I kept living the same inferiority loop I had from childhood. Why does this seem to keep repeating itself?

The stories we expect to see played out can be changed.

The stories you tell yourself shape your reality.

What would happen if you rewrote that storyline?

In this episode, we sit down with Amanda Johnson, a strategist and storyteller, to explore how powerful narratives can be when defining who we are and who we become. 

Discover the difference between being the character in your story, the narrator, or a co-author. Your ideal position is to be a co-author, but what does that mean for you?

Join us in this informative and reflective time to examine your own life and the story lines you have lived.

Are you ready for a change? Change, freedom, and victory are just around the corner.

Redeem Your Business Today by the Following:

How can we honor God in our business?

We can honor God by remaining true to ourselves and being conscious of why we’ve been put on this Earth.

This means conducting our business with integrity, humility, and a heart of service,

ensuring that our work aligns with God’s purpose for us.

One challenge from today:

Take 10 minutes to step back and observe your life from the narrator’s perspective rather than just living as a character in it. Ask yourself: What story am I telling? Where am I headed?

This practice is like a muscle—the more you exercise it, the stronger your awareness and ability to shape your own story will become.

More from this episode:

• Step back and observe your life as if you were the narrator, not just a character
• Notice the patterns, choices, and themes shaping your story
• Make a small, intentional shift to align your narrative with your true self
• Become a co-author of your own story

More About Amanda Johnson

IG: https://www.instagram.com/thestoryoracle114/

FB: https://www.facebook.com/thestoryoracle114 

LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thestoryoracle114/ 

www.SavedByStory.house - Writing, Publishing, and Story-saving for Individuals

www.The-Story-Oracle.com - Speaking & Facilitating Story Literacy and Story-saving for Communities and Organizations

Freebies to Enhance Your Story: www.SavedByStory.house/foreshadows

More About David Schmidt

Subscribe to Redeeming Business Today Podcast Newsletter

Website redeemingbusinesstoday.com

LinkedIn

Donate to the Show

Mentioned in this episode:

Step Up Referrals

Ever wished you had all your business information in one place? With Step Up Referrals, you can! It’s the ultimate digital referral card that makes sharing your business and showcasing who you’re connected with easier than ever. Step Up Referrals helps you stand out from the crowd, build relationships, and grow your network. Follow the link below and get started today.

Step Up Referrals

Bayou Refuge - Christian Mystery by Dr. Joshua Powell

If you are looking for a Christian novel to make you think about how your conversations impact those around you check out Joshua's book Bayou Refuge today.

Pick up the Bayou Refuge

David:

[0:00] Well, today I'm super excited to have with me Amanda Johnson. For over 25 years, she's been helping inspiring authors get their stories published and using writing as a means of healing hurt, past trauma, pain, etc. Past negative experiences or thoughts that keep us stuck in a negative rut, and she helps us understand how to be proactive in their life and get over it in a nice way. So Amanda, welcome. And what is one way you believe that we can honor God in our business that other people may not know about?

Amanda:

[0:34] You know, I think it's really about remaining true to what we know we're supposed to be doing. For me, getting into the business world and seeing all of the different ways that people taught me to market and taught me to sell and taught me to move rooms. You know um i was always ever present to this to my to my conscience and and knowing like no there's some of this that i understand but i'm not going to use.

David:

[1:04] Integrity good staying staying true very good and so how long has storytelling been interesting to you or interested you and what got you into that

Amanda:

[1:14] Well i i mean stories always affected me i think get was part of what shaped me, but I didn't really get a lot of awareness until I was in college. I got invited to an honors program, which studied all the classics of Western civilization. And I learned about the importance of great stories and how they shape us and our civilization and also the importance of history and helping everyone to understand kind of where was the author coming from when they were writing this. And so I kind of fell in love with it. That that program itself really, um, challenged like the whole point of the program. I grew up in a Christian environment and that program really challenged me to make all of my beliefs, my own. And the way that it did, that was asking me the hard questions. What if it's not true? How can you prove it's true? Right. And, um, and as I felt like my world was coming apart because there's only 18 trying to answer these really big questions and feeling kind of mad that no one had ever asked me this before. I thought, you know, I don't know how to get through this except through story. And some of the great stories of the time, Lord of the Rings came out around that time. The Matrix came out around that time. All these very resonant stories kind of gave me the ability to start seeing what I was feeling inside and being able to give it some language.

David:

[2:38] Okay. Very good. So in a pre-call, you talked about the narrative of our life

David:

[2:43] and how we're either characters or narrator. Can you kind of explain that to our audience, what that means?

Amanda:

[2:50] Sure. Yeah. So when I started helping people with their books from the beginning, I would help them map out what are the themes, what's the core message, what are the stories you want to tell? And then we get into the writing portion. And they always wondered if they had hired the wrong person when I asked them to go write from inside a scene. Go back to that really hard part of your life and write it from inside. What were you thinking? What were you feeling in your body? What was going on around you? Oh my God, they did not like me. But what I was asking them to do was be the character in their story again.

Amanda:

[3:26] And so they would take the deep dive. Fortunately, I'd built enough trust. They would do it and they would come up for air. And then I would give them the opportunity to say, okay, you gave me this moment and you gave me this moment. What happened between these moments? So they kind of got above like a narrator of a good story, right? And the narrator knows more than the character does. And so they could kind of see how things were working for them. They could see little moments of grace, people coming into their lives, a book dropping off of a shelf. And so then they would submerge back into a character scene and we had this back and forth and inevitably about two-thirds of the way through the project they would have this moment where they had been practicing both levels of awareness being in the scene being above the scene and they weren't just doing it uh in the book they were actually starting to do this in their own life because when you're looking for how do i describe this texture how do i describe the way this looks right you start to build that, skill so they're starting to do it in their own lives and inevitably they would call me and say, So, you know, that thing I keep telling you in our coaching sessions is keeping me from like finishing the book. It's a relationship or a financial thing.

Amanda:

[4:46] Do you think that maybe that is happening because I'm doing the same thing there that I did all throughout my book that didn't get me any results? Yeah perhaps that same old story is being repeated over here because you know experts like they'd overcome they were out in the world helping people so they had they had figured out how to shift the narrative in one part of their lives but there were other parts that uh that script was still running okay.

David:

[5:14] So if you're a character in the in the book in your life what what does that mean

Amanda:

[5:20] Well, a character has a limited view, right? I mean, it's the person who, you know, I think about your show is all about business and redeeming business, right? So when I think about my entrepreneurship journey, I think about how really

Amanda:

[5:37] the only limits that I had were my character limits. Like, I didn't know what I didn't know, because I hadn't been trained by another entrepreneur, I had to figure it all out. And that was scary. And I felt like a lot of things were happening to me. And so a character has that small view that has to be expanded. And so what I found is that, you know, the limits that I had were just my limits. And so when you're a character only, when you're only in that awareness, you feel like things happen to you. You feel a little bit like you're a victim. Things are out of your control. You can't quite figure it out, right? Because you don't have that higher level awareness. And it's usually very intense physically, emotionally.

David:

[6:21] So you're basically helping people say, I'm writing this book, but in real life, I'm acting out that character and helping people saying, I'm having trouble with developing this character in a book, maybe because I'm having trouble in my life overcoming a certain problem. Is that kind of what you're saying?

Amanda:

[6:38] Yeah, I actually think that the call to write is a call to clarity. And you may think that you're writing for other people and you're writing for your clients and you're writing for the world, but I see more evidence than not that we're writing for ourselves first, that there's some sort of internal incongruence that has to be wrestled out as we put it on the page and go, no, that's not exactly, do I believe that? No.

Amanda:

[7:06] And we tweak it and we adjust it until we get it just right. And usually that helps give us that narrator perspective so that we can start to see what our characters need to do differently.

David:

[7:19] To succeed okay so it's interesting you talking about that and then because i have one of my daughters is a writer and she's writing all these things but then she has this one series called she relates herself to this character scarlet and now she's writing these this series about scarlet and i think she sees herself in a lot of what she does and it kind of resonates with what you're saying there um i haven't read the book yet because it's not finished but it'd be interesting to see when it's done and kind of look at her life and look at the book and see what struggles and things go there.

Amanda:

[7:55] I had given my son one of these writing, you know, writing prompts. He was driving me crazy one day while I was trying to get work done. I was like, you know what, go write a short story. And he's like, about what? I don't know what. And I said, write the, we were talking about villains then in our dialogues on the couch. And I said, how about you write the backstory for president snow in hunger games and he said okay i'll do that well, i don't know how long it was later that i got the email with the document in it but man oh man did i see he he used all the material that he had from his life the mom who was a workaholic the dad who was struggling with his purpose the the cranky old grandma who i mean he it was like our lives and i I was like, oh, my God, he's telling me that he could become a villain. I mean, so brace yourself. Take some good deep breaths and get curious about that stuff.

David:

[8:51] That's funny. Funny. Okay. And then you described there's a third viewpoint, which is kind of a mix between the two. What would that third viewpoint be as it relates to our life? If I've had trauma in my life and I need to work through it, I'm either the character or the narrator, or what's the third viewpoint? Yeah.

Amanda:

[9:12] So the narrators, I find my narrators, I fall into this category. Being a character wasn't safe. Having those big feelings wasn't safe in my world. So I became a narrator. I watched everything. I observed. I could tell you my trauma map. Like I was, I could help other people with theirs, super good at what I did. Very narrator outside of my life. Helping other people be better narrators, but not really engaging my own. And so during this period of character narrator, character narrator, I think that that moment of being able to be both at the same time and like that you've practiced the other one enough that it becomes just as much of a default as the first, that's the moment where you can become a co-author. That's the moment where you can be in a scene, feeling all the feelings that you need to feel, right? Your instinct is telling you, I need to run away from this salesperson right now. I am prey. But you also have the narrator perspective telling you, like, I kind of knew that this was coming.

Amanda:

Amanda:

David:

Amanda:

David:

Amanda:

David:

Amanda:

Amanda:

David:

Amanda:

David:

Amanda:

David:

Amanda:

David:

Amanda:

David:

Amanda:

Amanda:

Amanda:

Amanda:

Amanda:

David:

David:

Amanda:

Amanda:

David:

David:

Amanda:

David:

Amanda:

David:

Amanda:

David:

David:

Amanda:

David: