Framing My Story

The power of framing…It is sort of a difficult concept to put down, especially since I have already explained it out loud before and feel like I explained it the best I could the first time I tried.  Of course, now I have forgotten the exact words and phrases that I used to try to explain it.  However, I will try to put it down in text.  The whole issue of framing arose from an idea that I had in another essay about becoming the mover rather than the reactor.  The idea was that I create my world around me, rather than letting the external world dictate, and in a sense, create me.  While many people are not leaders of other people, I think that similarly many people are not even leaders of themselves.  To become the creator of your own world is to grasp the reins of your life, and take active control over who you are, how you act, and how you attribute meaning to the events around you. 

This last bit really tipped me off to the power of story-telling, even in our own lives.  A story is not simply a recitation of events in sequence, it provides emphasis and substance and intangible feelings and connotations to events and circumstances.  The same events can have extremely contradictory meaning depending on how the author shapes the story around them.  What the author does is attribute meaning to events and circumstances.  The events in real life are no different.  Events and circumstances are merely containers into which we pour meaning.  Of course, the type of event, just like the type of container, limits and affects the range of meanings that we can pour into it.  However, there is always a choice.  Whether we are conscious of it or not, we are constantly creating internal narratives which fill all the various events in our life with meaning, and connect different events in different ways, until different patterns and plots become ingrained into the way we live our lives. 

The problem is that most people are passive participants in the creation of internal narratives.  They let their subconscious create patterns and plots and meanings that are detrimental to their happiness.  They allow their subconscious to characterize themselves as a chronic failure, an unconfident person, lazy, incapable of loving themselves, incapable of loving others, self-centered, or any other defining adjective.  And then they allow the events of their life to be made into reifying evidence of that negative self-definition.  It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy:  “I am a loser, so of course I didn’t get that job, or of course that girl didn’t notice me, of course he isn’t attracted to me”.  People become swept up in their own internal narrative, succumb to it, and sometimes even drown in it.

The Individual as the Epicenter of Positivity 

Yet what I have realized is that we can be active in the process of narrative creation.  I can frame how I am going to understand the events in my life, I can choose which events I am going to connect together into a pattern that defines me, I can choose to alter the arc of my internal narrative plot if I do not like the ending it is leading towards.  I am in control and I can bring the creation of narrative from the subconscious to the conscious.  When I do this, I become the author of my own narrative.  Yet once I realized that I could lead myself in this way, I realized that it was a way in which I could be a leader of others.  If I am intuitive and perceptive, I can help others create a narrative which is positive and resonates as true.  By this, I mean that I don’t think that as people we are ready to accept any meaning for the events in our life.  There are some meanings that ring more true than others.  I cannot simply try to pick any positive framework for people to understand the events of their life, but I must choose the one that they might possibly accept because there is truth and genuine foundation for the framework I try to provide.  Now, when I say that I provide a framework, I do not mean I do so explicitly.  This type of leadership can take many forms. 

The strength of my leadership, the strength of my ability to help create an environment of positivity around me, comes from a place of genuineness.  I have to have a genuine connection with a person to understand how an event could be negatively internalized by a person, and to counteract that with a push towards a different attribution of meaning that resonates as true to them.  It takes a certain level of empathy and perception that requires me to really see people, to see them as the three dimensional, complex creatures that they are rather than two dimensional characters who only matter in the ways they affect me.  In order to reach this understanding, I have to care enough to put out the effort.

I think the power of this type of leadership is that it originates with caring.  People are drawn to accepting and appreciating the shifts I try implement in to their internal narratives because they recognize that I had to care about them as a person to even attempt to lead them to positive frameworks of perception.  I think people are receptive to the positive source of the message.  I do not think that I could do what I do in a strategic, scheming, self-centered way.  Because as soon as I start seeing people merely as means to my own ends, then I lose the ability to see them with any depth or clarity.  I lose the ability to read the internal creation of narrative that others engage in, and therefore cannot see the moments and ways in which I could affect that creation in a way that they are ready to accept.  What I do has to be tailored very specifically to the individual, which means I have to see and appreciate everyone for their individuality.

What I discussed with my Mom was that this was only one aspect of being a leader.  It is a very subtle form of leadership.  It is starts with positive world creation for yourself, and extends to helping others do the same.  I think that it is important as a leader to create this environment of positivity, this momentum of positivity.  It is an environment that people are drawn to.  Genuine connection is like a mass whose gravity draws people to it.  Being a leader in this subtle fashion makes you the epicenter of that gravitational pull.  Meaning that by doing this, I draw people and authentic connection to me.  So what I am doing is incorporating and drawing people into my own life story.  And I am the author and creator of my story, so when I incorporate others I help them with the positive creation of their own stories so that our narratives resonate and give energy to each other. 

Another major aspect of leadership is having a destination or goal to which you lead people.  Now positive narrative creation is a laudable goal in itself, but I think that I can do more than that.  I think all the positive energy that I pull to me by the subtle form of leadership I have discussed can be channeled in some direction, towards some good.  I simply don’t know what that good is yet…I have yet to find my message, but when I do, I have at least found the way to create an audience who is receptive to it, a way to create the energy needed to accomplish something.

Maybe the power of storytelling, of conscious authorship of life, and the ability to expand that consciously to incorporate others is my gift, the vehicle for me to accomplish whatever I was put on this earth to do.  Maybe I will never find my message.  Maybe merely spreading the positive creation of narrative is enough.  I think that it can be a contagious thing.  People who I do this with become more positive, and maybe they spread that positivity to others, and it expands outwards exponentially.  Maybe I can teach others how to be conscious authors, and maybe those people can become aware enough to teach others. 

It is a way of life in a sense, but it is a way that is far from dogmatic.  It is a way of life that operates at a more abstract level then religion, or any other forms of belief or way of life.  You can do and act however you want, you can believe whatever you want, as long as you are conscious of the ways in which you attribute meaning to the events in your life, and choose to do so as positively as you can.  I think that it is a healthy way to live, and that people who come in contact with me for long enough have the seed for this healthier way of life planted in them.  It isn’t something that I argue with them about, or preach to people about, it simply the way I move in the world.  When you are a part of my life, you see how I chose to understand the events that occur to you, and I think the healthiness of it resonates with people.  They begin to try to understand the events in that more positive fashion as well.  Maybe not immediately, maybe it is an idea that lingers in the back of their mind, but hopefully it bears fruit at some point down the line. 

Perceiving The Negative 

Perception is reality, our mind is the creator of perception, and we are the controllers of our mind.  So, we control our reality, within limits.  I think that it is important to always understand the events of our lives in a way that gives momentum to the direction that we want to go.  To be the author of our own narrative is not to become skilled in the art of self-deception.  It requires extreme self-honesty.  To create a healthy internal narrative, we must understand the negatives in our lives as negatives.  But it is important to understand them as the right negative.  Always, that understanding must be constructive rather than destructive.  That way, everything that happens in life, while it may be a step backwards in one sense, is actually a step forward in our progression as a person.

This is not some simple “Look for the positive in everything” type of thing.  It is much more complicated than that.  It is the isolation of negative events, and disbanding of negative plot patterns.  It is the active creation of positive internal plot patterns.  There is nothing positive to be taken away from the death of a loved one.  But having the awareness to use that circumstance to attain a better self-understanding makes it constructive to your progression as a person.  Grief and heartbreak are part of the human experience, but there are healthy and unhealthy ways to understand loss.  Understanding our own feelings, our own emotions, and consciously shaping the meaning we attribute to them and the moments we are overcome by them is very important and useful.

Introspection As A Tool
I think that if we do it enough it almost becomes intuitive, as if we train our subconscious so that we no longer have to do it consciously.  Obviously this isn’t something we can do at all times.  Like everything, it is a balance.  You must allow yourself to simply experience life without constantly trying to control that experience.  But we must give ourselves time to look inwards and really think about how we are going to understand those experiences.  I don’t think enough people take this time for self-introspection, and I don’t think that many people realize how much control they have over the effect of that self-introspection.  Life is such a complicated thing, and we are all muddling about trying to find a way to be happy.  I’m not saying that I found the answer.  I’m merely saying that it is something we can do to help ourselves be happier than we would be otherwise.

It is such a hard thing to try to put these ideas into words, because it is something that I do very intuitively.  It was only recently that I really tried to articulate what it was exactly that I was doing, and it was only once I articulated it that I understood its power and applications.  Articulation is the tool by which I shape understanding.  It is only when we see things clearly that we gain control over them.  Articulation is identification, it unmasks the mysterious.  Mystery dictates to us, only through understanding are we given the power to dictate.  Self-leadership is self-understanding.  As we progress towards deeper self-understanding, we become more ourselves.  We discover ourselves, and the process of that self-discovery doesn’t allow us to mourn who we could have been but teaches us appreciation for who we are right now, because we had to work to discover it. 

Once this is identified, it is an easy extension to say that generally leadership is understanding.  For me, to understand people is to care about them, to interact with them authentically.  So for me, to be a leader is to live authentically.  Meaning, this is not a mantle I can put down because to live authentically is to have the least filtered connection to life.  And that is what I want.  I want to feel life and every moment of it as acutely as I possibly can, to be as present as I can be, to suck as much feeling from the river of experience as I can while I am alive to drink from it.  Articulation is the gateway to understanding, and the expansion of understanding expands our receptiveness to the raw experience of life.  We cannot run from the understandings we reach.  Ignoring our own understandings is when we become the deceiver rather than the author. 

The ideas for this essay were generated from earlier essays, which you can read here and here.