Understand Your Story

Personal Ownership Principle #2: Understand Your Story

Our Actions come from our beliefs, even when we don’t know what we believe in.

I define the word ‘story’ as facts tied together with assumptions into a coherent narrative about how life works.  All humans tell stories because they help us make sense of the world.  As I talked about in the last post, I told myself a story about pain and suffering making me stronger for unknown future challenges.  This helped me make sense out of the trauma and stress I experienced at the hands of others when I was growing up.  However, there are 2 problems with our stories: 

1.  First Problem – Assumptions is another word for ideas, philosophies, thoughts, perspectives, or beliefs.  Assumptions can be wrong.
2.  Second Problem – Life is a big thing.  There are more than 7 billion lives on the planet. Each with a unique experience.  It is highly unlikely that any one person’s story is completely accurate and without flaws.

Stories can give us meaning but they can also mislead us.  We have to practice self awareness and humility to be willing to recognize that there are always gaps in our understanding of the world.  This is extremely important to understand because when our fundamental beliefs about life get undermined it can be massively disorienting.  In response, on one end of the spectrum we may choose to ignore the truth and insist on our beliefs.  In this way we avoid having to do the work that comes with updating our understanding of the world (Think about the person who refuses to believe a significant other is cheating). On the other end of the spectrum we may accept reality but our frustrations with the situation may cause long term bitterness or resentment  (Again, think of people who struggle after being cheated on by a significant other).

It’s not that we should wake up everyday expecting to be disappointed but we should hold our beliefs with an open hand because life is complex. 

For me, this complexity was truly revealed after I graduated college.  This is when I began to recognize the origins of my own stories around work and what it means to have a successful life.

Things Fall Apart

I graduated from the University of Houston in May of 2005.  I earned a degree in Electrical Engineering w/ honors.  I then began working for Shell Oil Company.  I was making $60,000 a year fresh out of college.  I was the first in my immediate family to finish college.  Everyone close to me was proud of me.  

In many people’s eyes I had reached The American Dream.  Especially my parents.  It was a significant accomplishment and I had worked extremely hard to put myself in a position to get that job.  But when I graduated, I wasn’t happy.  I was just relieved that school was over.

I started working at Shell in July 2005.  I can still remember walking up to the office building on my first day at work and thinking to myself, “I am going to hate this!”  I was right.  Within about 8 months I found myself completely depressed to the point of having daydreams of driving off of an overpass while commuting to work in the morning.  Eventually these thoughts coincided with waking up every morning with mild panic attacks.  It was the darkest time in my life.  As a kid I had been extremely sad sometimes, but I never thought about taking my own life.  After only 11 months on the job, I quit Shell and Engineering.

In the year that followed I tried being a Personal Trainer.  Of course, this ambition came from my own weight loss journey which we covered in more detail in the last article.  The problem is, it’s really hard to get clients and build an income quickly as a Person Trainer.  Between student loans, a repo’d car, and credit cards, I had $60,000 worth of debt.  Eventually, I ended up having my electricity turned off and being evicted from my apartment for failure to pay my bills.  Here’s the irony, as bad as my financial situation was, for the brief period I worked as a trainer, I was happy.  I didn’t have a car or furniture.  I would get embarrassed when I saw classmates from school in the city because I was broke.  But, I was happy.  I loved being in an environment that encouraged physical fitness.  But I couldn’t sustain it.  For about two weeks I went to the gym during the day and I would come home to a dark empty apartment in the evening.  I’d contemplate what I was going to do next with my life.  I would also think about how I’d gotten myself to that point.  How did I go from being the picture of success to not being able to pay my bills and being hassled by debt collectors?

Origins:  My ‘Success’ Story

This is where I started thinking about the origins of my ideas of success.  The first thing I thought about were the people who had been closest to me and the thoughts they had about my quitting a high-paying corporate job.  Almost everyone close to me at the time thought I had been foolish and ungrateful for leaving such a high-paying job.  I heard many statements like the following during this time period:

“You know how many people wish they had a good job like that!”

“Travis, you need to be more grateful for what you’ve been given!”

I heard these things particularly when I expressed discontent.  No one agreed with my choice to quit. My concerns over my mental health were largely ignored.

Close Relationships

In that dark apartment I started to realize that part of the reason I had worked so hard academically was because of my belief in the stories my mother told me about success and career.  Particularly, when I was growing up, she constantly emphasized the importance of education. She often said, “We’re poor! If you don’t want to be poor, you need to go to school, get good grades so you can earn scholarships to college because I won’t be able to help you pay for it.  After college you’ll be able to get a good job!”

I took this to heart and I pushed myself hard in school.  But there are some big problems with this line of thinking.   Primarily, what defines ‘poor’ or ‘a good job’?  We never got evicted when I was growing up and I was miserable.  Here I was being evicted and I was actually happier than I’d ever been.  I needed money, but how much and for what job?  Being ‘poor’ and having a ‘good job’ were just stories that my mother was passing on because it was the best understanding she had.  We often unconsciously adopt stories from the people we interact with on a daily basis.  Especially as children because we lack the experience to scrutinize someone else’s fundamental beliefs about life.  As kids we don’t understand that we don’t know what we don’t know.  

Furthermore, the feelings of being poor or having a good job are highly subjective.  My mother was a single mom struggling financially.  She was also recovering from the trauma of an abusive partner in my sister’s father.  Also, the heartbreak of an absent partner in my father.  Even though we never missed meals or went homeless, my mother’s sense of her own lack of economic mobility  was probably intensified by many factors which then made her conclude we were poor.  Again, highly subjective but she’s passing on the best information she has.  Like any parent doing their best, does.

Culture and Society

Then there are bigger cultural narratives that permeate our society that must be contended with.  This is the second place our story originates.  I began thinking about my 6th-12th grade years in school.  The goal of both my middle school and high school was to get kids enrolled in college.  We didn’t talk about alternatives like the trades or being a personal trainer.  Add the media in the 90’s which made college seem like the one key to a successful life. This enhanced the message I heard at home and it contains similar assumptions.  There are many highly skilled middle class wage jobs that could have come from me doing trade school.  Not to mention joining the police or fire department in any major city.  To add to this, I’ve learned that with the power of budgeting, saving, and compound interest, even security guards can become financially well off with enough time and consistency.  ‘Financially Well Off’ being another subjective matter.

The Self

As I had these realizations I began to get angry.  I was frustrated with my family, the public school system, higher education, and the whole American Dream.  I wanted to blame them.  Here I am $60,000 in debt from doing what everyone said was the right thing.  But, I had to be careful to not let my frustrations and anxiety about the difficult financial position I was in, blind me from seeing my own responsibility and what I could control in the situation.  I ended up having a familiar thought, “Travis, ain’t nobody coming to save you.”  Same thought I had as a ten year old kid when I decided to begin my weightloss journey.

I calmed down and I reasoned with myself.  My mother was giving me the best information she had.  Same thing with the schools I attended.  Nobody pointed a gun at me and said, “Take out these student loans or else!”  I made a choice to believe what I was told without analyzing it thoroughly.  But why? 

This is where the third origin of our stories comes into play: the self.  Given the abuse I experienced as a child and the bullying I experienced at school, I was prone to doing my best not to upset others.  I was a very agreeable kid.  Being picked on so much, I also desired approval.  I worked really hard academically because it was the only thing I ever really got any praise for.  But, ironically, I hated school.

What I wanted to be more than anything else when I was growing up was an athlete.  Also, once I lost all that weight I wanted to learn more about being a personal trainer so I could help others.  But I assumed no one would treat these interests seriously.  I had let my need for the approval of others trump my own interests.  I realized that a major flaw in my story was the fact that I wanted my decisions to be validated by others because I had lacked the confidence to go my own way.

Separating Fact From Fiction

Once I saw the problems in my story around success, I started asking myself and answering, some very simple questions:

1. What did I like doing?
   I enjoy physical and mental challenges.  I also wanted a sense of purpose at work.
2. What made engineering so miserable for me?
   I wasn’t interested in the work and I hated the office environment.
3. What did I need to resolve my financial issues? Consistent Income. 

Simple truthful observations about myself and the world.  I had ignored these realities out of an outsized concern for the thoughts and opinions of others.

I want to be very honest here.  This was a scary time for me.  I was 25 years old, deep in debt, being evicted, and I was haunted by accusations of being foolish, ungrateful, and making the worst mistake of my life.  The joy I had in working in a gym environment was very real but so was the fear I had about how I would repair my situation.  Particularly my financial situation.  In response to the fear I tried to focus hard on what I knew to be true (the facts):

• After getting bullied consistently  for 12 years for being obese, I lost 100 pounds with no help from trainers, drugs, or surgery.  
• I earned a degree with honors in Electrical Engineering when I hated school. 
  

I had listened to all these people tell me I had screwed up my life.  I had allowed their words to take up space in my mind.  Then, sitting in that dark apartment, I realized I was the only person I knew at the time that could claim such accomplishments.  I thought to myself, “I’ve been through worse.”  If you remember from the last post, something that I took from my journey through weight loss and bullying was the simple knowledge that I could do hard things.  At 25 years old, I was a veteran of doing really hard things under intensely stressful circumstances.  The $60,000 of debt I had racked up was a big number but eliminating it was an issue of simple math and staying disciplined with money.  I just needed a job that I didn’t hate, which is a fairly low bar to meet. 

Developing a More Resilient Mindset

Listening to other people’s stories had me take massive action in a direction that wasn’t for me.  It wasn’t until I was borderline suicidal that I stopped to sort out the beliefs that drove those actions.  I had learned my lesson.  If we are not careful to scrutinize our beliefs we can end up moving in a direction that could destroy us. Our actions come from our beliefs even when we don’t know what we believe in.  

We have to be mindful that we create stories around everything in life in order to better understand the world.  Often those stories are over simplified and they rest on big assumptions.  Assumptions that need to be scrutinized for accuracy.  When I think about this principle I often think of something called ‘first principles’.  In first principles thinking we are looking at a problem and formulating a solution first by asking what we know to be fundamentally true.  When we apply this type of thinking, not only do our plans to solve various problems in our lives become more accurate but we also become more resilient against what we know will be the inevitable disappointments that come with finding a hole in our own story.  Because we observe facts, we know that there are parts of our story that aren’t true, so it’s not as shocking or disorienting as it could be, hadn’t we held that truth in our heads.  It’s knowing we have blind spots and not being surprised when they present themselves.  As the saying goes, we don’t know what we don’t know.  

But, how do we reorient when our belief system falls apart?

This is where the final principle comes into play. We’ll cover that next week.  

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