful to get everything out of your brain and on paper or speaking with a coach, and that way you can see the different thoughts. You can see the stories.

You can do, on paper, a thought download or brain dump on a particular area of your life. Just write down all of the thoughts that you have about it, and look at them and see what’s there.

Ask yourself how this story could be untrue. Asking yourself that can help you to dismantle this belief, and it’s not something that will happen overnight, but as you keep finding evidence of why the story isn’t true, then you’ll start to believe it less.

Once you do that you can identify a new thought or story that leads to the result you want. That’s not to say that you have to completely unbelieve the first story before you can find the new one, but as you start to break down the belief that you have in the story that is not serving you, you can be building up the belief in the story that does serve you.

One way to figure out what new thought you want to adopt or new story you want to tell yourself is ask yourself, “What would I think as the person who does x thing, who reaches whatever your goal is?”

You can also reverse engineer it. So, what is the result you want to create? What actions do you need to take to reach that result? What emotions lead you to take those actions? And what do you need to think to feel those emotions?

And remember that our thoughts create our emotions or our feelings and so when you choose a new thought you want to make sure that you feel differently.

If you don’t feel an emotional shift, it’s probably a thought that you don’t believe yet. And so it won’t lead to you taking different actions.

So if your current story is “I’m not good with money” going to, “I’m so good with money” is probably too big a leap right. But you could try something like “I’m learning to be good with money.”

Once you figure out what the new thought is, you want to practice the new thought and come up with evidence to support it.

Ask yourself why it’s true that you’re learning to be good with money, and write down all the reasons you can think of.

You can highlight things that you do that are in line with you learning to be good with money, such as listening to money podcasts or reading money books or even deciding not to buy something that wasn’t in your budget.

As you practice your new thought, your new story, and as you build the evidence to support it, you’ll start to believe it, and you’ll start to act in line with it and eventually see the results you want in your life, your money, your relationships, whatever.

If you need help shifting the story you tell yourself to get different results in your money, I can definitely help you. This is exactly the kind of work I do with my clients, and I would love to support you too, so head to rhothomas.com/coaching, and let’s set up a call to talk about it.

Okay so that’s it for today.

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Okay friend as we close out, I pray that you will examine the stories you’re telling yourself that aren’t serving you, or that aren’t leading to the results you want.

I pray that you will take the information from this episode and apply it to start getting the results you want.

And as always, I pray that you continue to take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth, and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve.

Talk to you later.