Our thoughts foster our feelings. Our feelings create our beliefs. Our beliefs write the stories that we live out, and those stories are far more malleable than we often realize.
This is because you have the power to change your story all on your own from the inside out, without depending on outside circumstances to change first.
That’s not the automatic norm is it? We tend to put our focus on changing what’s happening around us, believing that if it changes first, then that’s when we can feel differently about it; but there is a ‘behind the curtain’ skill set that I know about from my decades spent as an actor, which flips this on its head and puts the power of influence back in your hands.
How thinking like an actor will lift you up into the life you’ve always dreamed of, moment by moment.
Indeed, we are going for better lives in a big sense, but we must remember that the more sweeping shifts are made up of small moments. Thinking like an actor helps us bring a lot more conscious awareness to those moments. It helps us learn how to choose the path from there — from a place of conscious response, not just in reaction to our surroundings or a conditioned belief.
Change Your Story, One Piece at a Time
All it takes is one shifted piece of your story to create meaningful change in the outcome. When we want to create sweeping changes but it feels overwhelming, or especially when change feels big or uncomfortable, there is power and solace in feeling that it’s all very manageable.
When working on a script and creating a character, actors decide to open up all possibilities within that story. They play with many many combinations as they make their choices.
We tend to forget just how much choice and possibility we have in our lives at any moment, because we aren’t in the practice of practicing that concept with much depth.
We can think of any story we have living in our heads, and PLAY with it. We can breathe air and life into it and create a new experience. There is a set of questions that I used as a constant guide as a creative, and I use it constantly since to create mastery in my daily life. I’d love to share them with you today.
Change Your Story with a Set of Questions
Title of Scene
Who am I?
Who am I talking to?
What do you want them to feel?
What am I doing to create this?
The way in which you answer any one of these determines both how you feel about it all, and also much of the outcome.
I recommend taking any story in your life that is either really important, or one you believe is problematic, and first answer these questions about it AS IS, meaning how it usually happens or how you believe it will happen. Some examples would be what is happening in your head before an important interview or presentation…before sales calls…within interactions between you and your partner or children…
When you do this, you get to note on paper your attitudes and beliefs about this situation.
Change It Up
Then, re-write the ‘scene’ as you want it ideally to be. Change one answer at a time, or all of them! Here are some hypothetical ideas…
- Change the title from ‘The Dreaded Interview’ to ‘The Heart to Heart.’
- If there was anything negative about your description of yourself, change it to something like ‘I am a woman passionate about my material whose information makes a difference.’
- Change the person you’re talking to from perhaps ‘the big boss who decides my fate’ to ‘my new colleague who I share mutual respect with.’
- Change ‘I want to get the job’ to ‘I want them to feel seen and heard.’
- Change what you’re doing to get it from ‘to prove myself’ or ‘to get through it’ to something like ‘to invite, to connect, to shine, to celebrate this opportunity.’
Celebrate The Internal Win and Allow the Shift!
Hopefully, just reading the differences here is letting you feel the shifts that are possible, even in changing just one piece of the story. This question structure is built to help you define what you think and feel, bring it to full consciousness, and then easily begin to re-imagine it in ways that matter. You’ll find that nothing else changed but YOU, and that internal, energetic change will not only be empowering to you, but will create desired results as you interact in each of the scenes of your life!
Join Amelia at Speak Up Women on April 30, 2022! Tickets are available now.
Amelia Randolph Campbell is Founder and CEO of ARC Inc. TEDx Speaker and Yahoo Finance Top 10 Motivational Speakers to follow in 2022. Her e-book, ‘Pocket Perspective – A little book of instant relief’ will help you breathe easier through the challenging moments of your day.
