Time to read: 4 minutes
Article at a glance:
- Brené Brown shares a personal story about misinterpreting a tweet to illustrate how quickly our minds can create false narratives.
- Our brains often fill in gaps with fear-based stories to avoid the discomfort of ambiguity.
- She offers a 3-step practice to rewrite these stories: pause, ask questions, and name the story.
- By owning our stories, we can choose to respond rather than react, and write a more helpful ending.
Have you ever interpreted a situation to mean something it didn’t? Did you take offense when someone actually meant something else?
If you have a human brain, chances are, you’ve fallen into this trap. We all do it.
In this month’s culture video, Brené Brown tells of a time when she told herself a story…and it wasn’t true.
Minutes before Brené was to step onstage at the HubSpot conference she saw a Tweet that read, “Why is Brené Brown at HubSpot?”
Immediately, her mind told her a story: that this Tweeter challenged her right to speak at this conference, and that if this guy questioned her value, other people would too.
As she prepared to mount an online—and onstage—defense, she actually clicked the Tweet and realized it simply led to an article discussing the importance of the topics she was slated to cover.
Oops.
So why do our brains jump to the worst possibility, and how can we act differently?
Why We Tell Ourselves Stories
“There's a name…for a story that has one or two limited data points and we fill in the rest with fear. It's called a conspiracy.” - Brené Brown
Another word for telling an untrue story that we truly believe is confabulation, or “a lie told honestly.” We might honestly say or believe something that isn’t true, but we can’t see that it’s false.
With only scraps of information, our brains try to fill in the gaps because ambiguity is uncomfortable. And since our brains are often skewed toward the negative because we evolved to look for threats, we fill those gaps with the worst case scenario. Our brains would rather be upset about something we think we know than linger in that squirmy place of not knowing.
This little habit our brains love to fall into isn’t pleasant. It can stress us out and strain our relationships at home and at work. It can cause us to react recklessly (like Brené almost did) instead of pausing, gathering more info, and responding in a way that’s actually helpful.
What do we do?
When you start telling yourself a story, try these three practices to rewrite the ending.
Let’s say you want to move forward with an idea for modifying a process, and a coworker thinks you should hold off.
Your imagination takes off like a spooked horse. Do they think my idea was dumb? Do they think I’M dumb? Do they think I’m not a valuable part of this team? Maybe I am dumb…You know what, no. THEY’RE dumb.
And so on.
How do you stop the story and respond, rather than react?
Pause
Recognize you’ve been snagged by emotions and get curious. Your body can give you clues here. Maybe your face gets hot or your palms sweat. Brené says breathing grows shallow and her armpits tingle.
If you can head that emotional reaction off at the pass, you can tell a different story.
This takes practice, but when you notice you’re telling yourself a story, you can pause, take a step back, and decide how you want to move forward.
The more comfortable we can be with slowing down this process, the more we can learn not to believe those stories.
Ask Questions
Brené recommends these questions for getting out of the story and finding the facts:
What do I know for sure? Objectively name what you heard/saw.
-Your coworker actually said, “What if we explore more to see if we need that process at all?”. That’s it. Don’t embellish or make it mean anything.
What story are you making up?
-You might think their comment meant they think you’re dumb, and not seeing the obvious.
What do you need to know more about?
-What are they actually seeing?
When you have the facts and know what you don’t know, then you can move forward with rewriting the story.
Name the Story
A good practice, when you feel that stress rising, is to say and/or think “The story I’m telling myself is…”
Even asking this in your mind can help distance you from the story so you can see it more objectively. It helps you separate fact from fiction and start solving any problems that need to be solved instead of getting worked up over nothing.
If you choose to talk to someone about your story, it helps to say this out loud. “The story I’m telling myself is…” That sounds much less accusatory than stating your story as fact, and the other person is less likely to get defensive.
One of the Seven Habits of Highlight Effective People is “Seek first to understand, then to be understood,” so it can help to ask clarifying questions before you get into your story. But telling your story can help the other person understand the context around your questions. Try it!
Writing the Ending
“When you own the story, you get to write the ending.” - Brené Brown
When we believe a story, we might react defensively. We might hurt others to avoid being hurt. Lash out. Or shrink. Or numb. Or sabotage.
But we are not at the mercy of our brains. We can learn to notice when we’re telling stories and instead of believing them, get more clarity. How free would we feel if we didn’t automatically believe every story our brain told us?
