Part 2: The Dangerous Side of Narratives

Narratives give direction, intentionality and movement to our aspirations. A great narrative, with ourselves as the hero of a heroic quest, helps us achieve more, work harder, and enjoy much more what we encounter on the way. But, like with expectations, we must make sure our narratives are properly aligned with our preferred direction. While inspiring and exciting narratives can be enticing and energising, they can also be seductive and lead us away from our most fitting course.

Constructing the right narrative takes time and self-reflection. It takes discernment and a critical mind. In spite of what we are often being told, the world will not simply fall into step with our desires simply because we are thinking happy thoughts and indulge in wishful thinking. There will be obstacles to overcome and (hard) work to be done. Some things may be within our power to change, some can only be influenced indirectly, others may be completely beyond our reach. The best personal narratives are those that walk the knife’s edge between realistically doable and unrealistically desirable. They challenge us to push the envelope of what we think we’re capable of, without tearing the fabric of reality completely to become fantasies only.

As with unrealistic expectations, overly ambitious narratives can become a source of frustration when they continuously push us towards trying to achieve things beyond our power to achieve, or predict outcomes and improvements that fail to materialise. If we fail to use our power of judgment and discernment we may find ourselves trying to climb a Mount Everest without having the right equipment, skills or levels of practice, to end up discouraged and depressed for not actually making it to the top. Even worse, a strongly motivating but ungrounded narrative may get us to throw all caution to the wind and lead us to into potentially fatal endeavours we may not be able to recover from.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t dream big. On the contrary, only bold and audacious dreams can lift us out of the limiting perceptions of our current situation and compel us to rise above them. But between the dream and the execution there should be a time of reflection and consideration. In that time, we should hold our dream up in the light of reason and see where it may be push us beyond what we can even conceive of doing, are woefully inadequately prepared for, lack the means for, or that blatantly violate the laws of reality as we know it. The most important thing here is to use that time of reflection to see if and how the dream can be turned into doable (or at least plausibly doable) stages that we can see ourselves attempting with some chance of succeeding. There is no point in aiming for the stars if we cannot see where to start such a journey and imagine what the first achievable outcomes would look like. Even the longest journey starts with the first small step, and it is our responsibility to ourselves to make sure we are ready for the first step and have some idea where to go from there. If we can’t make those first steps at least somewhat concrete we will not only not get to those stars, we won’t even land on the moon. We are more likely to crash and burn, or nor even get started and run ourselves into the ground with misguided disappointment.

And then remember that the heroic quest is a journey of discovery: much of what we will encounter on that journey is unknown when we set off and we must expect to do much exploring and learning on the way. Part of that learning is that our pre-conceived notion about both the journey and the destination may significantly change on the way there. Like expectations, narratives need to be maintained and tuned, and – even more than expectations – subjected to a critical examination of alignment and usefulness. One thing we definitely don’t want is to get stubbornly stuck on the narrative we set out with, because we have become too attached to it.

(To be continued)