Closing Tabs in Your Brain by Writing Your Story
You know that feeling like there are too many tabs open in your brain? I have a two year old and a three year old at home, so I’ve become more intimately acquainted with the “too many tabs open”...
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You know that feeling like there are too many tabs open in your brain?
I have a two year old and a three year old at home, so I’ve become more intimately acquainted with the “too many tabs open” feeling in the past few years than ever before in my life. But you don’t have to have children to feel like your brain is operating on overdrive.
At any given moment you are…
Mentally preparing for your next meeting Thinking about what you’ll eat for lunch Wondering if the sideways look your co-worker gave you was benign or pointed Considering if you might be up for a promotion Wondering when interest rates will come down Dreaming about that new Tesla you’d love to drive Questioning your life path Entertaining an existential crisis Surveying what your bizarre co-worker is eating for lunch Remembering the email you forgot to respond to from three days ago Kicking yourself for leaving the wet laundry in the washer overnight againI could go on but I don’t need to. You get it.
Thoughts like this can overwhelm our brains and halt productivity.
Worse yet, they yank us out of the present moment and make it seem like our lives go by in a flash; as if we have no ability to truly enjoy ourselves or feel the meaning and purpose inevitably present in our unfolding existence.
But there is a tool that helps us close the open tabs of our brain and find a path of clarity, meaning and joy again. The tool is readily available, requires minimal skill or training and is one hundred percent free.
That tool is called writing your story.
I’ve been teaching people to write (and publish) their stories for more than a decade as a ghostwriter and a book coach.
But you don’t need to publish your story in order to find the process gratifying and healing. Writing about your life is undeniably clarifying, regardless if you ever share the story with anyone. When you write your story, you discover the one golden thread that guides a reader through the narrative.
Unsurprisingly, this golden thread guides you, too. It’s like a popcorn trail that leads you out of the woods.
Most people worry their story isn’t interesting enough or valuable enough to warrant being written down. Here are three prompts that can kickstart literally any story, no matter how complicated or even “boring” it might seem.
1. What do you want that you don’t (yet) have?
A story is built around a hero who wants something and has to overcome a problem in order to achieve that thing.
So the question is: what do you want that you don’t (yet) have?
If the answer is a new car, that’s fine, but it’s not likely a very interesting story.
Can you go a little deeper? What do you really want?
When you determine what you want inside of your story, you clarify the path in front of you. The tabs of your coworkers lunch or an existential crisis might pop up, but since answering those questions doesn’t serve the purpose of getting the hero what he or she wants, they close effortlessly. You are singularly focused on the one open loop of what you want.
2. What is the main problem or obstacle you’re facing?
Problems are essential ingredients in stories.
Stories organize themselves around problems so it’s good to know what specific problems you are facing that get in the way of your goal. Ask yourself how that problem manifests itself both externally (a controlling boss) and internally (feeling like a failure).
When you identify what I call the One Big Problem of your story, the other, smaller problems seem to sort of… disappear.
It’s not that they don’t exist. It’s that they don’t exist to you.
Like tabs, closed on a computer. You can easily tune them out.
3. Who will help you find your way?
In every story, there is a wise, benevolent character who helps the hero win the day.
This character is not only beloved in stories we read or watch, they are also the beloved characters in our lives. They help us shift our perspective or change our minds or try something bold we wouldn’t have tried without the push.
Who has come into your story to help you achieve your goal?
If you can’t think of anyone, who would you like that person to be?
Writing your story closes tabs in your brain by showing you what’s important to the story and what’s a distraction. Like noise-cancelling headphones, it allows you to focus only on the narrative you’ve decided to write, not one of the narratives being flung at you from a thousand different
directions.
The process is clarifying and healing. It’s grounding and peaceful.
I hope it helps you to find your way.
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About the Author: Allison Fallon is an author of Write Your Story and founder of Find Your Voice, a community that supports anyone who wants to write anything. In addition to her books The Power of Writing It Down, Packing Light and Indestructible, she has ghostwritten 11 books and has collaborated on countless others. Through Find Your Voice, she has helped leaders of multinational corporations, stay-at-home moms, Olympic gold medalists, recovering addicts, political figures, CEOs, and prison inmates use her methods as powerful tools to generate positive change in their lives. She has lived all over the country in the past decade but now lives in Nashville with her husband and two kids, Nella and Charlie.
