Storytelling

Self-efficacy refers to an individual’s belief in their own ability to overcome challenges to reach their goal.

Put simply, it’s about believing in yourself — about telling yourself a story that you are capable of accomplishing what you set out to do.

As a culture, we haven’t fully realized just how important and powerful these stories are.

Studies have shown many times that self-efficacy is a strong predictor of outcomes everywhere from education to medicine. In addiction treatment, for example, high self-efficacy is associated with a higher probability of someone breaking their addiction.

Let’s take a second to unpack that, because it’s such a remarkable finding.

Overcoming an addiction is extremely hard. But the simple act of believing in your ability to overcome your dependence increases the likelihood of your success.

In other words, the stories you tell yourself can lead to profound physiological change.

To be clear, the research on this phenomenon has mostly focused on exploring a correlation. But it doesn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to see a causal relationship.

Anyone who’s ever told a friend “you can do this!” has already intuited this. Expressing confidence in someone else is a gift — it’s a way of offering them a leg up as they reach for greater self-efficacy.

Because when we share stories about change with others, we plant the seeds for them to become true.

Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia tweeted, "You can be twice as rich by deciding you need half as much."

Mentally reframing your situation — financial, emotional, or otherwise — is one of the most powerful ways to change your experience.

The research on it is clear: Reappraising your circumstances can dramatically alter your wellbeing.

Reframing enables you to convert loneliness into solitude. It lets you turn losing your job into an opportunity for a fresh start, and allows you to see getting caught in the rain as source material for a funny story you can tell for years.

If you're feeling stuck, start by identifying ways you can change the story you tell yourself.

You might just discover you are more fortunate than you previously assumed.

There's a joke about how Excel is the most popular tool in the world for writing fictional stories.

If you're preparing a revenue projection, for example, it's really easy to simply add a zero and work backwards from there to make all the other numbers work out.

When you're trying to raise money — an investment for your business or a donation for your cause — you'll need to have a story to tell your audience first about the impact they will have.

The story needs to be true. Or at least close enough to being true that your contributors are taking informed risks.

But if you're trying to initiate something new, start by crafting the most compelling story you can. If you get that correct, and others share your vision, the rest will fall into place.

This post ends with a joke about extrapolation.

It ends with a joke, so that I could use it as a hook in that first sentence to illustrate a point: In storytelling, a common way of creating tension for your audience is to plant a seed by leaving out a key piece of information.

Doing so leaves an open loop in people’s minds, and because the brain craves closure, it grabs their attention. This is why some stories give away the ending at the beginning. We’re left wondering how the situation evolves from point A to point B.

We are meaning makers and like to fill in gaps based on our lived experiences. It’s why when you read the phrase “to be or not to ___,” you can confidently fill in the blank, even though there are thousands of words that would be grammatically correct there.

The urge to resolve the tension created by gaps in a narrative is irresistible, so we try to fill in those spaces until they’re resolved. Once we’ve done so, we often experience an emotional release.

I promised you a joke, so here it is:

There are two types of people in this world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.

Data can only look backwards. If you want to use it to look forwards to predict the future, you have to combine it with a story. And the longer that story is, the more fictional it becomes.

You might have a pretty good sense of what your business' revenue will be next month, but try to extrapolate that out to a goal for five years from now, and you'll likely find that there are far too many variables at play to make an accurate projection.

The pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay says that the best way to predict the future is to create it.

Analyzing data can only get you so far. After that comes the hard work of making the narrative you craft come true.

My college acting professor once told our class that we wake up every day with an image in our head of who we want to be. Then we spend the rest of our day trying to become that person.

This is the source of all drama and comedy.

Our self-image is just a story we tell ourselves. When there’s a discrepancy between it and who we want to be, conflict and humor emerge. The resulting tension is foundational to our experience of the world.

And when our story about who we aspire to be collides with reality, we have an opportunity to grow.

I recently asked a group of performers to raise their hand if they felt comfortable with self-promotion.

Unsurprisingly, no one put up their hand all the way.

It's inherently difficult to promote oneself. We worry about being seen as perhaps a little full of ourselves or coming across as too pushy.

But if you ask people if they feel comfortable telling a story, they will almost always say yes.

A cover letter is just a story about your experience. A social media post is a story about where you're at in that moment. And a personal email to family and friends about your new project . . . you get the point.

When we reframe self-promotion as storytelling, it suddenly gets just a little bit easier. And if you can't tell your story, who will?