Learning to differentiate between facts and stories is one of the most pivotal tools of life coaching and will undoubtedly change your life.

Today I'm going to teach you how to do that and what it means when you begin to look at the world from a perspective of your choosing.

Wouldn't it feel amazing to believe that everything is happening for our good? It's totally possible.

Want to start a business but feeling overwhelmed? Join my Finding Your Side Hustle Course and learn the step-by-step process for starting the business you've been dreaming of.

Have you already started a business or really need one-on-one guidance? Schedule a free coaching call with me so we can make progress on your dreams!

Hey friends.

Welcome back to burning brightly.

Today, I want to talk to you about a movie that I recently saw with my teenagers.

It's called the Truman show.

If you've been around for more than 20 years, you've probably heard of it.

And it was a really fun story about a man who was actually

adopted by a production studio.

And then he was raised by actors under ever present cameras and a live audience.

So in other words, his whole life was a TV show.

everything was created for him.

So his family members, his boss.

The random dog Walker, he said hi to on his way to work every morning.

The newspaper salesman that he went to, even people who he never

interacted with who were just extras, they all had one job.

And that one job was to be there.

If and when Truman needed them to be able to interact with them, to be able

to make his life better in some way.

It's a fascinating, fascinating look into.

Life and what is real and what is not.

So if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it, but let's

just set aside for a second.

The obvious moral dilemmas that come along with forcing someone to be on a

television show without their consent.

Okay.

We're going to, we're going to put that aside for a minute, but think

about just a second, the magic.

Of living a life.

Where everything is orchestrated for your good.

Just think about that for a second.

If you knew that everything that happened to you.

Was for your benefit?

What, if you knew that the good that happened to you, the bad, the

ugly that it was all part of a plot.

To give you the best chance at happiness, just like for Truman.

Kind of a cool thought, right?

Whether you know it or not.

Let's just talk for a second about the idea that the world

is conspiring for our good.

Now this isn't meant to just turn us into narcissists.

Right?

We walk around thinking, well, everything is for me and meant for me no.

That's not what we're trying to do here.

We are going to instead try on a new story.

And that story is that everything that comes at us.

Is designed to help us succeed, grow stronger or become better in some way.

So try that story on for just a minute.

As we talk today.

one of the very first things that I teach new clients about the world and

their brain is that there are very few cold, hard facts in the world.

We call facts in the life coaching world circumstances.

And the definition of a circumstance is that it is something that

everyone in the world can agree on.

So when you think about it like that, the number of true facts

diminishes drastically, right?

What is one thing that the whole world can agree on?

Well, maybe that grass is green.

Now a certain shade of green no, probably not.

That the sky when there's no clouds in it is blue.

That there are people on the earth, everything else that everyone on

earth can't agree on is just a story.

It doesn't mean it's not necessarily true.

But if everyone can agree on it, it can't be called a fact.

So let me give you a few examples.

You walk into a room.

a fact would be, there are 35 people in this room.

A story would be there's a lot of people in this room.

Okay, because not everyone can agree on whether or not there's a lot of people.

Let's say he weighs 99 pounds is a fact.

He is really skinny as a story.

My sister-in-law said the words you are not very nice.

Sometimes that's a fact, she said these words, everyone can agree

that those came out of her mouth.

A story might be.

ugh my sister-in-law hates me.

stories change all the time.

The facts can stay the same and stories can be different from one person to

the next, from one day to the next.

Have you ever had the same thing happen to you one day?

And you make it mean something, and then the next thing you make

it seem, it means something else.

Absolutely.

That's how life works.

Okay.

So understanding of the difference is really, really life-changing.

Why?

Like I said, because stories can be told and retold in a number of different ways.

And here's the important part.

We always hold the power to retell our story.

Always.

Can we control the facts of our lives sometimes.

We could be in a bad relationship and choose to leave it.

We can live in a rainy place and choose to move.

Right?

Sometimes we can't control some of the facts of our lives, but very often.

Even in these lives that we've controlled as much as we can.

Facts happen that we do not love.

And we get to tell the story about what we're going to make it mean.

Okay.

That's so, so powerful.

And probably the first thing that makes the biggest difference in someone's life

when they start coaching and they start managing their mind is the power to

retell their story the way they want to.

So let's go back to this idea for a second, about everything

happening for our good.

This is a story.

Choosing to believe that that's a story that you choose to

believe or not, to believe.

Right.

And it's actually a story that sounds pretty nice.

Am I right?

Everything is conspiring for my good.

Okay, sweet.

That sounds amazing.

The idea that everything is happening for us.

Instead of against us, maybe.

Cause sometimes it feels like that.

It's actually a really fun story and one we might want to believe, but it might be

a little bit difficult for us to believe.

And so we'll talk about that in a second.

But did you know that it's a story you can choose?

You really can.

And I want you to be really, really clear on the fact that everything is a story

so that you don't feel like this is just being naive or being toxically positive.

That's not what I'm talking about at all.

I'm talking about choosing to believe a story that serves you more than

what you're currently believing.

So you can choose today right now.

To decide that everything you do.

Everything that happens to you and everything that happens

around you or to your loved ones.

Is for your greatest good.

Like, yeah, I want that story.

That sounds amazing.

You could probably imagine you would start walking around a little

bit, like Truman does in his show.

Right?

around happy and pleasant with a smile on his face because those,

this plot is for his own good, right.

However, we do need to ask ourselves what happens when bad things do

happen to us, because there are some things that just about everyone

can agree on is awful, right?

Like a death or a loss.

A divorce, a betrayal or a house fire, a car accident, an illness, losing

your job, any number of things that the majority of us would say, Hmm, that's

some bad luck or that's not a great thing.

So what happens then?

What this doesn't mean believing that everything is for our

good does not mean that we just believe everything is wonderful.

It doesn't mean mean that we experienced a loss and we immediately

think, oh, this is going to be great.

No, that's not what I'm talking about.

We actually have to feel badly about these types of things that we think are bad.

Or else we become emotionally unhealthy will and probably should Choose to

feel badly about some things that don't turn out the way we expect.

I personally have actively and consciously chosen grief.

I've chosen anger, I've chosen sorrow, other negative emotions when I've

experienced hard things in life.

Because I want to, you know, when someone gets hurt or ill, I don't

want to think positively about that.

I want to feel sorrow and empathy for them.

I want to grieve with them.

That's important to me.

So, what I'm saying is we don't ignore the negative emotion that come up.

But.

The difference is once we feel these negative emotions, we

allow them to move through us.

Then we can get to work, looking for how this experience is for our good, the

difference is how we move on past that.

Do we use that experience as evidence that everything's going wrong?

Or do we use that experience as evidence that we can conquer anything?

I'm sure you've seen experiences in your life where.

It feels like everything's going wrong.

And you start counting up all that evidence.

So maybe Friday afternoon, you've had a week that feels really bad and you

start counting up the evidence like, oh, my car broke down and I was late to

work and my kid wouldn't stop crying.

And then the sink broke and we just start telling it up in our head.

And at the end of the week, we really feel like this was a terrible week.

if we instead chose to tally up the things that happened for our

good, you see what I'm saying?

What if we chose to focus on the things that are easier to accept.

All of a sudden, the story changes, right.

So, let me give you a real life example from a story

that you've probably heard of.

You've probably heard of the woman Elizabeth Smart back when she was

a teenager, she was tragically kidnapped from her home in Utah.

And she was, against her, will abused and regularly raped up in the mountains.

Not even far from her home.

She was eventually recovered and returned to her family, but obviously

with some lasting trauma, and some horrible memories of these experiences.

So to her then?

Well, I'm sure I haven't met her before, but I am sure that Elizabeth does not

look back fondly on these memories.

I'm sure she still struggles.

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't still struggle

with nightmares and, negative.

of this experience.

But she has since used her tragedy for so much good.

She's in her thirties now married with kids.

And she has written a book or maybe a couple of them.

She is a popular public speaker.

She's an advocate for abducted and other abused or missing children.

She has done so much good thanks, to this negative experience.

Now, is she glad it happened to her?

I'm thinking probably not.

She probably would've loved to go back and make some changes, so that,

that didn't happen to her again.

But because it did, she is rewriting the story of her future instead

of staying a victim forever.

So she rewrote the story about her kidnapping and she changed

it from a tragedy to a triumph.

Maybe she was a victim at one point, but she's not anymore.

She doesn't have to think positively about these experiences to move on.

And to turn it into a triumph.

She simply has to believe that there is a purpose to those experiences, whether

they were good experiences or bad.

Do you see that shift?

So let's talk about building a business for a minute.

When it comes to being business owners.

We have so many opportunities to work on our mindset, and to choose the stories

that we tell ourselves about our business, no matter what happens in our business,

good or bad, to decide the narrative that we want to believe about those facts.

So let's say you have a month with no sales in your business.

You could choose to believe that that means you're a failure

and you could close up shop.

Or you could choose to believe that it means that you've discovered

a number of ways that marketing your business does not work.

Okay.

Now, you know, those don't work, we're going to do something else next month.

What, if you get an angry customer, you could choose to make that mean

that your business has failed and no one's going to buy from you

again, because they're so angry.

Or, does that angry customer simply mean you've been given

an opportunity to receive.

And learn from and implement some very important feedback because people

who are angry, give lots of feedback.

Once again, this is not the same thing as toxic positivity.

I'm not asking you to look at experiences that you see as bad and turn them into

good and just think, oh my gosh, I'm so glad I had no sales on my business.

Now I'm not talking about that at all.

If you need to have a little bit of a pity party and feel badly and

whine, and complain for a little bit about the no sales, please do that.

Don't push away any emotions that need to be felt when these experiences come up,

because that will just make things worse.

So frustration, embarrassment, pity, anger.

Those have all come up for me regularly in my business.

allow myself to feel them.

Let them move through me.

And then I get back to work.

And I look very neutrally at that experience and decide

what I want to learn from it.

Okay.

So I want to take you for a moment to the sermon on the Mount, in the new Testament.

Christ g ives this list of what is known as the beatitudes.

And he talks about what kind of people will be blessed in the kingdom of God.

And what I found was so interesting when I was studying this not

long ago, was that some of these beatitudes sound very negative.

blessed are the poor in spirit.

Poor in spirit sounds kind of negative.

Blessed are those who mourn.

Like, I don't want to mourn, I want a life free of mourning.

Wouldn't that be better?

Blessed are those who have been persecuted.

So what if a life full of blessings?

Don't look.

As you expected.

What if your blessings, one of your greatest blessings are actually going to

come from some of your greatest trials.

From some of these circumstances that you choose to see as negative, but,

they end up being blessings because of the story that you tell yourself.

Because you turn the story into one of triumph instead of tragedy.

So, let me ask you what stories are you writing for your life?

Take a minute journal it.

What kind of stories and what kind of thoughts and feelings have

been very prevalent in your life?

Especially around building a business.

If you've started already.

Do you like the TV show that you're writing for your life or does it

feel a little bit like a tragedy?

Are you believing a story that maybe you are a victim?

Or that things are happening to you and there's not a lot.

You can control.

you can't change that story or are you believing the opposite that no matter

what happens, it is all for your good.

Okay, friends, get out there and examine those stories.