Change Your Story

by Allen Klein, MA, CSP

O.K., so somebody cut you off on the highway today. You had a choice. You could have gotten really mad at them; you could have cursed and raised your blood pressure to an unhealthy level, or you could have calmed down and recalculated the situation.

Just like your GPS (Global Positioning System) gets you moving in the right direction after you have made a wrong turn, you can get back on track again by rewriting the script.

No, I’m not talking about the part where the driver cut you off, I’m talking about the part where you reacted to the situation-where you cursed and carried on about how rude drivers are, how no one pays attention to other people these days, how everyone is out to ruin your day. You could have changed the channel and changed your story with your own custom-made GPS. I’m talking about how to Get a Perspective Shift by changing the story you are telling yourself about the situation.

Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has been studying how small changes in a person’s own story can change their life. He found that tiny tweaks in the interpretation of a life event could reap big benefits. He calls the process “story editing.”

Wilson discovered that a revised story helped college students who were struggling academically. He found that if students told themselves “I’m bad at school,” it led to a self-defeating cycle that kept them struggling. But if they told themselves a new story like “Everyone fails at first,” they improved their grades and stayed in college.

Actress Shirley MacLaine knows about revising a story from one you don’t like to one you like. She says, “I think of life itself now as a wonderful play that I’ve written for myself…and so my purpose is to have the utmost fun playing my part.”

Actors, like MacLaine, take on a role and convince us that they are someone else. Good actors walk, talk, and think like the person they are portraying in spite of the fact that the words they are saying are not theirs. A scriptwriter has written it all for them.

You may not be an experienced actor, or a scriptwriter, but you can still write your own story in your imagination and create the leading character, as you would like it to be. If you are fearful, act as if you are not. If you are mad at someone, make believe that you are best friends. If you are having a rotten day, make believe this is the best day of your life. Actors do it all the time. You can too.