The Stories You Tell Yourself Shape Your Life

Aug 10

In the last post, we explored who you are becoming — the direction you feel pulled toward and the gap between where you are and where you want to be.

But here’s something that gets in the way of nearly everyone who tries to move in a new direction.

It’s not a lack of information. It’s not even a lack of intention.

It’s the way we think when things get hard.

The Space Between

Viktor Frankl wrote something I’ve returned to many times. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he observed:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Most of us assume our behavior is driven by circumstances — that what happens to us determines how we respond. But Frankl is pointing at something different: between what happens and what we do, there is a space. And in that space, we have a choice. The challenge is that most of us never find that space. We react before we realize we’ve reacted. And the reason is usually a story — an automatic interpretation we’ve told ourselves so many times it no longer feels like a story at all. It feels like the truth.

The Stories That Run in the Background

Psychologist Dan McAdams has spent decades researching what he calls narrative identity — the idea that we each carry an internalized life story that shapes how we interpret what happens to us and who we understand ourselves to be. His book The Stories We Live By is the foundational text on this idea, and it has real implications for how we think about change. Because if we are shaped not just by what happens to us but by the meaning we make from what happens — then the stories we carry matter enormously. A difficult experience can become evidence that we aren’t capable. Or it can become part of a larger story about growth and learning. The facts of the experience may be identical. But what we do with them can be very different. Most of these stories operate quietly. We don’t choose them consciously. We simply live from them — until something makes them visible.

The B-Game: When Our Thinking Works Against Us

In the Inner Compass program, we work with a concept I find enormously practical: the distinction between what we call your B-Game and your A-Game. Your B-Game isn’t a character flaw. It’s the automatic, reactive, familiar way you think when you’re under pressure, stressed, or caught off guard. It often served a purpose at some point. It helped you cope, stay safe, or manage difficult situations. But over time, it can become a default that pulls you away from who you want to be.You’ve probably felt it. A conversation that triggers a familiar defensiveness. A setback that immediately calls up an old story about your limits. A moment where you react and then wonder, a few minutes later, why you responded that way. That’s the B-Game at work. And the first step is simply learning to recognize it — without judgment, without shame — just as a pattern worth noticing. This connects to what Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey describe in Immunity to Change — the observation that our limiting patterns often have a hidden protective purpose. We aren’t sabotaging ourselves randomly. We’re running a kind of internal immune system that works to keep us safe, even when that safety comes at a cost. The B-Game, in that sense, is familiar. Comfortable. And very hard to see from the inside.

The Central Question

So how do you find that space Frankl describes? One of the most useful tools I work with is a question — simple enough to remember in a difficult moment, but powerful enough to shift the direction of your thinking. It comes from the work of Peter Demarest and Harvey Schoof, and they call it The Central Question:

What choice can I make, or action can I take, in this moment that will bring the greatest net value?

This question isn’t about finding the perfect answer. It’s about interrupting the automatic. When you pause long enough to ask it, you create just enough space to choose something different — to respond rather than react, to move toward your A-Game rather than stay in your B-Game.The situation itself doesn’t have to change. The other person doesn’t have to change. The pressure can still be real. What changes is your relationship to it.

Your A-Game: Thinking From Your Clearest Self

Your A-Game isn’t about being positive all the time. It’s not about pretending things don’t bother you, or performing composure you don’t feel. It’s you thinking from your clearest, most grounded, most value-creating perspective — even when circumstances are hard. The version of you that can still access perspective, purpose, and choice when things don’t go as planned. In the Inner Compass program, we use a tool called the VQ (Values Quotient) profile to help participants understand their own best ways of thinking — what we call their VQ Assets. These aren’t personality labels. They’re patterns of thinking that tend to show up when someone is at their clearest and most capable. Once you can name them, you can begin to draw on them intentionally — not just when conditions are easy, but especially when they’re not.You can learn more about the VQ framework at axiogenics.com.

A Practice You Can Start Now

You don’t need a VQ profile to begin working with this. Think of a recent moment where you didn’t show up the way you wanted. A conversation that didn’t land right. A reaction you later questioned. A moment where something pulled you away from who you want to be.Slow it down. Ask yourself:

What happened?
What story did I tell myself in that moment?
How did that story shape what I did?
What might I have done differently if I had paused and asked: what choice here brings the greatest value?

You’re not fixing anything in this reflection. You’re building awareness — and awareness is where the capacity for choice begins.

Then, this week, try it in a real moment. When something triggers your B-Game — when you notice that familiar reactive pattern beginning to take hold — pause. Ask the Central Question. Notice what shifts.

You always have a choice. Even when it doesn’t feel that way in the moment.

And if one question feels like a good place to carry forward, it might be this:

What small habits or practices could help me move toward alignment — one step at a time?

That’s where we’ll turn next.