The School of Life's How To Narrate Your Life's Story

Not all the disasters were wasted anyway. Maybe we spent a decade not quite knowing what we wanted to do with ourselves professionally. Maybe we went through a succession of failed relationships that left us confused and hurt a lot of people. But these experiences weren’t meaningless because they were necessary to later development and maturity. We needed the career crisis to understand our working identities; we had to fail at love to fathom our hearts. No one gets anywhere important in one go. We can forgive ourselves the horrors of our first drafts.

The good storyteller recognises – contrary to certain impressions – that the central character of the story isn’t always responsible for every calamity or triumph. We are never the sole authors of anything that happens to us. Sometimes, it really will be the economy, our parents, the government, our enemies or simply the tragic dimensions of human existence. Good narrators don’t over-personalise.

Every day, we are induced to narrate a bit our life story to ourselves: we explain why there was pain, why we forgot to seize a chance and why we’re in an unhappy situation.

The Art of Charm's AoC Toolbox: Narrative building

Think of your narrative — your hero’s journey, as illustrated by mythologist Joseph Campbell — as a riff on the narratives that brought you where you are today and not a carbon copy of those existing narratives. To know yourself, you need to tell your own story.