Are Your Stories Serving You? Or Is It Time To Write New Ones?

Have you ever considered the stories you tell yourself about who you are? 

We all have narratives we've spun about ourselves, and it's time to unravel some of them to see if they serve us or hold us back. An enlightening dinner with an old friend made me realize that I had been boxing myself into the narrative that I'm not strategic. 

Join me as we explore how such self-narratives can become self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping our actions and decisions more than we might realize.

And stick around for an empowering exercise that will get you thinking about the part you want to play in your life story.

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Transcript

Ryan Spence: 0:00

You need to unpick the stories, figure out what serves you without judgment, and let the rest go. You're listening to the Triple C Project. Welcome to the Triple C Project, the podcast that helps you gain clarity, lose confidence and courage so you can live life. Next. I'm your host, ryan Spence, the big law dropout, life coach, author, speaker, lover of hoodies, hip hop and big, hairy, pervasive goals. If you're tired of living the life you think you should want, and ready to start living the life you do want, this podcast will help you get from where you are to where you really want to be. So now, with friends, I invite you to grab a drink, take a seat, allow me to guide you towards living a life that's lit. Hey, hey, welcome to episode 78 of the Triple C Project and the last episode before I go off on my two-week holiday, which I'm very excited about.

Ryan Spence: 1:07

I had toyed with the idea of pre-recording episodes to release while I'm away for the next two weeks, but I decided that I didn't want to do that. It just didn't feel like what I wanted to do, and there's nothing wrong. I mean, batching episodes, as I've talked about before, makes a whole lot of sense and, yeah, particularly the way that I work. It would save me a lot of time. But I don't know. There's just something about the way that my brain works and when it comes up to the things that I want to share, that I don't really know what I want to share until it's time for the episode to be recorded and come out. And I just feel that that's just the way that I work right now and it works for me mostly Mostly works for me, but I like it that way. So I'm going to be away for two weeks, so there'll be no episodes for the next two weeks. I'm sure you won't forget about me, right? I'll be back and for force when I come back from a well deserved break with the fam.

Ryan Spence: 2:07

And also, I think often there are a lot of people in this space, a lot of coaches, a lot of people out there who are doing good work, who sort of are very good at talking about self care and looking after your wellbeing and that kind of thing, but aren't that good at doing it themselves, because they are always on the go, always on their hamster wheel. And I feel that it's kind of important to walk the talk, really, to kind of model what you're talking about. So, for example, I have kind of sort of stepped down a little bit from my social media activity of the last sort of couple of weeks into, as I sort of ease into, this coming break, and taking a break from the podcast is another way of doing that as well. So hopefully that allows you to give yourself some permission to take a break from whatever it is that you're doing and that you feel you literally can't stop doing and you can't get off the hamster wheel of. And my holiday is coming at a time when, hopefully, it looks like the weather is coming back.

Ryan Spence: 3:09

We had a beautiful day of sunshine yesterday. I was actually down in London catching up with some friends, and it was a glorious day. London in the Sun, when you can just roam around without a particular place to go, just catching up with friends. It's a beautiful place to be. So that was fantastic and I'm sharing with that with you, not just to talk about my great day in London, but because it has a connection to what I'm going to talk about today.

Ryan Spence: 3:35

And the question I'd like to ask you is what are the stories that you're telling yourself about yourself, and are those stories serving you or are they holding you back. So I met up with two friends yesterday and one the friend I had dinner with is again an old friend of mine. We trained together at the firm I was at. He'd moved on but we'd always been in touch. When he was in Dubai I'd been to see him. He's now a partner at a different firm not Big Law, but a different firm and it's really good to sort of catch up, as it always is.

Ryan Spence: 4:13

And as we were talking about various things and he was interested in kind of what I'm doing now a bit more and that kind of thing, and I was talking I think I was talking about wanting to do more speaking, more public speaking, and what I had said was that, yeah, but I'm very much more sort of freewheeling, like I'm not strategic, like strategy isn't really my thing, and that's the story that I've been telling myself as I've been on this personal development quest, in fact, probably even when I was back in Big Law, like strategies isn't me. And I think, as as I've left Big Law and as I've gone down this path and as I've kind of refound the creative flow inside of me that's kind of taken over and that's become more my identity, that this creator, this person with these big ideas, who wants to just go ahead and execute and isn't really that interested in the details, or is it in kind of putting together a strategic plan? But what he said kind of made me think oh, I see what I'm doing here. I've been telling myself this story and he said to me but when you talk there is always a logic to what you're saying. You can always see that there is some thought process. You're not literally just vomiting up a word tablet and I thought about it. It's like, actually you're right.

Ryan Spence: 5:44

I've been telling myself that I'm not strategic, that I don't do this sort of logical way of putting ideas together, that I'm very much this kind of like sort of airy fairy creative, if you want, for one of a better term. But actually there is some strategy within my creativity. I've just been telling myself this story and that's then. That story had kind of been this self-fulfilling prophecy and it showed me that even with all the work that I've done and all that I know, I can still fall into that trap of telling myself stories that aren't necessarily serving me Because it doesn't mean. I mean, if it's true, if I just wasn't strategic at all, and it was true. There's nothing wrong with telling yourself that story. It shows, in fact, and then it shows self-awareness, and it shows that you know where your strengths lie and where they don't. But I've been telling myself this particular story for so long that I had believed that I didn't really have any strategic impetus, any sort of strategic ideas. Well, in fact, as he pointed out just in those few words that he said, I do. And so this thing got me back to thinking about other ways, other clients that I've worked with, or friends that I've spoken to, or just things that I've done, where I've been telling myself stories or people have been telling themselves stories that aren't actually serving them and they're actually holding them back.

Ryan Spence: 7:22

Another story that came to mind was I remember when I had left music and I'd gone to start my law degree, my law undergrad, and I think I was in my first year at the time and I was probably my late 20s then. So I figured out when I got my degree I'd be in my early 30s and I was like am I going to be too old for law firms or am I actually going to get a job in a firm? And this, it sounds crazy now, but this was a real concern of mine in my mind. I mean, I was doing this degree, I wanted to do this degree, but I also obviously wanted to get a job at the end of it. And when firms had the pick of all the graduates who'd gone straight through them and coming through in their early 20s, were they going to want to hire somebody who had dropped out of uni, already had worked in the music business but not being quote and quote terribly successful, and was almost 10 years older than the average graduate? Yeah, very, very silly.

Ryan Spence: 8:25

Looking back, and I remember saying this to a tutor that I had on the course of the time and she kind of looked at me. She was just like no, not at all. She didn't quite laugh in my face I think she was too polite for that but she kind of made the point that no, not at all. Like he has nothing to do with it. You're nowhere near any sense of being too old. But I had been kind of telling myself this story for a period of time, that that was the case, and so I then believed it to be true and, as I've said before, there was actually no evidence to support that story.

Ryan Spence: 9:02

So I'm going to read an extract from the triple C method because I felt that, as I was thinking about this, this kind of really speaks to this point about. We have these stories that we have been telling ourselves for so long without really questioning whether they are true and whether those stories serve us. And if you're doing that, then here's kind of what you need to do. As I say in the book and this comes from chapter three entitled Don't Think About it, be About it. And it's if you've got the paper back. It's on page 501. I was going to read this short extract you need to unpick the stories, figure out what serves you without judgment and let the rest go. It's akin to shedding layers of yourself that have been built up to protect you until you get to the absolute essence of who you are without the armor you've been carrying around to keep you safe and comfortable. And I chose that section because I think this is what we need to do as you find yourself telling yourself these stories, as these stories are playing around in your brain, that you can't do this, or you can't do that, or you're too old for this, or you're not good enough at that, or you're rubbish at this.

Ryan Spence: 10:30

It's getting curious and starting to unpick those stories. Where is the truth in those stories? Where are those stories coming from? Are they stories that you've created yourself? Unlikely? Are they stories that have come from your parents, from your friends, from your teachers, from your colleagues? Where have those stories come from, and how long have you been telling yourself those stories? And is there any truth in them? And do they serve you? Because if the story is true, then fine, acknowledge that it's true, let it go. It's not serving to keep telling yourself negative stories about yourself. And if the story isn't true, then tell yourself that, declare that and get to the essence of what the truth actually is, so that the story that you then tell that, the narrative that you reframe, can then begin to serve you in what it is that you want to do, in where it is that you want to go. And it is this unpicking. It is basically like shedding layers, as I talked about a couple of weeks ago and I talked about in a self-stack article that I posted. You have to shed the layers, you have to kind of keep going down, to kind of get to the essence of what's really going on, what's the truth, what's the heart of the story and what do you want your story to be? Because if the heart of the story is a story that you don't really like, then you can change it. You are the author of your own story. You can rewrite that narrative. You can rewrite that story.

Ryan Spence: 12:10

There's an exercise I used to get my coaching clients to do. I haven't done that for a while, but in the very early days of my coaching it was an exercise that I used and Pirates quite liked it, and I can't remember where I came across it. I didn't invent this, but it was something which I thought that's really good and I kind of adapted it and made it my own. And so if you've ever been to an airport or even just into a bookstore where you have the big magazine stands and you know that the magazine they always have different headlines, sometimes different pictures on the cover that to kind of like entice you in to kind of open up and look inside and go ahead and buy it. And so what I would say to my clients is imagine you're walking through an airport rushing to catch your flight and you stop off at that news agent to pick up something to read on the plane and you see that wall of magazines and on that wall of magazines there's a magazine about you. What would be on the cover of that magazine? So what five things would be on that magazine that would really represent who you are or really how you want people to see you, who it is that you want to be. And so there are differences.

Ryan Spence: 13:38

Sometimes people wanted to be quite sporty and they wanted to be seen on there doing a particular sport or exercise that they liked. They wanted to be seen on there as a parent and doing something with their child. They maybe had another hobby or a skill that they wanted to be represented there. But it's also about how did you want to look? Were they going to be smiling? Were they going to be happy? Were they going to be? You know, what were you going to look like and what I liked about the exercise is it started to help clients see themselves how they wanted to be seen.

Ryan Spence: 14:14

Because we are very much who we are. We kind of get up and we just go about doing the things that we've always done and the way that we've always done them, and it's rare that we take that time to kind of step back and think about but actually, who do I really want to be, how do I want to show up for others, how do I want others to see me? And so this exercise was like this thought process in that, and when you look at the cover and you think about how you want to be seen, one of the stories, one of the narratives that go along with the images that you pick, with the pictures that you choose, and that's the story. They're the stories that you want to be telling yourself, because they're the stories that are empowering. They're the stories that represent who you are, who you want to be, how you want to be seen. So those are the stories that are going to serve you, not the story that's saying you can't do this thing. You're not going to get yourself on the cover of that magazine looking downtrodden, looking miserable, looking unhappy, because that's probably not how you want to be, how you want to come across. We all feel like that sometimes, and so this isn't dismissing that, but the idea is that this is the ideal view of you, of how you want to be, how you want to be seen, what's important to you, what makes up you in your life, in your story.

Ryan Spence: 15:36

So I invite you to try that episode, that exercise. If you've never done that before, just take some time. Sit in a meditation position if you like, sit on the chair, sit somewhere in silence and eyes closed or eyes open. Just if your eyes are open, just kind of fix them and just let your mind wander and just get to a visualization of you walking through an airport, going on an amazing holiday or maybe you're going on a really exciting business trip. So it's somewhere where you're excited to go and you're all set, ready to go, and you're just stopping off to pick up something to read on the flight and you see a magazine that represents you. What's on the cover and what's the story? What are the stories inside that represent what's on the cover and are they serving you?

Ryan Spence: 16:32

So I hope this episode has been helpful. I hope it's got you thinking about things that you say to yourself, the conversation that you have with yourself, and where they work, where they're not working and how you can rewrite them. In fact, I hope it just even gives you even if you walk away from this just believing that you can rewrite them, because often we feel that the story is what the story is. The story is where we're from the background that we had, the school we went to, the parents that we had, and that all influences who we are and where we've got to now. But we can rewrite that if we choose to, if we want to, if we want things to be different. We just need to take the time to do it, and that's what I'm hoping that this episode does for you.

Ryan Spence: 17:15

So go ahead and have a go at the episode and think about what comes up for you on the cover, and I'd love to hear what comes up in your mind, what it is that you want to see yourself represented as on that magazine cover. Send me an email, hey, at I am Ryan Spencecom. Or find me on LinkedIn or over on Instagram at I am underscore Ryan Spence, and tell me, tell me what's on there and tell me why. And tell me how it made you feel when that came up. Did it make you feel excited, did it make you feel powerful, did it make you feel motivated? Because these are the things that are going to help you push forward towards that life that's lit. So I'd love to hear from you. It really makes the whole, this whole process, a conversation. I love conversation, community connection. So, yeah, hit me up, tell me what's on the cover, tell me what the story you were telling yourself is, and tell me what story you're going to tell yourself now and how that's going to serve you in moving forward from where you are to where it is that you want to be.

Ryan Spence: 18:23

Thanks for being here. I will see you again in about two weeks time, back from my holiday, with some more tales to tell, no doubt. Until then, go ahead, do the exercise. If you haven't already check out the book the triple C method you can now get that direct from my website. I am RyanSpencecom slash book audiobook, ebook and, if you're in the UK, you can also get a signed paperback too. If you're not in the UK and you would like a signed paperback, just drop me a message and we'll work something out on the shipping front. Okay, I'm out of here. Let's get in late. Thank you for being here Always a pleasure and I look forward to hearing what you have to say about your own stories and what's coming up for you from this episode. Share it with a friend. Until next time, until I'm back from my lovely break, stop living a life of lethargy. Stop living a life of lethargy. Thanks for tuning in to the triple C project.

Ryan Spence: 19:26

In the spirit of the triple C, there's three things that you can do to support the show. Head to ratethispodcastcom. Slash triple C or over to your favorite podcast app and leave a review. Reviews really help people checking out shows to see what they can expect and how this show can help them. Second thing you can do Share. Share a previous episode with a friend, someone who you feel could benefit from what I'm throwing down on this show. And number three, head to imrinespencecom. Get on the mailing list. I'll be sharing news about the show, news about what I'm up to my new book. Start writing soon. So to be the first to be in the know, you need to get yourself on the list. Really appreciate you being here and, until next week, stop living a life of lethargy. Living life lit.