Episode 4: Changing Your Story. Changing Your Life - Interview: Lori Lee of Love Your Story

Show notes:

In this episode of the Unlock Your Block Podcast, Robin Cartwright invites listeners to delve into a conversation about transforming your story, altering your narrative, and ultimately reshaping your life.

Joining Robin is Lori Lee, the founder and producer and host of the Love Your Story podcast.

Lori is the author or L.I.F.E. - Living Intentional and Fearless Everyday. She has a masters degree in Folklore with expertise in personal narrative. She is expert in helping with reframing story and creating life stories we want on purpose. She is also a podcast producer. If you'd like to have a podcast but don't want the hassle of producing it, please reach out to her.

Lori shares her expertise in personal narratives and emotional intelligence, helping individuals create fulfilling life stories. The conversation explores reasons for narrative stagnation and provides steps for reframing and changing these narratives. They highlight the value of professional guidance, like coaches or therapists, in this transformative journey.

In this episode, you will learn the following :

• The five steps to reframing your story: accepting your story, telling your story, finding meaning and purpose in your experiences, changing your lenses, and putting it all together.

• The importance of accepting your past and acknowledging it as part of your story.

• The power of sharing your story and how it can help release the shame and power associated with it.

• The concept of the cultural eye and how different perspectives and lenses shape our interpretation of events.

• The significance of forgiveness, both for yourself and others, in the process of reframing your story.

• The role of empathy and understanding in reframing your story and finding meaning in your experiences.

Connect with Lori Lee:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lorileelys

Email: Lorijlee@msn.com

Websites: loveyourstorypodcast.com

Connect with Robin Cartwright:

Website: https://www.hiddengemscoaching.co/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robincartwright

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIGXKZtXOcHTojxFfr4FtYA

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the Unlock Your Block podcast career empowerment with me, Robin Cartwright. Join me as I empower you to shine in your career, to up level your life and to go after your dreams. Let's talk.

Welcome to the Unlock Your Block podcast with me, Robin Cartwright. I'm really happy you're here today. I'm excited because today is something that's near and dear to my heart, and I really want to talk to you about it. We're going to be discussing changing your story, changing your narrative, changing your life. I deal with this all the time with my clients in coaching sessions. And in a conversation with Lori, we thought it would be great to bring this to you because she has a big background in this as well. So, I would like to invite you to, my guest, Lori Lee. And as a creator of the host of Love Your Story podcast. Lori uses her master's degree in folklore and her research in the personal narrative along with her personal journey through emotional intelligence to work with individuals on creating our best life stories on purpose. She is known for inspirational and empowering interviews on the Love Your Story podcast. And for being able to clearly see stories both good and bad, that people create and in a no-nonsense way helps them shift their stories into a space of empowerment and action. So Lori, thank you so much for being here today. I'm real excited.

Robin, thanks for having me on your show. I'm excited to talk to you about this too, because it's such an interesting topic.

Totally is. So, I work with this all the time with clients and they're telling me about their past and why they can't move forward in their future. And it's just like this circle. So, tell me a little bit about how you got into this and your podcast and all of that. What inspired you?

Well, that's a great place to start. I think that that goes back to, I was just finishing up my master's degree and I was trying to think about what do I want to do with my doctorate degree? Like what question have I not answered yet that I'm willing to spend another six years researching? And that turned out to be, did your story turn out as you expected? Did your life story turn out as you expected? Now, in hindsight, I look back and I think, what a silly question. Nobody's did. I put a whole research project together, 19 out of 20 people's lives did not turn out as they expected. And of course, because when we're young, we don't picture the divorces, and the eating disorders and the traffic accidents and the health issues.

That's not what we're picturing. We're picturing the picket fence and the career or the motherhood or, you know, whatever it may be, we're picturing the good stuff that we want. So when life happens, and mine did, I ended up with three marriages and three divorces, which was filled with a lot of shame for me and a lot of hurt. You know, when you're going through that type of thing that's so emotionally, that can be so emotionally traumatic, there was a lot of stuff that I carried around in those stories, how I'd been done wrong and how I was a victim and men are all bad. And, you know, just there was a big pile of it. And so part of my work after I started doing that research was figuring out how to reframe and I wasn't even aware that I needed to reframe at that point. It wasn't until I started the emotional intelligence training that they really took me to task and called me out on this. And from there I learned this flexibility. I just came to understand the flexibility of reality and that's fascinating when you think about it because everything in the world, I mean truly nothing has meaning until we give it meaning. Does that make sense? Like they're just events, they're things that happen.

But when we give the meaning as good or bad or painful or offensive, whatever those things are, we create that meaning and with that we create our emotion about it and we create the story. But those stories, all of those stories are self-created and we can start to reframe those when we know, and you know. You know if you're stuck in a story that's not serving you. If what you're going through is keeping you small or keeping you angry or keeping you frustrated, you know that you're in a story that's not helping you to bloom, which is what you help your clients do, to get out of those spaces. So this is a great thing for us to kick around today because we have control over those stories and when we learn power behind that and our own ability to shift those and reframe, you have big power and you can change your future.

I mean, I can't tell you how many times I deal with it with my clients, I deal with it just with friends and family, and I've dealt with it for over 25 years when I was in Human Resources. I mean, the stories these people would have, well, because I had this as a child or that as a child, which was the exact reason why I decided not to pursue my psychology degree and become a therapist because I didn't want to deal with all these people's stories. But I'm still getting them. I had this done as a child, so therefore it must be this. I just have a black cloud on it. Why do you have to have a black cloud on you? You are making this. The color green wouldn't be green if we didn't label it green.

Well, you know, what's worried about what you do is that you work in this position of being able to call people out. And when we're stuck in our stories, we need that other person to be able to say, wait, hold up there. Let's look at this story. Let's look at, there's another perspective. Let's look at and to challenge those stories because without challenging them, they just seem like reality.

Right, exactly. So what do you think it is and why do you think it is, they get stuck in these stories? I mean, because you hear about it and they're just telling you, well, I had this and I had that and I can't move forward because of this. And they're just like, stuck there. But I work with them to move them out of that. And I know you do, too. So why do you think they get stuck?

Well, I know for a fact the reason that we as people get stuck in that is because what we just were talking about we see them as reality and until you become dare I say advanced enough to realize that reality is a completely subjective thing that I create my reality you create your reality we can be two people watching the same thing happen. And we're going to have different experiences there according to what our triggers are, according to what our past is, according to what our religion is, according to what we've been exposed to. So everybody has a different story and it's subjective, but it feels like it's reality. So we get stuck in it only because we think we're seeing reality and we're thinking that our interpretation of reality is correct. And so, it's easy for all of us to get stuck. And this is why you need a coach. This is why even after I had done an entire master's degree in understanding personal narrative, how it's told, why it's told, you know, finding really neat things that we as people insert into our personal narratives, even after that, I still needed a coach to help me find my way out of my stories because I was so enmeshed in them. They were fat. I knew what had happened. I knew how they had made me feel. I knew when really having the coach helped me shift out of what was huge.

Yeah, it is. I mean, I went through years of therapy myself. And when you go through counseling, they bring up all the past versus when I went to an empowerment coach and she helped me work on the future. She empowered me to move into the future. And I thought, you know, I want to do this. I want to empower people to do this. And it really opened my eyes up to go into empowerment coaching, because when you start looking at the future and, hey, you know, that's my past. I've learned from it. I had some situations and now I'm going to move into my future, which is a different story. So I think that is the biggest part of it versus getting out of the past and moving into the future, which hasn't even been written yet.

Yeah, why don't we dive into that and we'll repeat it at the end before Lori leaves to make sure everybody can get this information. And I believe we can even put it in the notes so that you can receive this information. But yeah, would you dive into those steps? Because that would be great for our listeners.

And I would love to hear your feedback on them too, with all of your experience in helping people. Maybe we can share some stories. So, the first step is to accept your story. The first step, accept it. Debbie Ford said, the greatest act of courage is to be and to own all that you are without apology, without excuses, and without one's mask to cover the truth of who you really are. So I think that when we are, not I think, I know that when we are trying to get out of our places of shame or darkness or things we've been hiding or things we're not okay with, stories that are holding us back, the first thing we have to do is step into, this really happened. You know what, whatever it is, this really happened. It's part of my story. I can't pretend like I didn't. I can't keep it locked up in a box and hide it. I just need to accept that this was part of my story and I don't have to stay stuck here. In fact, this is why we're doing the work. We're not going to stay in it, but we need to accept that that happened.

Yeah, you have to acknowledge your past. I mean, it's just part of who you are. It's who you are, who you are going to become, because you've learned from the past. You wouldn't be who you were. For example, my mother was an alcoholic. Had my mom not been an alcoholic, I wouldn't have the passion for helping people as much as I do, because I saw her go through what she went through. And all I wanted to do is go out and help people, which led me to my HR, which led me to where I am today. Without that, I wouldn't be who I am. It's the same with many clients and people I work through. Absolutely, you'd have to own your past. What's the next one?

The next one is to tell your story. I have a couple caveats here, but whenever stories, especially if they feel shameful, are kept in that dark box hidden under our bed where nobody knows about it, they carry a great deal more power than they do when you say them out loud. And this does not mean, I'm not trying to say that everybody needs to get on Facebook and air all their dirty laundry. That's not what I'm saying, because that's not a safe space. But there are safe spaces, maybe with a coach or a loved one, someone that you trust. But to be able to actually, you've accepted it, and now you tell your story.

Because when stories, especially the ugly ones, come into the light. They're not, the light shines on them. They don't have the power of being a secret anymore, you know? So you actually learn how to tell it. And you may not fully understand how cathartic that is until you've done it. In fact, I really don't think we do. But once you actually say it out loud and you see, oh, the whole world didn't collapse. Oprah actually, in one of her books, she shared this story of when she had gotten pregnant when she was 16, I think, and she was so ashamed of this and had kept it hidden for years. And then when she was 40 years, you know, older into her career, and forgive me if I'm getting some of these details wrong, but someone got a hold of it in the press and leaked it out there.

And she talked about how mortified she was that somebody or, you know, how is everybody going to look at her when she walked in? Was she going to be shunned? You know, now everybody knew her dark and dirty secret. And she said, really, she just like when she went into work, it wasn't even a big deal. There was no big brouhaha about it. But there were people who said, you know, that they had sorry, sorry that she had gone through it. But there was a lot of compassion. There was a lot of love. There wasn't a lot of abuse around it. And she I mean, it just really illustrated the fact that sometimes the things that tie us up the most that I feel the most shameful when we say that when we accept that they're a part of our story and they're making us and teaching us what we need on the way, and then we can actually get it out from hiding in the box under our bed, it loses the power to influence us.

Completely loses the power. And it's really funny too, because when you start talking, even with my clients, when they start talking about their deepest and darkest secret, and we have them tell one person, then they tell another person, they find out it's not that big of a deal. And a lot of people already knew. That's what, show me. I remember when my mom passed away the family started discussing, about, how my mom was an alcoholic But everybody knew. Like even the brownie troop leaders they knew. What really? We all thought it was this big secret. No, you know, it's just it's getting it out there and once you start telling people you're gonna find that it's not that big of a secret because you know, your closest friends who really care about you and the people that are important to you, either it doesn't matter or they already know.

And, you know, again, you don't have to go out and tell everybody that's not part of the step. Go to a trusted space and share this story that's difficult for you and see, check in, find out how cathartic that really is.

Write a letter and burn it. You don't have to say it to anybody. Yeah, exactly. But you're right. Okay, so we've gone through the first two steps. What's the third?

The third is the one that I think is extremely powerful for all of us. And that is finding the meaning and the purpose and what you experienced. So for example, with mine, I think that this step helped me to really reframe it extremely well because my coach that was sitting there was, we're talking about the divorces and all the things that had happened. As I started going through, what did I learn from these really hard things? Well, I learned empathy. One of my marriages was abusive, and I'm a pretty dominant type A woman, and I never could understand why women stayed with abusive men. So that was very foreign to me and I couldn't, I didn't understand why, like, if they're beating you, you wait till they're asleep and you pick up a big ass frying pan and you knock them in the head like, like you're going to fight back. That's, and so I never understood why people didn't.

And then when I got in, this marriage. I loved him and I keep, giving him chances and I keep, and it was more emotional abuse. It was very tactical emotional abuse, but it was, it wasn't physical, but I would keep giving him chances. He's apologized. We'd go to therapy. You know what, I wanted to believe that he could get over this. I wanted to believe that the relationship could go on. And so it gave me an empathy and an understanding of something I couldn't understand before. That's just one example. You know, there was a lot of meaning behind understanding, one of my marriages, my husband had a porn addiction. That's not something that you can truly understand until you are a part of that and how destructive it can be. There are, you know, another marriage lasted all of a few months, and then he'd, like just, he'd never even moved in, which, so this, so really weird desertion factor and what does it look like? What story do I build around that? And so there was all of this stuff, but when I just stopped and said, what did I learn? And again, empathy, compassion, deeper understanding of things, you know, things that you wouldn't know until you went through it.

Then all of a sudden, it's like, even though this crappy stuff happened, I don't think it necessarily makes it better. It's not like, oh, yay, I wanted all that crappy stuff to happen. But you understand the stuff you mined from it, the stuff that you got from it, how much you have advanced because you know things now that you didn't know before. So, you can do a couple things in your life you can say, why me? Which sometimes I think that's part of the process, you know, why me? Why not you? But also you get to choose at that point if you're going to get bitter or you're going to get better. And that's absolutely your choice. And part of the, getting better, I think, is that you look at all of the things those challenges brought out of you and taught you that help you to be a better person.

Right, and having empathy and understanding that, you know, sometimes these situations you learn things from and grow from, and it makes you a better person. It doesn't necessarily beat you up and put you in a box you know, you're this awful person. You're a better person for having gone through that because you've learned some very valuable life lessons. So for example, I remember a client that I was working with and she had a really difficult childhood and she changed her, we worked on changing her story and she did it and she realized that her weight gain and her, you know, feeling like she was nothing had everything to do with creating the strong, resilient individual that she is today. So she gave that younger child of herself huge empathy, love, and said, hey, you know, I am not this story and I'm moving on. So that, yeah. So what's next?

That's awesome. So the step number four is to change the lenses. We started talking about this a little at the beginning. There's a concept in academia called the cultural eye and I need a graphic really to show you, but basically pretend like you have a telescope and all the different lenses that are in this telescope are your education level, your sexual orientation, your religion, your socioeconomic status, where you live, what gender you are. All of these things are different lenses for you. And when you can comprehend that you have all those lenses, then you comprehend that everybody else has a completely different set of lenses. And so, when we are seeking to reframe a story, we can acknowledge that we are seeing it through our set of lenses, and maybe there's forgiveness that's involved, and a step in that space of forgiveness can be trying for a minute to comprehend what that cultural eye is for the person on the other side of this story, right?

Realizing that the perspectives, the intention, all of the things involved could have been completely different. They may have been, you know, let's say in the case of someone being sexually abused, perhaps the perpetrator also had been sexually abused and perhaps they were a very destructive person. And I mean, that of course is a path. Unfortunately, it's a really common path, but it's a singular individual path that has to be walked in dealing with something that can be that crippling. But oftentimes, the cultural eye just gives a bunch of different perspectives and how to deal with it. And I think part of that reframing of a story is all of these things. It's being at peace with your own story through acceptance, through being able to say it out loud, through looking at the things that you gain from it. And then this fourth step of, okay, let's, let's take a look now and consider how other people, you know, who were, who were the other players in the story and what might their perspective been.

That's a great example.

Yeah, exactly. So four steps, right?

There's five, but the five one really is just...So you're going to go through and you're going to do all of these and in the podcast episodes that I mentioned to you, so 46, 47, 48, 49, and 50, in each of those episodes, we get a lot of detail about how to do each one of these things we're talking about. So, definitely go and listen to the episode like free therapy, right? Take yourself through this workshop to get yourself to that better, more productive step out of the victim role. So use these episodes. But number five is after you've listened, after you've done the internal work, you've pulled out the journal, you've spent some time with these things. Number five is putting them all together, you know, really sitting down and looking at, have I done these?

What was the result when I did this? When I shared my story, was that effective enough? Did I share it with the right person? Like, what did I get out of that? Like really taking the time to put each of these together, writing out the list of the things that you've learned. Changing that list, seeing, you know, what came up when you changed your lens. Did you feel like there were people you needed to talk to, to like, clear things up or, you know, what was that next thing? So number five is really just the reframe. We see things only as we see things and it's kind of a process to discover other options. That's what this is.

I know a lot of my clients, I asked them, one of the things I do with them is I have them write their old story and then rewrite it for today. What do you want moving forward? And I have them, it's a process. We take that old story. We work through that. We then rewrite the new story. We talk about that. And it moves them into that new story. And sometimes we bury it or burn it or rip up the old story because that is not who we are now. So it does help move forward. So that might be something that listeners can do as well. Write up your old story. Then write up your new story of where you're going, how you got here and why you are and who you are, and then, you know, rip up the old ones. That's not who you are. We're moving into a new you.

Absolutely. So Robin, I have an actual story that is in one of the episodes in number four that I think really illustrates this cultural eye. Can I share it?

Yes, absolutely. It's in episode number four of yours.

It's, well, it's the fourth step in this five part.

Oh, fourth step. Okay.

So it's about changing your lens.

A farmer stood with his dog overlooking his fields. Behind them in the grasses peered a small brown rabbit and above flew a lark. The farmer looked across the field and saw cows, milk, provision for his family, a new car. The dog saw frustration because wild things could so easily hide and escape his chase. The rabbit saw security because it could hide and the lark flying overhead saw the field as home. While we may all be looking at the same thing, standing in the same story, the lens we look through to interpret that story is vastly different for everyone.

Oh my gosh, that is awesome. Great story. That's great. Yes. Because if you were to talk to my family's siblings, you would hear a different story from how we grew up. So I don't know if you've ever been around your siblings or cousins or friends and you remember something 20 years ago and they remember it completely different because they saw it different.

Yes, my sister and I are that way. She'll tell, something that happened. I'm like, where were you like that? And we're only a year apart. So we were growing up, going to the same schools and with the same parents, you know, our parents stayed together, but I just mean, you know, they were in the same space dealing with the same thing.

Yeah, your lenses were different.

And really the only difference with our lens was just the person, the difference in our personalities, because we had the same upbringing, we had, we're around the same people, but just because of the difference in our personality, we interpreted things very differently.

Oh, my gosh, I love that story. That's so great. Dog, poor dog didn't see it very well. That's great, though. Wonderful. That's fantastic. Thank you so much. I mean, this is a subject that I could talk to you for hours on, but of course, we don't have hours. But other than listening to the broadcast that you have, which are, fantastic, and I highly recommend our listeners do that, what other tools would you recommend that they could do to help them with their stories?

Well, this is the main tool. This is the five episodes, 46, 47, 48, 49, and 50. So if you go to loveyourstorypodcast.com, you can go to the episodes page and scroll down. We're at like 260 episodes now, I think. So just scroll back to those or put in the search bar 46 or pull it up on your phone and just scroll back. And go to those and listen to them in order and do the work like, it's free workshop and they are phenomenal tools and really listening to the whole podcast about each step will take you so in depth with it, you will get just a really good start and that's. You know, I'll be up front, though, and Robin, this is where you come in, in that you might do all of those steps, and you will still be able to acknowledge, I'm still stuck in this story. And that's how I was with mine. I needed that coach to pull me out, to be able to show me what I had gained and why it was good that those men were no longer in my life and the things that them, leaving, like how that made my life better and somebody else's perspective. So whether you need a, you know, do these five steps, see how far you can get, how far it takes you. But if you're still stuck, seek the help of a professional that can help you reframe that.

Yeah, because I also would recommend that if you listen to the episodes to go and journal take some time, write some things down. I will work with my clients and ask them to write their old story, write their new story. And yeah, working with a therapist, working with a coach, somebody that can help you because so many times we have to have somebody else bring it to our attention. And my husband's always good at that. He'll point out a different view than I'm in because I'm stuck on the one view I'm in and then he'll see it completely different. Oh, my gosh, I didn't even see it that way. So, it does help to have a coach or a therapist work with you and help you through these. Don't go, you have to do it alone. It's funny. I went to visit my son this weekend and he was telling me about all his pitfalls and challenges. And I just told him, I said, you know what, if you ask for help, it's a very good thing because asking for help is actually asking for success. It's not being a failure. Ever see it that way, asking for help is asking for success. So you want to be successful in your life. Ask for help. It's a good thing.

That's a great thing. And you know, I want to go back and clarify when you decide when you do look for help, it's important who you choose because if it's just going to be a best friend that placate you and let you stay in that victim space, that's not the help you need. You need somebody that knows what they're looking for, somebody that can help you, somebody that will call you out and not just tell you that, you're right. And your perspective is the only one, you know?

Right, and I do it with career empowerment coaching because so many times, you know, through my HR career, people would be stuck in these stories and they couldn't move into the jobs that they wanted because they were stuck. And so many times, in fact, I would say 90% of the times when I work with folks, we have to work on that story in order to move forward in the future.

Oh, I bet you run into it all the time. I did an interview with a gal on, Love Your Story podcast, and her name was Samantha. And she was specifically talking about a job interview where she really thought that she deserved it. She'd been there a long time. She was going for the promotion, and then she didn't get it. And so her story at first was that she was victimized. She wasn't appreciated. That was the story. And then her mom kind of called her out on it. And her mom said, you know, have you learned everything you need to, at that job is quitting really the thing that you want to do and she took some time and looked at the story she created. She looked at what the opportunities were.

And then in the end what she decided to do was to dig in to do a lot more research to become a lot more qualified than she had been and she became something. even more than what she needed to be to get that promotion. And so she was uber qualified and brought that much more to the position when she actually was granted it the following year. So what that illustrated to me was, when you come up against something, you, the way that you choose to deal with it, the story you choose to create about it is going to determine whether you stay small or whether you fly, whether you become better and stronger. And so especially around our careers and our jobs, I think those stories become supremely important.

Absolutely. You know, you hit the nail on the head and that's it. And I am so glad you said that because so many times people just want to quit and move on to the next thing. But guess what? You just took the same story with you. So you're not doing anything. You just took the same story. So in order to change it, we need to get out there and work on this. So listen to her episodes. They're fantastic. In fact, I'd like to go back and listen to them all, but that's just because I'm that way. I go from one to 20. But they're great episodes. Lori, thank you so much. And do you have any other offers that you'd like to offer our listeners today before I let you go?

I think that's the one that's going to help you the most, with this. So yeah, thank you. We invite you to the Love Your Story podcast and happy to have you come and learn. We focus on all kinds of life hacks and techniques for loving your story. And the podcast, you know, does a little calling you out, just, you know, calling all of us out like, let's think about this. Are you doing this in your life? Are there, you know, we've done some emotional intelligence episodes. And anyway, there's good stuff there.

It's great stuff there. Yes, I highly recommend you go to it. And thank you for listening to mine. We are going to have Lori on again, because this is one of those subjects that just needs to be repeated over and over in different ways. So thank you so much, Lori, for being here. Truly appreciate it. And everybody go, shine in your careers and in your life. And we'll talk to you next time.

Thanks Robin.

Bye.