Telling Yourself A Different Story Is Not Enough

When I was in the seminary, there were two students who were my seniors but each of them was always the best in his respective class.

One of them was called John while the other was Paul. John was so bright to a point that his brain processed information faster than he could convey it which made him seem confused most of the time.

I remember that during the final 3 days leading to his UCE/O-level examinations (nationwide examinations), John got the news that his entire family had perished in a catastrophic fire that had been started by a candle that his family had lit in the night.

He must have been 16 or 17 at the time. He went home, paid his last respects to his family, and returned to school 2 days later for the examinations. He was not only the best in his class but he also got the perfect and highest grades that anyone in the country could get.

Paul wasn’t as bright as John but he was a force to be reckoned with too because he was also the best in his class a few years after John.

Both of them had become my friends during our time in the seminary. Not very close but close enough to ask how and why they were so good in their studies.

Paul was a hard worker. He was also deeply spiritual. He was the guy who always cried hysterically in his prayers while we were in the chapel dozing our heads off. He constantly begged God for wisdom so when I asked him, he pointed me to his faith and hard work.

John was as lazy as they come. He was not spiritual at all. That guy not only dozed during chapel time but he also dreamed. The chapel was his second bed.

He used to read, but not more than necessary. He didn’t have the work ethic in terms of hours spent reading but he never once fell below the first position in his class for the entire 6 years of his secondary school education.

When I asked him how he did it, he only gave me a few strategies on effective reading which I still use to this day and they work but they aren’t secret. Memorizing, mindmaps, recitations, experimental curiosity, that kind of thing. For John, reading and memorization seemed like a game that came naturally to him.

The one thing that tied both John's and Paul’s behavior together was that they were both convinced that its what they believed about themselves that made the true difference.

Paul told me that, through our hearts, we propose and God disposes. He had somehow twisted that to mean that he asks, and God gives him what he asks for. All the chapel crying he did was meant to get his heart into that state of pure belief.

John on the other hand had a fixation on running ideas in his mind. If he had a math problem that was troubling him, he didn’t just let it go mentally, he tweaked it in his mind until he came up with a hypothesis to test. If that failed, he would repeat the process. This is why he walked with half papers and a pen around school, noting down any ideas that he could test his challenges on.

In a way, this trained John to believe that no challenge presented before him was too big to solve which is the belief he had about himself and the way he operated his life.

When people try to change, however, we are told to tell ourselves different stories. Some engage in anything from affirmations to meditations.

This is all good at the moment but what John and Paul taught me is that nothing is that simple.

Paul had a few hours a day in the chapel for which to cry while telling himself a different story that could push him to his goals, but he equally had an ungodly work ethic at 15 years of age that I have never seen in any adult. And this work ethic compensated for the rest of the time he wasn’t wetting the church pews with his faith cries.

John was not interested in religion. He was an academic and he loved it. His mind was always running ideas to the challenges he wanted to work through. You could find him walking aimlessly but this later turned out to be the times that he was deeply in thought trying to string up an idea on how to navigate a complex challenge he was going through.

Also, you’d be fooled to think that he spent time thinking about only high school problems. Nope. All of that complex thinking was being done when he was in high school but he was often thinking about complex mathematics concepts found at university levels.

The stories these people told themselves were not mere verbal statements. The stories they told themselves were more like their ways of life.

John didn’t care about God’s existence. His way of life was one of perpetual curiosity and he used that to create the stories he wanted to tell about himself.

Paul was wildly spiritual and he used his belief to sink him into states that would help him believe something about himself. If it wasn’t there or didn’t have it yet, he asked God for it and then proceeded to back it up with a wild work ethic. Like he used to tell me sometimes, his way of life was “Ora et Labora” — Pray and work

These two approaches are by no means the only ways that people can tell stories about themselves. These are mere explanations of an idea. The idea here is that the stories you tell about yourself shouldn’t be merely verbal statements but should be your way of life.

If you want to dissolve the hate you have towards someone, you do not just tell yourself that you don’t hate them. No. Your way of life must back it up in ways such as spending time with that person and talking to them about your points of conflict while being willing to listen to and respect their perspective if they aren’t willing to let it go.

Someone in my family has for years told himself that he will never use debt again to finance his life but yet he keeps jumping onto any credit offer he gets from banks.

He keeps telling himself different stories but when the rubber hits the road, all these stories must fall away to allow the self-preservation routines to take effect.

He can’t extricate himself from debt because he keeps coming up with very strong reasons as to why he needs just one more debt to float him out of the present situation.

And that is the thing with stories we tell ourselves. The truth about it is that these stories require sacrificing a lot to achieve new realities. The lifestyle you seek cannot just be spoken into existence, sometimes, you must make different (and often painful) decisions to get you to that lifestyle.

If you have very low self-esteem, you will still have very low self-esteem thousands of years from today if you think that you can solve the problem by just telling yourself different stories. If you feel like you lack the self-esteem that you need, put yourself in a position that demands more self-esteem from you. Speak to your crush, and go put yourself in front of crowds. You may not speak at first but even getting the front seat as opposed to that back seat will be a great start as you work your way towards addressing the masses.

Stories on their own should work for an infant's mind as the mind still tries to form constructs to work with. But as an adult, you need more than just stories to pass you by all your unhelpful beliefs and biases that plague you. You need a different way of life that constantly demands different thought processes over an extended period.

Don’t just tell yourself a different story. Live a different story.