Dr. Jim Loehr: Change The Stories You Tell Yourself [The Knowledge Project Ep. #193]
Shane Parrish: Let’s start with how we tell stories about ourselves to ourselves. We tell stories around work, family, health, happiness, and friendship. And the story that we tell ourselves and reality are often different. Sometimes our stories empower us, and sometimes they limit us. And I’m wondering if we could explore a little bit about the story you used to tell yourself as a father.
Jim Loehr: It’s an interesting question. I have three sons, and it wasn’t until I became heavily involved in the field of psychology and mental health and performance psychology that I began to realize that just about everything we say publicly and privately in our head is a story. We don’t have direct contact with the real world. We have all this data streaming into our five sensory portals, and then our big neural processor has to make sense out of that. And there’s a preference for making sense in terms of what’s already been loaded in. So if you get information that might be somehow contradictory to what’s in there, you tend to just purge it. You tend not to listen or you tend not to incorporate it. And as I began to understand this—and as a father, I wish I had understood it much earlier in my life—I began to realize that the way I spoke to my three sons, my public voice, became a major factor in the way their private voices would speak to them as they grew older.
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