The Stories You Tell Yourself

When I was 13 years old, a single story changed the course of my life.But to understand it, I need to take you back in time to a strange experiment from decades ago.Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga was studying patients who had their corpus callosum surgically severed. His experiments led him to hypothesize that the left hemisphere has a specialized system he called The Interpreter, whose responsibility is to find clear cause and effect.Its job is simple: To take scattered, seemingly random data and facts about the world in front of you and stitch them into a coherent story that feels true.The problem is that we’d rather have a story that’s wrong than no story at all.For me, The Interpreter began telling a story when I was young: I wasn’t very smart. My sister was the smart one. I had to be something else.And then, confirmation bias kicked in. The story determined what “counted” as evidence. Eventually, the story itself constrained my world.In this video, I talk about the stories we tell ourselves and the empowering truth that allowed me to confront my own:You wrote the stories. Which means you can rewrite them.The most important story in life is the one you tell yourself.Make sure it’s true.•••This episode brought to you by:DeleteMe - DeleteMe makes it quick, easy, and safe to remove your personal data online. Origin Financial - Your personal AI Financial Advisor. Track your spending, investments, and net worth—all in one place.Innerbody Labs - A Higher Standard. After reviewing thousands of health products, we built formulas we wished existed.Lemon - The Al agent that turns your voice instructions into finished tasks.