Do you know who you are? Without all your false stories of your identity? Who would you be if you were the one writing the chapters of your life? Too often we believe what other people think is more important than what we think or want for ourselves. Then, we live our life through their lens instead of our own. Not anymore! Here’s how to stop letting other people write your narrative so you can be in control of your life.
It’s important to know what’s yours and what’s not, and to separate fact from fiction. When we don’t have a grasp on who we are, we bend to what other people want us to be (people pleasing).
Understanding where you give your power away, play roles, and don’t have or uphold boundaries, helps you redefine who you are. It allows you to have control over yourself, your emotions, and your own validation. Writing your own narrative sets you free of your previous limitations and sets you up to live a life you love.
Know your own narrative
Knowing your own personal narrative helps you to uncover your patterns, stories, and limiting beliefs. This is important because when you know what you’re telling yourself, you can start to recognize what’s yours and what’s not.
The things we tell ourselves are often stories that we’ve created from childhood experiences to keep us safe. Sometimes, they’re things that other people told us about who we are that we believed in a personal way.
These survival techniques are often unhelpful, and create a disempowering narrative around who we are. Most of these stories are taken in before we really can understand fact versus fiction.
Memories are directly tied to emotions. Quite often, the emotion is giving us a false narrative. This is due to the way we remember experiences. We form the story based on the emotion, and the brain fills in the rest based on your belief system. That’s why we don’t always remember the actual “facts” of the experience.
Once we know what we’re telling ourselves then we can start changing it to be more conducive to the reality we desire. We create from our narrative, so if our life isn’t what we want, we need to ask what our story really is.
Our stories shape our reality.
What we believe becomes what we experience. If we continually tell ourselves that we’re “stupid” eventually we believe it. Then, before we know it, our life is filled with moments that confirm our alleged “stupidity”.
Our beliefs are self-fulfilling prophecies. The things we keep looping on repeat become ingrained within our neural pathways, therefore becoming our “truth”. And the more we reinforce it, the deeper it gets.
Being aware of what you’re telling yourself on a regular basis gives you a clue as to what you’re creating. The things that you think — are they your thoughts or are they stories that someone else made up about you?
Did someone once tell you something about yourself that didn’t feel so good? If every time you think of it you still feel something emotionally, then your body still remembers it. That means you’re not in control of your narrative. You’re letting someone else’s story of you become more important than your own energetic sovereignty.
Which means, you can easily fall back into unwanted patterns because of the narrative someone else created for you that you’re living out.
Stop performing
Why are you trying to be someone you’re not?
When you’re living out someone else’s expectations of you, you’re performing a role they designed for you. And when you’re playing a part you were never meant to play, you fall into the belief that the role is you.
Performance never feels real. In fact, it often feels stifling and restrictive. You’re living out an idea of you that someone else wants you to be. You change who you are based on who you (often subconsciously) think you should be to them. Perhaps you shrink into a fearful, child-like version of yourself, or bend to meet someone else’s expectation.
We self-abandon when we perform. The role is inauthentic and rarely feels good. We become disconnected from who we are and assume the roles others created for us because it’s easier (and sometimes safer) than self-discovery. Maybe it’s less painful. Often we don’t even know we’re doing it.
Most of us move through life as someone we’re not. The notion of “go to college, get a job, get married, buy a house, have kids, work until you’re 65, then go and enjoy life” is just a role society created for us to play.
How many of us feel good as that character in our own life? Considering the amount of people who’ve ditched this outdated idea of “life”, my guess is we’d rather be the main character writing our own plot twists.
Where do you perform in your life? Do you change who you are when you’re around certain people? Do you feel like you have to act a certain way to fit in, be loved, or accepted? How does that really feel? Where in your life do you feel like you’re living someone else’s dreams?
Create strong boundaries
When you don’t have boundaries, you will bend to what other people want. Whether it’s from a pattern of people pleasing, intimidation, fear, or something else, when we can’t hold our own boundaries, we give our power to someone else.
In giving our power away, we let someone else’s beliefs, expectations, projections, and patterns dictate how we think, feel, act, and show up in the world. A lot of times this is completely unconscious, meaning we have no idea it’s even happening.
For example, imagine if every time you go visit your parents, they treat you like you’re twelve and not a grown adult. How do you respond? If you don’t speak up, then you are not holding boundaries around how you want to be treated. And, you’re reinforcing the role you’re playing.
This means that you’re allowing your parents to dictate the way you behave, and you slip back into old patterns you didn’t even know you had. In order to break the cycle, you need to choose a different response. That means you have to validate that how you feel is more important than what/who others want you to be.
Standing up for yourself isn’t always easy, especially when there’s a power dynamic like a parent/child. However, boundaries are massively important as they protect your personal peace, balance, and sanity. They also let people know how to treat you — what you will and will not accept in your life.
And the people who get upset with your boundaries are the people who took advantage of you not having any. These boundaries allow you to be true to yourself and create your own identity based on what feels good to you. Letting others treat you in a way that keeps you locked in their perspective lets them write your story for you. It’s up to you to break free.
Tap into your feelings
“If you don’t invest time getting to know yourself you’ll end up accepting everyone else’s definition of you. How you see yourself impacts every decision you make” -Jeff Moore
How deeply connected to your feelings are you?
Listening to your emotions and being in tune with them will give you huge clues to your alignment. When you’re letting someone else write your narrative, your emotions will feel unaligned. This might show up as sadness, anger, overwhelm, fear, stagnation, resistance, tension, anxiety, depression or something else.
Aligned emotions feel elevated, open, light, motivating, inspiring, and fluid. When you are living your experience, notice how you feel. Writing your own story should feel exciting! Each day is a new adventure and you get to choose who you are in every moment.
Playing a role and performing out of someone else’s expectations leaves you feeling drained. Maybe you even feel “out of your body”. These feelings are associated with you not living in the truth of who you are.
Tap into how you’re feeling throughout your day. Where do you feel deeply connected to yourself? What are you doing or thinking at those moments? Do you do enough of this in your day to day life?
When you’re writing the chapters of your story, you’re in control. That means you have jurisdiction over what you think, feel, say, do, and believe. Go deeply into your storylines. How do they feel to you? If something’s not so good, ask yourself why. Are you performing? Where are you acting as someone you’re not? Are you willing to be someone else?
Becoming more aligned with who you are is scary. Feel into any fear that arises. You’re walking into an unknown version of you — a version of you that you’ve never been. And that’s enough to easily pull you back into what is known and comfortable. Feeling your way through the discomfort helps anchor in your experience.
You need the space with yourself to contain the new, true, version of you. Otherwise, you just repeat the same stories and patterns you’ve been acting out unconsciously.
Be audacious
Be audacious enough to write your own story. Have the courage to say that your life is your life and you get to be the author. Take control of your narrative by reaffirming it is your narrative. Make sure that the stories you’re telling yourself feel good to you. Create them to be constructive and supportive of what it is that you want for yourself.
Take some time for self-reflection. Where do you live your life according to what someone else wants for you? How does that make you feel? What would you rather do? What would be required of you to be that person?
The big question is: Are you willing to give up everything about your identity that’s not yours and replace it with what is?
If you’re ready but don’t know where to start, book an alignment session to get focused and resolve what’s been standing in your way.