Choose Your Story Change Your Life

Kindra Hall is the author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Stories That Stick,. She is a master storyteller, who also served as Chief Storytelling Officer and Contributing Editor of Success magazine. Kindra Hall is a keynote speaker, and is currently President and Chief Storytelling Officer at Stellar Collective, a business consulting firm. Her clients include Facebook, Hilton Hotels, Berkshire Hathaway, the Harvard Medical School, and others. She is a graduate of New Mexico State University and Concordia College.

The stories you tell yourself generate the voice you hear in your head all the time. To upgrade the trajectory of your life and career, choose different, more dynamic stories to tell yourself. Install better stories in your head, and you can change your life and your career for the better.

There's a four-step process you can and should use to install better stories in your mind:

If you feel like you've been stuck in one place in your career for too long, upgrade the self-stories you live by. Install better stories in your mind first, and then let your mind get to work translating those stories into reality. Take the opportunity to reach for the sky.

1. You become your story. At first glance, it can be a little unsettling to realize there's a lot of invisible storytelling happening in your life and career already, and that this is something you might never have noticed before. The amazing thing about the stories you tell yourself is they actually become your reality. By taking control of those stories, you actually take control of your future life and career.

2. The Self-Storytelling Process. The great thing about becoming aware of the power of stories in your life is the choice of which stories you tell is entirely yours. To upgrade your life and career, choose better stories to tell which will propel you in the direction you want to head. This is a four-step process:

3. How to upgrade your essential stories. When you start telling and more importantly believing better stories about yourself, you change the path ahead. Your life and career will become more vibrant, more purposeful, and more yours. You can use stories to upgrade every part of your life.

To upgrade the trajectory of your life and career, choose different, more dynamic stories to tell yourself.

Thought provoking book this week. I liked storytelling guru Kindra Hall's earlier book *Stories That Stick*, so I was interested to read her latest book, *Choose Your Story, Change Your Life*. Here, she makes the point that if you change the stories you tell yourself, you can change your life and career. Choose better stories to tell yourself, and you can elevate your career and find abundance.

In some ways, this is not dissimilar to the classic *Think and Grow Rich* by Napoleon Hill. I do like, however, that Kindra Hall has come up with a systematic 4-part process for how you can upgrade the stories you tell yourself: Catch, Analyze, Choose, Install. That's smart, and the formula gives a concrete way to guide your inner storyteller to drive you forward and create an even better future.

It might, at first glance, seem simplistic to say choosing better stories to tell yourself will automatically drive your career forward, but as with most things it's not easy to do. Or is it? As Napoleon Hill noted: "'Set your mind on a definite goal and observe how quickly the world stands aside to let you pass.' It might be worth road testing the idea and seeing how it works out in practice. In the words of Kindra Hall: "The choice is yours. It's all stories. It is up to you to choose the good ones."