Episode 001 Story Super Power – Reframing so we can Fly!
Stories are our lives in language! There is nothing that comes more natural in human communication than to tell a story or recap an event that has taken place in our lives. In fact, it is so natural and happens so often that we are usually completely unaware that we are doing it. If it’s lunch time for you, you’ve probably already told 3 or 4 stories this morning. But have you ever stopped to think about their power? Stories are either the source of our super powers, or our kryptonite!
Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Power serves you best when you know how to use it.
Since the beginning of time and recorded history stories have been the means humans used to informally share experiences, beliefs, identities, and ideologies. It doesn’t matter the culture, the country or the belief system, we are all united by STORY!
During my master’s research, in the field of folklore, I studied the personal narratives of hikers, bikers, skiers, rock climbers…you get the idea. The things I found, like how we use stories to build our reputations (for example, when one tells a story about riding their mountain bike along a knife-edge mountain trail, they are inadvertently sharing that they are skilled mountain biker) to share awe (such as a retelling of falling asleep under a dark night sky, untouched by light pollution and the billions of stars that become visible in that space), to inspire (such as a story of persevering through a difficult snowstorm), to define ourselves, to keep ourselves in a cage, to make sense of events…the list goes on and on. These peaked my interest because it was fascinating to discover the multitude of things that we subconsciously use story for: the sheer depth of ways we automatically use story to define our very lives, our self percerception, the world around us.  As I started working on my PhD dissertation research proposal, I found a new angle that peaked my interest, namely I wanted to research the difference between how we expected our lives to turn out vs. how different they usually turn out. I found in my research an understanding of how our families, genders, cultures, race, economic status, sexual experience and preference, education, etc. set those expectations for each of us; which then went on to highlight how our life expectations and the acceptability of our stories are created by a set of imposed laws that are created by our environment. Do you realize what this means? This means that the very stories that define ourselves to ourselves are actually created from a set of criteria that is completely arbitrary and depends upon where you were born and what that culture defined for you. In one culture you may be considered a goddess of perfect living, in a different culture you might be considered an outcast. And yet, there you are, the exact same person. Should our perceptions of personal value and acceptability be taken seriously in the big pictures?
As is true with most higher education research, we seek answers to things that puzzle us, things we want to make our own peace with, things we want to understand. This was no different for me. I was interested in how others expected their lives to turn out, and if it met their expectations because my life had not turned out as I planned or expected. Born into a family and culture with a prized family ethic, my three divorces have been a source of shame and failure for me. Try dating and telling someone you’ve been divorced 3 times. It never bodes well. I usually tell them 7 times, so that, “No really just 3” makes it seem...

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