We’re delving into your Narrative. By now you know that your Narrative informs at least 50% of the way you show up every day in every situation, and that the other half is your Nature. Both require work, but most people find each brings it’s own challenges.

Before we get into the next tool, I want to point out a couple things that you may have already noticed:

First, we’ve gone from the shallow end of the pool toward the deep end. During the early Audio Notes your feet touched the bottom of the pool. Not anymore. This portion of the Selfship journey requires that you’re able to swim, which is why I’ll remind you of the importance of the Activation Triangle and Reactivity Scale. Think of them as the edge of the pool that you can reach in case the swimming gets tough. Use the edge to make your way back to shallower depths where you can touch. Or get out of the pool altogether.

Second, you may also notice that most people don’t do this work. Most of us live willingly and accidentally unaware of our Nature and Narrative. We have some sense that they’re there, but tend to avoid them, which is what produces all of the compensatory behaviors that affect us and the people around us. Instead of gaining an honest assessment of ourselves, we hold ourselves together with psychological duct. For a lot of people, it’s only when things begin to unravel that they begin to consider their Narrative and Nature. They ignore the disturbances on the river which grow over time into rapids.

Think of this Selfship journey as the antidote to that tendency we all have to put off the hard work. As you go through this process, you’re proactively identifying defining elements of your Nature and Narrative. Soon I’ll introduce a framework you can use every day to work with yourself and the insights you’ve gained during this journey. More on that later.

Now that you’ve completed your Life Map you have a snapshot of your entire story from birth up until today. It’s a powerful tool that often brings enormous clarity to leaders.

I recently took a CEO through this exercise. He was reflecting on his story he realized in a new way how few care givers he had growing up, how he was on his own, and how he learned to do everything on his own. He made immediate connections between his story and some of the tendencies within his leadership. For example, he spoke about his tendency to do everything on his own and how he struggles to effectively delegate and collaborate with others. Going away from his Leader Intensive, he identified this as the growth area he most wants to target. We spoke last week and he talked about the how he’s already seeing improvements, and that his team is recognizing his changes as well.

The point of the exercise is to highlight the data of your story. Like the disturbances on the surface of a river, we’re gradually beginning to consider how you’ve responded to the data of your story. Like this CEO, you may also recognize that certain behaviors have their inception not in your Nature but in your Narrative. They’re reactions to your story. That’s what this portion of the journey toward Selfship is all about. The specifics of your story are important, but we’re most interested in your responses to these events, relationships, and all of the things that comprise your Narrative.

In this Audio Note I’ll walk you through how to punctuate your story into chapters. We’re going to break your story into bite-sized chunks. In the last Audio Note I said that I was going to help you create your Rule Book, but decided to include this Note first because it’s an important lead-in to the Rule Book.

(Like I said, this is the first time I’ve ever presented the Selfship journey in its entirety. I appreciate your patience with me as a sort out the best way to sequence the content.)

When I say we’re going to “punctuate” your story, I mean that we’re going to identify the natural breaks in your story. Events like moving from one place to another, moving one school or grade to another, marriage, a divorce or loss in your family, a graduation, and other events like this add natural divisions between sections of your story. These may or may not be the events that received the highest or lowest scores on your Life Map. For example, my dad leaving our family scores lower than when I left for university a year later, but it marked a break in my narrative.

Let’s het started.

Take a look at your completed version of your Life Map. Reflect on the events that you see and ask yourself how much impact they made on what came after the event. In other words, to what degree did this event mark the end of one chapter and the beginning of another chapter?

You’ve already scored the event on a scale of plus ten to minus ten with respect to whether it was a positive or negative event. Now I want you to score it on significance when you consider the degree to which it punctuated your story. Next to each event put a number that represents how much this event punctuated your life. A score or 3 or less indicates a period in a sentence. A score of 3-5 indicates a paragraph break. 6-8 marks the end of a section within a chapter, and 9 or 10 means you ended chapter and began another. Again, you’re scoring the significance of the event by how much it punctuated your story, which is different from scoring based on triumph or tragedy.

Draw a vertical line to indicate those breaks across your Life Map. Now that you’ve identified your chapters, you will print and complete one Chapter Map for every chapter in your story. That way you have one for each chapter of your life.

As the directions indicate, you’re going to identify the narrative components that comprise each chapter of your life. Of course you are the main character in the story, but each chapter is like a story unto itself. It includes narrative elements like setting, plot, tension, crises, triumphs, and resolutions. Each chapter will also include a cast of characters. You’ll identify your supporting cast. These are the people that walked alongside you through this chapter, and maybe several chapters. You’ll have unsupportive cast members that should have supported you, but didn’t, or even worked against you. You may also have villains within some chapters—people that haunted you and seemed bent on your destruction.

Take the time you need to complete one of these for each chapter. Each complete Chapter Map represents a portion of your story. Together they capture your entire life so far.

This exercise provides a deeper understanding of your story. Like I said in the last Audio Note, you knew all of these things at some level. You knew the data. Now you’re gaining a deeper appreciation for the significance of the data. As we move forward, this will illuminate how you may have responded to the data.

Remember that I challenged you to own your Nature—the unique tendencies, passions, and gifts God gave you? I talked about how there are times you may want to be someone else, wish you had certain aspects that others possess and you don’t. In other words, there may be times you want to disown your Nature. The same is true of your Narrative. You may wish you could change your story, erase certain elements, or take things back from the past. You may wish that you could have had someone else’s story.

Nature and Narrative envy are a normal part of life, but true Selfship requires that we do the work that’s necessary to own your own story. It’s yours and no one else’s. You may not like all of its aspects, but it’s yours. It’s shaped the person you are today. Your attempts to disown your story produce the very reactions and tendencies that hurt the people around you and undermine your leadership, your goals and your aspirations.

Imagine reading a book, or watching a show, or a movie that lacked tension. You wouldn’t watch it. It makes you root for the hero as he or she navigates challenges in the story. Without them you’d stop watching. Why? Because, opposing forces make stories not only interesting and meaningful, they make them good, even if they include the bad.

Your story is no different. Whether you’ve lived a relatively charmed life or experienced tremendous hardship, it’s your story. It’s not your spouse’s or friend’s story, or your co-worker’s, or your employee’s, or that person you envy because according to Instagram, they have an amazing story. It’s yours and it’s a good story—all of it, from your birth this very moment. In that sense, every element is not merely necessary, it’s good in the sense that it’s part of your unique narrative. The one that shaped the person you are today.

As you grow to increasingly own your story, the Selfship process invites you pay attention to those disturbances on the surface of the river—those times where your Narrative reveals itself in your perceptions of the world and your reactions to life’s situations. That level of awareness and commitment to understanding the truth about your Narrative opens a whole new world of intentionality.

In the next Audio Note we’ll look at your Rule Book. For sure this time. Whether you know it or not, you have a Rule Book. You follow it every day, mostly without knowing it. This exercise will clarify those rules, encourage you to keep some of them, and to start breaking others. It’s all with the same goal: that you own your Narrative.

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