Conscious Ambition Tips: From the Unknown to Constructive Meaning
On Halloween, I was reading how one of the influences for the holiday originated from people’s fear of the unknown. What was going to happen as our ancestors entered the winter months?
We humans tend to be uncomfortable with not knowing how an event, our careers, our lives will take shape.
We can’t control the future, nor the uncertainty, but what we can control is how we weave and tell the story of our past.
This month I share a few tips for telling ourselves more powerful stories to positively impact how we show up in the present.
Conscious Ambition Tips:
What are stories we tell ourselves about ourselves?
The stories we tell about our lives can shape our perspective, how we feel, our well-being, and how we live forward. This is rooted in a concept called narrative identity.
This is a great podcast episode on Hidden Brain that tells more about the concept, covering topics such as how we often assimilate or accommodate experiences into our stories, how we have agency around them to tell them in a way that is better for our well-being, and how we can be in community around stories to make their impact more positive. A few notes: how we frame our stories is important. While narrative identity can help us make sense of the past, we also want to make sure that we tell stories that don’t limit our futures. Rather, it’s important to remember that our futures aren’t already written, and instead we can shape our narratives to allow for more future possible selves. Finally, this paper speaks to how we can shape these stories for our communities and as part of leadership to create a more inclusive world.
What are you most proud of?
When you look back on your life to date, what are you personally most proud of in terms of who you have are, what you’ve crafted for your life, and even what you’ve accomplished? For each thing you identified, ask yourself: What’s important about this to me? Ask yourself that question building on the prior answer up to 5 times to get to the root of why that is important to you. This is a way to uncover what you value. And, it can help you uncover what you find personally rewarding and where you might desire to focus your attention and/or your effort.
Values association can help reduce stress.
Dr. Kelly McGonigal at Stanford wroteThe Upside of Stress (there's a good summary here) and she shares that research shows when we associate our effort to our values it can help reduce stress by creating meaning behind our effort. Thinking about our values and how we intentionally live them brings more meaning to our lives. The lesson: when you're experiencing stress around an ambition or goal, reflect on why it’s meaningful for you and how it ties to your values? James Clear writes about it here.
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