When it comes to accepting new things into our lives, we may feel uncomfortable, anxious, and helpless. Uncertainty can take hold. However, not knowing what comes next, can be a great opportunity to challenge yourself and even rewrite your story. Before imagining how a story will end though, it helps to just think about the first chapter.
Who is the main character? Who will be the supporting cast? What will set the journey in motion? But most importantly, what will the story be about? If you’re considering a rewrite, remember that there are things you have been doing for a long time that define your character. Successes that make your character unique and worthy of a hero’s journey. While things can seem to change from one day to the next, the one constant is you. The lead character in a story can give us deep perspective into the uniqueness of the human experience.
What we learn through a hero’s tale comes from how we witness their reactions and emotions. Much like them, you have founding characteristics that others have come to know and that have defined you. A plight for reinvention or a new start begins with knowing yourself, the hero. It’s about knowing how you fit the context you’re in.
While emotions can sometimes dominate the way they think and act, they define the experience we undertake. If you’re looking to put things back in place or add a new perspective to push through uncertainty, it’s necessary to go beyond your emotions and be able to pause them.
To accomplish this step, there is a strategy to use to start writing the first chapter of your new journey: stop, think, feel, say, and act.
Stop: Look around with new eyes, different insights, new perspectives. Try to have a different understanding of your current context that can lead to different thinking.
Think and Feel: Discover what you think by focusing on how you feel. What brings happiness? Energy? Motivation? Inspiration? Where emotions abound there is purpose, and purpose is worth thinking about.
Say: Express your emotions, beliefs and desires, and your personal goals. Own them.
Act: Do, create, change, persevere, unleash your potential, and then repeat.
To form your new beginning: Act on your own behalf. Organize yourself and your surroundings to reframe the experience you’re looking to create. Of course, you can imagine the outcomes and the successes you want to bring, but you still need to pull it back to look at the very first steps you need to take.
Be aware of who you are, what you feel, how you think, the way you behave and how you’re most likely to react. Go back to this awareness as many times as you need until you feel you have enough clarity about your main character in order to write your next story.
The choice to put it in motion is yours. But to be the hero means one thing; daring to act. Your best self is already rising. The rest is still unwritten.
Author
by Adam Schneider
Adam Schneider is SurePeople's Head of Content, leading the end-to-end enterprise-level content strategy, production, and management for a global platform ecosystem. At the core of his practice, he's a scientist with a passion for storytelling. At the core of his Prism, he's a double Catalyst with a passion for people.
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