The stories of our lives, far from being fixed narratives, are under constant revision. The slender threads of causality are rewoven and reinterpreted as we attempt to explain to ourselves and others how we became the people we are. . . . This is why in the initial stages of psychotherapy it is important to listen to the patient’s story uncritically. Contained in those memories are not just the events, but also the meaning they have for that particular person.
—Gordon Livingston, MD
Buzz Aldrin was the Apollo Lunar Module pilot on the Apollo 11 mission. He stepped down onto the dusty surface of the moon just a few seconds after Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon and utter those historic words, “One small step for man.” But what should have been an incredible, positive experience for Aldrin nearly ruined his life.
During the three-week quarantine then required of astronauts upon returning from space, Aldrin immediately began an alcohol bender that didn’t end for over nine years. His marriage of twenty-one years quickly decayed and ended, and his prestigious military career concluded on bad terms. At his lowest point, he was working at a Cadillac dealership in Beverly Hills and didn’t make a single sale in six months.
One night, Aldrin was drunk and his girlfriend locked him out of her house. In his rage, he pounded her door down and broke into her home. Terrified and in shock, she called the police. Aldrin was arrested.
How did this all happen? How could someone as successful and brilliant as Buzz Aldrin experience such a negative shift?
Aldrin himself gave the answer in his 2009 autobiography, Magnificent Desolation: “The transition from ‘astronaut preparing to accomplish the next big thing’ to ‘astronaut telling about the last big thing’ did not come easily to me. . . . What does a man do for an encore?”
During the return flight from the moon, Aldrin became absorbed in negative thinking and emotions. Staring down at Earth, he lost his imagination. Nothing could top what he had just done. His future was over.
I will never outlive this, he thought.
He had peaked at thirty-nine years old. Such thinking terrified him, so he tried to drink away his pain.
Compare Buzz Aldrin’s story with that of basketball player Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Antetokounmpo grew up poor in Greece. He and his brother actually had to share the single pair of basketball shoes their family could afford. His brother would wear the shoes during the early game and Antetokounmpo would wear the same shoes during the late game.
Antetokounmpo recently signed a major deal with Nike, and now his signature shoes are being worn by tens of thousands of kids throughout the world. During the 2018–2019 season, he was awarded the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award. In an interview, ESPN commentator Rachel Nichols asked Antetokounmpo if it had sunk in that he was the MVP.
“I’m really happy about it, I’m not going to lie,” he said. “But I don’t ever want to hear about it again for the rest of my life. It’s a great accomplishment and great honor. But, you know, that’s in the past now.”
“Wait, you mean you don’t ever want to hear the words ‘MVP’ again?” Nichols asked, surprised.
“No, I think it’s gotten too much. Usually, when you share that, you tend to relax. If I keep thinking, ‘I’m the MVP of this league,’ then what’s going to happen? I’m just going to relax. And I do not want to do that. I’m proud of it. But let’s go for the next goal.”
Antetokounmpo is defined by his goals, not his previous accomplishments or failures. He’s defined by what he’s going to do next. He’s chasing his future self, and that’s why he’s continually successful.
According to Dan Sullivan, the founder of Strategic Coach, when your “status” becomes more important than your “growth,” you usually stop growing. However, when growth is your genuine motive, then you usually end up getting lots of status. But you won’t be attached to it. And you’ll definitely be willing to destroy a former status to create a new one. As Sullivan says, “Always make your future bigger than your past.”
If you’re honest with yourself, you may find that you are primarily motivated by a particular status. Once you obtain that status—such as a particular job title, income level, or relationship—your motivation shifts from approach-oriented to avoid-oriented. Rather than approaching a new and expansive future self, your primary concern becomes to maintain or protect your current status or identity by avoiding failure. You’ll stop being courageous. You’ll plateau, and the energy and zest that was your growing personality fizzles out into something far less inspiring.
Without a future self that has outgrown and outdone your current self, life starts to lose its meaning.
Condoleezza Rice served as the sixty-sixth US secretary of state. She was also the first female African American secretary of state and the second female secretary of state. She has continually defied the odds throughout her life and career. One of the reasons she’s been so successful and innovative is due to a philosophy she holds. In her own words, “I firmly believe you should never spend any of your time being the ‘former’ anything.”
The idea that you should “never be the ‘former’ anything” conveys in one phrase the entire premise of this book. Whether you were an astronaut or a drug addict, you should never be the former anything. Both trauma and achievement can have a powerful impact on your personality. But whichever you experience, you should never get stuck in the past, nor let your past define you.
Your authentic self is your future self. Who you aspire to be.
For so long, Buzz Aldrin’s “mission” was to stand on the moon. It was the purpose or goal he built his identity, choices, and environment around. But then he got stuck in his status after “fulfilling his purpose.” From his perspective, there was no way he was going to outdo his former self, so he threw in the towel on his future. Without a meaningful purpose, his life went into a tailspin.
Aldrin, someone whose goals and imagination pushed him to the moon, went totally blank on his future self.
Giannis Antetokounmpo took the opposite path. Within weeks of being named MVP, he emotionally detached from the status and put his focus on the next goal.
This doesn’t mean he isn’t happy or grateful. What it means is that he hasn’t become emotionally attached to an outcome or an identity. His vision of himself remains in the future, not the past. And as a result, while others around him will plateau, he will not. He continues living, rather than existing.
For the rest of this chapter, you’ll learn why we formulate narratives and stories to shape the meaning of our experiences. You’ll learn to reframe your narrative to be future-focused—on who you intend to be—as Giannis and others, like Elon Musk, do. This is a rare skill, and part of why they are so successful.
With these new skills in place, you’ll be challenged to reframe your narrative so that your past isn’t keeping you stuck but pushing you forward. Your past is happening for you, not to you. After reading this chapter, you’ll be challenged to have your future self be the story you tell others in explaining yourself, not your former self.
Who are you?
Recently, my wife and oldest son, Kaleb, who is eleven, were out walking our two seven-month-old twin girls. Kaleb was manning the stroller. They were on a country road with lots of shrubbery and ditches on either side of the road.
I needed to chat with Lauren before leaving for work, so I drove around to find them. I pulled up beside Lauren, and we began talking. Kaleb stood by listening.
The rocky road we were on was slightly slanted downward on the edges. Within about twenty seconds of starting the conversation, I noticed the stroller beginning to drift toward a ditch. I yelled for Kaleb to grab it!
He did his best, but the momentum was too much. He was getting pulled down into the ditch with the girls.
Immediately, Zorah was crying, as she had fallen out of her stroller seat. She wasn’t strapped in. Phoebe was strapped in and stayed in her seat.
Luckily, the fall wasn’t bad. Zorah was fine, just scared. But Kaleb was noticeably shaken by the experience. He was crying, staring at the ground, and not making eye contact even after a few prods. I could see that in the midst of his emotions, he was defining the meaning of this experience. And given that his emotions were negative, the meaning he was forming was also negative.
I didn’t want this for Kaleb. I wanted to help him regulate his emotions and become psychologically flexible. I wanted him to proactively and healthily frame this experience, not for it to absorb him.
Meaning is shaped during emotional experiences. According to the famed psychologist Dr. Roy Baumeister, meaning is a mental representation of relationships between events or things. “Meaning connects things,” Baumeister explains.
Dr. Crystal Park, an expert on the psychology of meaning and meaning-making, argues that human beings create meaning from our experiences by connecting three things:
First, we define the cause of the event or experience. (“What just happened?”)
Second, we link that cause with our own identity. (“What does this experience say about me?”)
Finally, we link that cause and our identity with the bigger picture of how the world and universe work. (“What does this experience and who I am say about the world?”)
Creating meaning is fundamental to who we are and who we become. Our personality, in large part, is based on the meaning we’ve placed on former experiences. It’s based on the meaning we give to various goals or values. It’s based on what we focus on. Our personality is even based on the meaning we place on small things, like humor or music or style or interests.
Creating meaning is something we do instinctively. But it has a dark side. If we are not intentional about the meanings we form, we can generate a premature cognitive commitment about ourselves.
I’m a bad person.
I’m an introvert.
I’m never going to live my dreams.
I’m not good with people.
I don’t like people like her.
Meaning-making can, if you’re not intentional, lead to a fixed mindset. Trauma, for instance, isn’t the event itself but a meaning you take or create from it. Something terrible happened, but what made it traumatic was in your interpretation.
Take, for example, Sean Stephenson, a giant of a man born with osteogenesis imperfecta, a bone disorder that left him three feet tall and in a wheelchair from birth. Stephenson’s perspective was, and his last words before dying were, “This happened for me, not to me.” He had fallen out of his wheelchair, hit his head, and was in a great deal of pain. Moments before drifting to the other side, those were his words. That was his interpretation, not only of the incident that killed him but of his entire life, as potentially traumatic as it was or could have been.
Trauma is the meaning you give to an event or experience, and how that meaning shapes your view of yourself, your future, and the world at large. The meaning you formed during former “traumas” is now driving your personality, your choices, and your goals.
Until you change that meaning.
Think about it for a second: Why do you define yourself the way you do? Why are you the way you are? Why do you like or dislike certain things? Why are your pursuing what you’re pursuing?
It all comes down to the meaning you’ve shaped of your former experiences, as well as the identity you’ve formed as a result.
The meaning we derive from our experiences and the information we gather shapes our worldview. It’s important to note that as people, we usually shape meaning first about ourselves, and then use our self-image as the lens through which we view the world. As Dr. Stephen Covey said, “We see the world, not as it is, but as we are.”
If you have a negative view of yourself, then you probably have a negative view of the world. If you have a positive view of yourself, then you probably have a positive view of the world. The world is viewed through the lens of your identity.
You only see, or selectively attend to, what is meaningful and relevant to you. This is why Andre Norman stopped seeing all the criminal behavior around him in prison after Harvard became his purpose and identity. It’s also why Aldrin stopped seeing opportunities for growth once he got trapped in the status of his former self.
Your view of the world says more about you than it does about the world. Your view of the past says more about you than it does about the past. Consequently, you should formulate meaning based on your desired future self. This requires being intentional about your interpretation of your experiences, even your hard ones.
How would my future self respond to this experience?
What would they think about it?
What would they do about it?
How could they turn this to their benefit?
This is happening for me, not to me.
Kaleb, in the heat of his emotions, was formulating meaning to understand his experience of letting go of the stroller. Although nothing bad happened to the girls, it had the potential to be traumatic for Kaleb and leave lasting harm. As part of the meaning-making process, Kaleb’s thoughts and feelings likely went through the three stages of meaning-making: (1) defining a cause, (2) shaping his own identity, and (3) shaping his view of the world through his identity.
Examples of cause-effect thoughts could include:
Was it my fault the stroller began rolling because I wasn’t holding on to it?
Why wasn’t I holding on to it?
Was this Dad’s fault because he stopped Mom’s and my walk?
Why was Dad distracting us from our walk?
Was this because we were walking on a country road?
Why did Mom want us to walk so much? I just wanted to stay back at camp.
Examples of identity-forming thoughts based on his cause-effect thinking include:
I don’t like being with my parents.
I’m not a good brother.
I don’t like going on walks with Mom.
I’m not going to do stuff like this anymore.
My baby sisters are too fragile and not fun.
After thinking about the event and himself, Kaleb creates “global meaning” about the bigger picture of life. Examples may include:
Going on walks is dangerous.
The world is dangerous.
Life is horrible.
Dad always ruins things.
This meaning-making process all takes only a moment in the brain. More than thoughts, these cause-and-effect scenarios reflect Kaleb’s initial emotional reaction to the event. Without the skill of emotional regulation, which takes time and practice, and without the help of an empathetic witness to help him proactively and healthily frame his experiences, despite his initial reaction, he may reactively and negatively create meaning from this experience.
Human beings are fundamentally meaning-making machines. We create meaning in order to comprehend our lives. When you understand this fact, you start to see it everywhere. We create meaning even in the smallest and most mundane of experiences, which have an impact on our identity and worldview. Every small experience counts.
For example, I was on a long drive recently, and out of nowhere, I had to go to the bathroom really bad. It took about five minutes to find an exit. During those five minutes, I had several thoughts racing through my head.
This is ridiculous.
This sucks.
Why is this happening to me?
Then I began to notice my thinking and became intentional about it, which is a key technique of what psychologists call emotional regulation. As you become more intentional about your life, you start to see small moments like this as “practice,” or “reps,” for being who you want to be. If you can’t handle the small moments when the stakes are low, you won’t show up effectively in the big ones.
Life is practice.
When regulating challenging emotions, you can define the meaning of your experiences intentionally. This is the exact opposite of how people often handle their emotions and the meaning-making process. Most thoughts are governed by emotions, particularly in emotionally heated situations. Those thoughts are reactive and unintentional, but go on to become the long-term meaning and narrative held by the person.
Instead, your thoughts, or, more specifically, your goals, should govern your emotions, even when the initial emotions triggered by the experience are difficult.
The better you get at emotional regulation in both small and big experiences, the more psychologically flexible you become. As you become more psychologically flexible, your emotions and experiences stop defining you in a reactive way. You’re enabled to move forward in a goal-directed and value-centered way, holding your initial emotions and thoughts loosely and becoming better at directing your emotions and thoughts.
The first step of emotional regulation is identifying and labeling your emotions as you’re experiencing them (the more descriptive the better). You can’t manage something you’re not aware of.
The second step of emotional regulation is understanding the difference between primary emotions and secondary emotions.
Primary emotions are your initial reactions to external events. You shouldn’t judge them. They are natural reactions to things around us. For example, being sad when a loved one dies, or being frustrated in traffic, are natural initial responses.
A secondary emotion is when you feel something about the feeling itself. For example, you may feel anger about being hurt, or shame about your anxiety. Secondary emotions increase the intensity of your reactions and can push you into destructive behaviors. Hence, part of becoming psychologically flexible is holding your initial reaction loosely—not taking it too seriously or overly identifying with it, but acknowledging it, labeling it, and then deciding how you want to interpret and feel about the experience.
The third step of emotional regulation is letting go of negative emotions. Accepting and acknowledging that you’re feeling negative is key to letting the feeling go, rather than pretending you’re not feeling it. You then want to step back from the emotion and consider the consequences of acting on it. Usually, the consequences aren’t in line with the values and goals of your future self.
People often make stupid decisions because they act based on their emotions in the moment, rather than on the consequences that will come after. For example, binge-eating cookies while stressed may initially feel good but will ultimately create negative consequences. It is the consequences you want to think about, because they will determine your feelings in the long term. The consequences are what create your future self.
Given that Kaleb is only eleven years old, he isn’t yet adept at emotional regulation. Lauren and I are trying to help him foster his ability to not bottle things up, but rather to safely and openly express himself. Expressing emotions openly and honestly is key to emotional regulation and becoming psychologically flexible. The better you get at expressing emotions, the better you’ll handle them and positively respond to them.
Kaleb needed an empathetic witness. The last thing he needed in this moment of emotion was a lecture. We told him that he did his best to help the girls, and that everything was okay. We let him hold and comfort Zorah, and praised him for being a comfort to her. “Accidents happen,” we said.
We helped him express his emotions, and we decided as a family what to do about the experience. We turned the meaning of the experience into something positive and constructive rather than negative.
Fundamental to the meaning-making process is developing stories. We understand the meaning of our experiences through stories. We understand our identity through stories. We have stories for our lives, for specific events, even for a given day. The more intentional you get about your life, the more you become the author of the story. You shape the meaning of your past. You also shape the meaning of current and future experiences in order to have the story you want for your past.
Rather than telling the story of Kaleb’s blunder, we chose to tell the story of his heroic rescue. As the wizard teaches in the musical Wicked, “Is one a crusader or ruthless invader? It’s all in which label is able to persist.” We moved past the primary emotions of fear and failure and took the narrative into our own hands.
These are questions we will explore throughout the chapter. As you will find, you can and should be the one shaping this story.
Ken Arlen grew up in the 1970s, and during his junior year of high school he started smoking a lot of marijuana. To cover up the smell, he smoked cigarettes because, although they weren’t thrilled about it, his parents didn’t really mind. Cigarettes weren’t as negatively viewed back then.
Ken’s smoking continued throughout his senior year of high school and his four years of college. During college, he got to the point where he was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. In recounting his story to me, Ken said he actually believed it was physically impossible to drink a beer without smoking a cigarette at the same time. He couldn’t even drink a cup of coffee without smoking.
He and his friends all tried quitting on multiple occasions during college, but to no avail. “It was an ongoing theme,” he said. “I mean, I probably tried quitting at least twenty times and was unsuccessful.”
Smoking was a fundamental aspect of his identity and tied to everything he did. He smoked when he studied, when he woke up in the morning, when he was with his friends. He really wanted to quit, because he knew it wasn’t healthy. He knew it was a bad habit and that he was addicted to the nicotine. He also had the goal of playing trumpet.
When he got out of college, he was in a state of transition. He moved to Madison, Wisconsin, and got a job as an orderly in a paraplegic ward.
At the hospital, there was a lounge where orderlies hung out, and smoking was acceptable there. On Ken’s first day on the job, he walked into the lounge and one of the other orderlies pulled out a cigarette and offered him one.
He said, “No, thanks. Don’t smoke. Never have, never will.”
That event occurred over forty years ago. Ken has never smoked a cigarette since.
Ken changed his narrative. He changed his past, and that allowed him to have a new identity in his new environment.
Firstly, he was in a new environment where no one knew of his former identity as a smoker. He also explained that the decision to say he wasn’t a smoker was impulsive yet strategic. By publicly declaring himself as a nonsmoker to his coworkers, he put himself in a position where smoking around them would be incongruent.
“I think there was some wisdom in my subconscious that helped me come up with the idea, because I knew a lot of habits and addiction are a response to peer pressure and environment. I wanted to be a nonsmoker in that environment.”
It took about a week for the nicotine cravings to go away, which weren’t that difficult to deal with given that most of Ken’s time was spent at work where he assumed the identity of a nonsmoker. After that initial week, he never thought about smoking again.
He’s the storyteller.
According to the theory of “narrative identity” developed by scholar and researcher Dr. Dan McAdams, we all form our identity by integrating our life experiences into an internalized evolving story. The story gives a sense of unity and purpose to our lives.
This life narrative integrates our reconstructed past, perceived present, and imagined future. All three coexist at the same time. Hence, from an experiential standpoint, the past, present, and future are not separate and linear but holistic and co-occurring. Your past, present, and future are all happening right now—at least in your mind.
The stories we hold of ourselves are continually evolving and changing based on the experiences we are having. The “facts” about your past don’t necessarily change, but the story you tell yourself about those facts absolutely can and does. And when you revise your own history, you may leave out and ultimately forget certain “facts” that once played a dominant role in your story. Perhaps certain facts weren’t actually facts but merely your former perspective.
Instead of creating a narrative that serves them, people often get trapped in stories based on their initial reaction to an experience.
A fundamental aspect of “reframing” your narrative of the past is shifting what was formerly defined as a negative experience into a positive one. You may be scratching your head and asking yourself, “Why would I want to do this? If the experience was negative, why would I pretend that it was positive?”
“Positive” and “negative” aren’t facts, but meanings.
The meaning you place on past events determines who you are and what your future is. Changing how you view your past is essential to upgrading your identity and future. Fundamental to changing your identity is also changing your story. A new future creates a new past.
Having studied this for over a decade, I’ve never seen a more useful reframing technique than what Dan Sullivan calls “the gap and the gain.” According to Sullivan, living in “the gap” occurs when you focus on what’s missing.
When you’re in the gap, you can’t enjoy or comprehend the benefits in your life. All you’re focused on is why something wasn’t how you thought it should have been. For instance, you might live in a great house. But if you’re in the gap, then all you might see is what’s wrong with your house. You may have an amazing partner but only see what you believe to be wrong or missing in them.
That’s the gap.
You might have great kids, but only see where they come up short.
You might have made huge progress over the past ninety days on your goals, but only see where things didn’t go according to plan.
Compare living in the gap to living in “the gain.” Instead of constantly measuring yourself against your ideal, you measure yourself against where you formerly were.
This may seem counterintuitive. Let me explain.
The story you tell yourself and others is about your future self—your ideal. But when it comes to short-term measuring of progress, you want to look back on where you were before. The purpose of measuring the gain regularly is to see the progress you’re making. By seeing progress, you feel movement and momentum. This increases your confidence and sense of morale to continue pursuing a future self beyond anything you’ve been before.
Why is measuring the gain important?
First, it refocuses your “selective attention.” We don’t see the world objectively but through a subjective lens. That lens is trained based on what we choose to focus on. When you begin focusing on the gains, you train yourself to see progress and momentum. You create a sense of “winning,” which boosts your confidence, excitement, and enthusiasm.
That’s the purpose and practicality of measuring the gain. It’s totally psychological. The goal is to feel great about how you’re doing, because these positive emotions and the confidence that comes with them will inspire you to continue pursuing bigger and more challenging goals. Confidence is the foundation of imagination, and it comes from seeing progress.
When you begin proactively framing your narrative, it is incredibly powerful to shift what once was a “gap” narrative to a “gain” one. For example, you may harbor negative emotions about something that happened to you in the past. You may view the experience for all that it cost or has done to you. You may be blaming your current circumstances on those former experiences.
But what would happen if you flipped the script on those experiences? What would happen if you proactively shifted your attention and began looking for the “gains” of such experiences? What would happen if you choose to reframe and retell those stories from an alternative perspective?
History gets revised all the time with new perspectives, experience, and understanding. If your own past hasn’t changed, then you’re still stuck inside of it. You’re not evolving and growing.
Shifting from the gap to the gain is how you strategically remember your experiences. It’s how you remember your past intentionally, not based on your initial emotional reactions but instead on your chosen identity and goals. You are the one who assigns meaning to your experiences. You’re the one formulating the story.
So how do you flip your own script?
Re-remembering the past is about filtering your past through the lens of your chosen identity—your future self. How would a more evolved version of you view these events? How have these events enabled you to become who you are today?
Everything in your past has happened—or more accurately, is happening—for you, not to you.
Russell Wayne Baker was a highly regarded and famous American journalist, narrator, and author of a Pulitzer Prize–winning autobiography. His autobiography was originally rejected by publishers as “uninteresting.” In response to having his story rejected, he told his wife, “I am now going upstairs to invent the story of my life.”
The result was the Pulitzer Prize–winning bestseller Growing Up.
This “reinvented” version of his own story was no less true than the original version—he simply found a more compelling and useful way to tell that story.
His past, like yours, can be viewed in limitless ways. A terrible experience can be framed as a learning experience. A boring day at school can be framed as a powerful and positive experience.
What you choose to emphasize or ignore in a story determines the focus and impact of the story. Of this, the psychiatrist Gordon Livingston, MD, said, “Each of us have similar latitude in how we interpret our own histories. We have the power to idealize or denigrate those characters that inhabit our life stories. We just need to experience both alternatives as reflections of our current need to see ourselves in certain ways, and to realize that we are all able color our past either happy or sad.”
I grew up in a broken home. My parents got divorced when I was eleven. That divorce led my father into a deep depression and ultimately into becoming a drug addict. Throughout my teens, I had very little stability and barely ended up graduating high school. I made a ton of mistakes and faced a lot of emotional pain and confusion.
During this period of my life, I created all sorts of meaning to help me understand and navigate my experiences. Part of that meaning was that my dad had failed me and my younger brothers. He was to blame—the “cause”—for everything wrong in my world.
I felt like a total victim to everything happening to me. Almost a year after graduating high school and basically doing nothing with myself, I decided to change my life. I was done playing video games fifteen hours a day. I had always wanted to serve a church mission but had given up on that due to life events and my interpretation of those events.
Pivotal to changing my life was rekindling my relationship with my dad. He had reached out with countless attempts during my high school years. I had shut him out. But in order to move forward and change my life, I knew I needed to begin talking to him again. He and I began meeting for lunches once a week. He encouraged me to serve my mission.
It was approximately ten years ago that I began talking to my dad again and preparing for that church mission. Over those past ten years, I’ve become an entirely new person. I’ve learned to look at my past differently—to see the gains rather than the gaps. Like Tucker Max, I view my past with increasing compassion, not judgment. I also view my parents with compassion and understanding instead of judgment.
Part of shifting from the gap to the gain is getting more information. On multiple occasions since returning from my mission experience, I’ve talked to my dad about that difficult period of our lives. He’s since cleaned up his life and even spent a few years as an addiction recovery counselor.
In hearing about my teen years from my dad’s perspective, I’ve been humbled. He was going through a great deal of trauma himself. Not only did his divorce shatter him, but his kids abandoned him in his ultimate time of need. I’m not justifying his behavior. But I am choosing how I remember my experiences. I’m choosing, based on my current context and perspective, to frame my past based on the gains, not the gaps.
My story used to be about how my father had failed me and my brothers. During my mission experience, my story began to shift. When recounting my past as a missionary, I would explain that I had forgiven my dad for what he had done to us and that the past was “behind me.”
But “behind me” wasn’t enough. My father was adopted as an infant. I am now the father of three adopted children. Helping my kids through their traumas has helped me rewrite the story of my dad. I’m now seeing my father with increased compassion and understanding.
The meaning of my father’s behaviors, and the overall context of that episode, continues to change for me. It’s less painful but increasingly pivotal to the growth I’ve had and continue to experience. In fact, at this point, it is no longer painful to think about or discuss. Everything during that period happened for me, not to me.
Over the past ten years, I’ve watched my dad change his life in absolutely incredible ways, get himself under control, and become one of my best friends. He is one of my absolute heroes. What he’s been able to overcome is truly mind-blowing. So now my narrative about the whole experience is “awe” for what my father went through and for who he became as a result. The transformation and gains are far more meaningful than drilling down and fixating on the specifics of what occurred all those years ago.
The more emotionally developed I become, the less negatively impacted I am by my past and the more I get to shape the meaning of it.
The same is true for you.
At this point, it is your job to reshape your past narrative. The first step is shifting from the gap to the gain. Here’s how to do it.
Let’s practice training your mindset to shift from the gaps to the gains. In order to do so, pull out your journal and answer the following questions:
By focusing on the progress, you allow yourself to focus on change and growth. This will enhance your imagination and confidence as you begin to shape your future identity. If you do this consistently, you will train your brain and selective attention to only see growth. You’ll train your identity to be positive.
Now that you’ve thought about your past in terms of the gain, think about one to three key experiences you feel have negatively impacted your life. Write those experiences down in your journal.
Now spend some time thinking about and then listing all of the benefits, opportunities, or lessons that have come from those one to three experiences. How have those experiences happened for you, instead of to you?
Your former self is not gone. They are alive and well. You carry them around with you wherever you go, just as you carry your future self with you wherever you go. However, you’re probably carrying around a bruised and broken version of your former self, which is greatly limiting your current and future selves.
It’s time to heal and change your former self. You’re going to change the meaning of the past. You’re going to let go of the pain you’ve been carrying. You’re going to be left with a different identity of your former self. Your former self will now be totally healed.
Measuring the gains of your experiences to see how far you’ve come is one powerful way of seeing the strengths, rather than the weaknesses, of your former self. Another powerful technique is having a conversation between your future and former selves. You can do this in your journal, your imagination, in a therapy session, however you want.
First, imagine your ideal future self. They are incredibly compassionate, wise, and understanding. They’ve been through a lot and have created the freedom and capacity you want in your life. To get you started, here are a few questions you could pose in your journal:
When you shift your story, you see new possibilities for yourself. You’re no longer the victim of what happened. Instead, you’re the shaper of the meaning of your own experience. Your past is a meaning, a story, which you reconstruct and design here and now.
Every time you go back to your past, you change it.
When healed and healthy, the past is simply a source of information that you can use (not emotion, except for positive and chosen emotions). The past is just raw material to work with. It’s entirely malleable and flexible. You get to take the pieces and choose which ones to discard and how you’re going to frame them.
Every time you retrieve a memory, you change the memory. The more times you retrieve a memory, the more it will change. Memory is like the telephone game—the more times you tell or imagine the story, the more that story will change. As the neuroscientist Dr. Donna Bridge said, “A memory is not simply an image produced by time traveling back to the original event—it can be an image that is somewhat distorted because of the prior times you remembered it. . . . Your memory of an event can grow less precise even to the point of being totally false with each retrieval.”
Following the conversation between your future and former selves, who is your former self now?
As you move forward and change your memories, do so intentionally. Avoid recalling difficult memories when depressed or feeling unsafe. Rather, intentionally visit your memories when you’re safe, happy, lighthearted, and with those you know love you.
In a study done by Dr. Bridge, participants were tested on their ability to recall information by looking at a bunch of items on a grid. It was a three-day study. On the first day, the participants saw 180 separate and unique items in various places on the grid. On day two, only some of those 180 items were on the grid, but they were all in a central location. On day three, the participants were tested to see if they could recall which items were on the grid among a large list of random items, and they were also tested on where those items were originally located.
The results showed improved recall accuracy on the final test for objects that were present on day two compared to those not present on day two. However, people never recalled exactly the right location. Instead, they tended to place the object closer to the incorrect location they recalled during day two rather than the correct location from day one.
Their day-two experience altered their memory of their day-one experience. Memories are altered as you retrieve them. As Bridge explains, “Our findings show that incorrect recollection of the object’s location on day two influenced how people remembered the object’s location on day three. . . . Retrieving the memory didn’t simply reinforce the original association. Rather, it altered memory storage to reinforce the location that was recalled at session two.”
Every time you look at or view anything, you change it. In physics, a concept known as the observer effect shows that the mere observation of a phenomenon inevitably changes that phenomenon. For instance, by simply checking the pressure in an automobile tire, you will inevitably let out at least a small amount of air, and thus change the pressure. Viewing any object places light on that object, causing it to reflect back that light. Even if small, a change will have occurred.
By looking at your past, you will change your past. Every time you look at your past it will change. Every time you look at yourself in the mirror, you will change.
A great example of someone who strategically applied the observer effect is Kamal Ravikant, who every time he looked in the mirror would tell himself, “I love you.” Since he was struggling with depression, this was initially hard for him to believe. But each time he did this, he changed, even if imperceptibly.
As he repeated these intentional observations thousands of times, he slowly went from depressed and suicidal to purely loving himself. Over time, the person looking back at him from the mirror changed. He now has a totally new personality with a new emotional foundation. His whole story changed—past, present, future.
Regardless of what happened to you in the past, no matter how unique, terrible (or wonderful) it was, you have the same ability to shape who you were and who you will become.
I’m not trying to diminish what happened to you. Nor am I trying to ignore the emotional impact of your previous experiences.
What I’m showing you is that, quite literally, you are the designer of your past. How you choose to remember your past is what determines your past far more than what actually happened.
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we begin from.
—T. S. Eliot
Nate Lambert has always struggled with his weight—as indeed does his whole family. After countless failed attempts to diet and lose weight, Nate conceded that his lot in life was to be overweight and unhealthy. He determined to compensate by succeeding in other areas.
This was hard for him, though, because he saw his parents dealing with extreme health problems. They had all sorts of diseases and limitations due to being overweight. Thinking about this, Nate began to imagine his own future:
What will my future be like if I continue to struggle with my weight? At age seventy, what will I be like?
With his current story and identity, he imagined a future self that was completely unhealthy and unable to do the things he loved, like go on long hikes or travel the world. He also thought about his five kids and his future grandkids. At age seventy, he wouldn’t be able to fully enjoy those relationships. If he took the same route as his parents, he’d be completely overweight, unable to move much, and would have all sorts of debilitating diseases.
This vision of his future, and the painful emotions it conjured, was a tipping point for Nate. He determined that a single decision he could make, which would make the biggest impact on his health, would be to entirely eliminate refined sugar from his diet for the rest of his life.
If he eliminated unhealthy sugars from his diet for the remainder of his life, he could see himself getting his weight under control. He could see himself in his seventies, totally fit and healthy, able to go on hikes and play with his future grandkids. That was a future self he authentically wanted.
That vision for his future self gave Nate a reason to change his identity and behavior. By making that single decision, he would no longer need to obsess and stress about his weight.
In psychology, “decision fatigue” is one way in which our willpower gets exhausted, using up our mental resources to weigh the pros and cons of every decision as we encounter them.
Decision fatigue can be avoided by making a committed choice. For instance, because Nate decided he was going to be sugar-free for life, he no longer had to decide in various situations whether or not he was going to eat sugar. The decision had already been made, and thus decision fatigue—weighing the options and potential outcomes—was no longer a problem.
By not making a clear decision for yourself beforehand, you’ve deferred the decision-making process to some future moment when you’re forced to decide.
For instance, when your alarm goes off at five a.m., if you haven’t already committed to the decision to get out of bed, you’ve set yourself up for failure. You’ve put yourself in a position to make the decision in that moment—when you’re lying in bed, foggy and exhausted. Instead, keep your alarm across the room where you no longer have a choice. You have to get up and turn it off.
Unknowns are really bad for willpower, and ultimately lead people to the negative influences in their environment. You need to know what you’ll do in a given situation. The decision needs to be made before you get there, otherwise you become inconsistent, constantly going back and forth with yourself.
The opposite of decision fatigue is making a committed decision. As the basketball legend Michael Jordan is credited for saying, “Once I made a decision, I never thought about it again.”
Think about Ken, the man who “never” smoked. Once he decided he’d never smoke again, it wasn’t long before he never thought about smoking again. Decision fatigue is integral to addiction. The addiction exists because the decision to stop has yet to be made, and thus the mind continues to be consumed.
Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen has said, “It’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time.”
When you’re only 98 percent committed to something, then you haven’t truly decided. As a result, you’re required to continue making decisions in every future situation you’re in, weighing in every instance whether this particular situation falls into the 2 percent of exceptions you’ve allowed yourself. In every situation you’re in, you’re not actually sure what the outcome will be in terms of your behavior and decision-making.
This lack of decision leads to identity confusion and a lack of success. Becoming 100 percent committed to what you want is how you succeed. Making serious and sometimes hard decisions, rather than deferring them for bad situations, leads to enhanced confidence and progress.
Once Nate committed to his decision to cut out refined sugar, his entire identity changed. His new future self—a totally healthy person later in life who could play with his grandkids, travel, and hike—was now shaping his current identity and choices.
It’s important to note that “sugar” in itself isn’t necessarily the problem. The problem is Nate’s imagined future with sugar, versus his imagined future without it. If he imagines his future without it, he sees all sorts of possibilities that aren’t there when with it.
You can and should do this for yourself. Think about one thing in your life that you aren’t entirely aligned with. What would your future be like without that thing in your life?
It’s not that the “thing”—whether it is sugar, video games, or any other “vice” or distraction—is inherently “bad” but rather that your future self is different without it.
Decisions shape your future.
Your future shapes your identity.
Your identity shapes your choices and ultimately your personality.
With his new future self in mind, enabled by the decision to go 100 percent refined sugar free for life, Nate began to take an extreme interest in his health. He began reading health books. He researched all of the negative side effects of sugar. He wrote down a list of all of the diseases associated with sugar, such as dementia.
Nate proactively changed his identity to match his decision.
Every morning, he declared his daily affirmation that he was a healthy, vibrant, and sugar-free individual. When invited to eat sugary or unhealthy foods, he would affirm his identity by replying, “No, thanks. I’m sugar-free.”
In the six months that followed, Nate lost over fifty pounds and his confidence and vision for his future exploded.
Nate’s narrative about himself and his past also changed. His story became far more focused on where he is going rather than where he was. Nate is not the former fat guy. Instead, he is the healthy and vibrant person he wants to be.
Now it’s your turn.
Before imagining your desired future self, take some time to honestly think about the future you’ve currently consigned yourself to have. Remember, Nate had resigned himself to the fact that his future self would be limited, like his parents.
It wasn’t until he made the one crucial decision that his desired future self not only became possible but believable.
If you are not completely excited about the future you honestly see unfolding before you, then there’s a problem. That limited future self is also limiting who you are now. Your future and your goals are what frame your identity. Thus, with a limited future self, your current identity and behaviors are also going to be less than what they could be. As Dan Sullivan says, “The bigger your future the better your present.”
In order to upgrade your identity, actions, and behavior, you need a new future self. You need something you deeply resonate with and are excited about. Something extremely purposeful that you can shape your current identity around.
You need to aim beyond what you are capable of. You need to develop a complete disregard for where your abilities end. If you think you’re unable to work for the best company in its sphere, make that your aim. If you think you’re unable to be on the cover of Time magazine, make it your business to be there. Make your vision of where you want to be a reality. Nothing is impossible.
—Paul Arden
You get to write your own story. Pull out your journal and begin your own biography, as though you were recounting the life of someone who was no longer alive.
Take some time to sketch out your own biography. Write from when you were born up until the present. Then, write from the present through the rest of your life. Every year or so, do this exercise again. You’ll notice that your past and future narrations will change and evolve as you change and evolve. However, the more you do this exercise, the more intentional and creative you’ll be in narrating your story.
You’ll become increasingly better at creating and living out the story of your imagination. Because you’ll be living with greater intention, you’ll be having peak experiences more regularly. These peak experiences will alter your perspective and increase your confidence, enabling you to have a more flexible identity. The more flexible you become, the less rigid you’ll be about your past and who you think you are. You’ll be able to imagine a future self and quickly embody that self.
Instead of just answering these questions in your head, it’s far more powerful to write or type them into a “vision” or “future self” statement. This document could be typed and printed and include inspiring pictures that reflect your future self and future circumstances. Examples of pictures could include:
Pictures with you and your family that you love
Pictures of people who are physically fit in the way you want to be
Pictures of environments you want to have, such as a beautiful home
Pictures of spiritual figures, such as Christ or Buddha, whom you want to emulate
Pictures of experiences you plan to have, such as a marathon or a trip to a foreign country
This document could be as long as you want, but it also helps to keep it brief and focused.
Never mind searching for who you are. Search for the person you aspire to be.
—Robert Brault
Most people’s identity narrative is rooted in their past. From now on, your identity narrative—your “story”—is based on your future self. That’s the story you tell people from now on when they ask who you are.
In the musical Hamilton, the song “Satisfied” depicts the party where Alexander Hamilton meets the Schuyler sisters, and ultimately, he marries one. Hamilton first meets Angelica. The usual questions arise, focusing on status and class.
“My name is Angelica Schuyler.”
“Alexander Hamilton.”
“Where’s your family from?”
“Unimportant. There’s a million things I haven’t done but just you wait, just you wait . . .”
Alexander didn’t have an amazing past. He didn’t have incredible circumstances. He wasn’t rich. But he had dreams. His narrative wasn’t based on where he currently was or what he had formerly done. His identity narrative was based on what he would do.
Cameron Herold is the founder of the COO Alliance and has helped hundreds of organizations develop what he calls a “Vivid Vision.” Herold recommends that organizations keep these Vision documents three to five pages in length and, once developed, to publicize them everywhere.
If you’re a company, you want everyone on your team to know your vision (not your personality type). You also want all of your clients and prospects to know your vision.
As it relates to yourself, having a three- to five-page printed document of your future self will help you more fully see and believe it. Moreover, you want to share your Vivid Vision document with everyone you know. As you share your vision and goals with those in your life, they will start to hold you more accountable.
Your vision needs to be something that is way above your current reality. It needs to inspire and excite you. It needs to give you motivation and hope. It needs to be something that will stretch and change you. It needs to be big enough that when you look back, you’ll be shocked by where and who you currently are.
Your “future self” and “vision” are things that are under constant revision and should be working documents. In order for it to be strategic and useful, it’s helpful to narrow that vision to three or less years out into the future. The vision should focus on your one major goal, which if you achieve will make your future self and everything else you want in your life possible.
Now that you’ve reframed your past and imagined your ideal future, it’s time to get busy.
It’s time to act.
In order to solidify your new identity, you need to begin acting in alignment with that new identity, rather than acting in alignment with your former self. Psychologists have a term for this—self-signaling, which means that our actions signal back to us who we are. We judge and measure ourselves by our actions. If you change your behavior, your identity will begin to follow suit.
As you begin acting as your future self, you will eventually become that future self. Your personality will adapt itself to your goals, and you’ll have the characteristics, attributes, and circumstances you want.
In order to do so, you must make your future self the new standard for your daily behavior. You must say no to current-self opportunities and options and forgo them for future-self ones.
Your future self is the new standard.
For example, if you are a public speaker and your speaking fee is $5,000, raise your speaking fee to $15,000 and say no if someone won’t pay it. Prefer being rejected at your new standard than being accepted at your old one.
Over time, your subconscious catches up to your courage, becoming your new normal. Eventually, the new standard will be replaced with a higher and different one—and not just in monetary terms. Sometimes, the new standard is a lateral rather than vertical upgrade. Make your future self the new standard for your current mindset and behavior.
The next chapter will show you exactly what you need to know.