Photo by Pickled Stardust on Unsplash
I love a good story. Honestly, we all do. Children, adults, elderly – it’s universal. We love stories because we immerse ourselves in the drama or conflict of a good story right along with the storyteller or character. Our empathy allows us to connect with that person’s feelings and learn from their experience. When the story is good, those learnings stay with us vividly as well.
When we bring storytelling to our experiences with money, we benefit, and those we share our experiences with can benefit as well.
Rethinking Our Financial Story for Ourselves
We benefit by actually crafting our story. The exercise of piecing together a story can offer a different perspective – a slight remove that allows you to see your position differently, like an outsider looking in. As an ‘outsider,’ you can consider alternative narratives from the one playing in your head. For example, “I’m not good with money” could turn into “I’m learning about money, and making a mistake now and then is expected.” As the storyteller, you can offer the perspective you might offer someone else, which is often much less harsh than the one you impose on yourself.
Looking back on the events of our lives as storytellers, we can offer a different narrative arc to ourselves and others. Essentially, we can choose to own our story. Consider bankruptcy. The story of insolvency might be that it is the trigger of all of your troubles in life, which led to sinking deeper and deeper into personal, career, and other ruin. Alternatively, filing for bankruptcy could be the story of how you received a wake-up call that helped you identify and begin fixing negative patterns in multiple areas of your life. You have control of the narrative, and you can tell a story with a promising ending.
Telling Our Financial Story to Benefit Others
Others benefit from our story by getting to learn from our experience. The human race and our societies were built on the progress that each generation passes on to the next. Storytelling is a big part of that. Money is an excellent area for more storytelling because it’s usually kept private. When we do hear stories about money, they can be heavily edited and only include the parts people want us to hear. We all need more knowledge about money. We all make mistakes with money. We also all need more outlets for piecing together our stories around money.
My goal is to share more money stories. To get more people in the process of drafting their story to-date, determining where they are, and then deciding what’s next. In the process, we’ll all be able to learn from these stories.
Crafting Your Story
Here’s an exercise you can do to begin crafting your money story. I suggest doing some free journaling on these prompts. This is the template I’ll be using for the stories that I plan to gather:
- What was your upbringing like? What were some of your parents’ or family of origin’s views about money and work?
- As a child and adolescent, what key memories around money or class come up?
- What mistakes have you made with money?
- Where are you now in your money journey?
- What’s next?
After you finish journaling (which may take a few different sit-down sessions), start to craft a story with
- A beginning,
- A conflict
- A resolution and/or an ending of where you are now and what’s next.
I invite you to start telling your own story about money for your sake and the sake of others. If you would like to schedule a time to do this valuable work, I’ll offer a complimentary session where we can work together to craft your story. Just schedule with me.
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