Narrative Therapy

Narrative Therapy For Success

By Michael Schreiner | August 28, 2015

People who consciously or unconsciously want to see you fail will ignore or minimize your successes while honing in on your failures, even exaggerating them, whereas people who consciously or unconsciously want to see you succeed will ignore or minimize your failures while honing in on your successes, even exaggerating them.

This is probably the biggest hidden reason why when you surround yourself with people who want you to succeed you tend to succeed and when you surround yourself with people who want you to fail you tend to fail. From the objective standpoint you might have the same ratio of successes to failures whether the people around you are cheering you or jeering you. But when no one notices your successes then in a way they never happened and when no one notices your failures then in a way they never happened. The narratives we spin often end up determining our reality.

From the narrative therapy standpoint your story of success or failure is not just determined by the fact that everyone else gets behind one of these two narratives, a narrative usually crafted and propagated by just a few power brokers, a few people with authority, but is also determined by the fact that you start to believe your story too. You end up thinking, feeling, and acting as if it were true. The story told about you is like a current pulling you out to sea.

It should be obvious then that, quite apart from your own efforts, the active help of others, or sheer luck, the best way to insure success in whatever endeavor you’re pursuing is to surround yourself with people who want to see you succeed and to distance yourself from people who want to see you fail. You might be saying to yourself,”Duh,” but it’s not always easy to decipher into which of these two categories those around you fall since most intelligent people aren’t going to make it obvious that they want you to fail and many others aren’t even consciously aware of the fact. But where they choose to focus most of their attention, and the types of stories they tell about you as a result, stories of instances where you made progress or stories of instances where you came up short, will always give them away.

Courting Failure If you fail on your first twenty endeavors and find great success on your twenty-first then down the road you will probably end up considering yourself a success and so will everyone else. This is the power of the narratives we tell ourselves and others, where we have the opportunity to pick isolated data points […]...
Breaking Free Of Your Dominant Narrative There are certain stories told and retold about you that seem to be representative of who you are as a person. These stories embed traits and behaviors that might start off as concrete details regarding a concrete event but end up taking on mythical proportions as life goes on. They end up being representative not […]...
Problem With The Favorable Dominant Narrative Narrative therapists are concerned with deconstructing the rich tapestry of stories that make up social reality in order to help clients become aware that the way they see themselves, what we would call their dominant narrative, is not necessarily indicative of who they really are. There are usually a multitude of data points to contradict […]...
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Understand Narrative Therapy Human beings are story tellers. We understand the world and one another through stories, we recount events in order to make patterns out of the chaos. But these stories are by definition subjective, they represent particular points of view, of people influenced by time and place. They include some details while excluding others. Incidentally narrative […]...
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Success As A Source Of Malaise Most people are aware that failure is a source of malaise but they don’t realize that success can be a source of malaise too until they’ve actually achieved what they set out to do. What happens is that they finally get what they think they’ve always wanted and, whether they’re willing to admit it out […]...
Redefining Success Deciding not to pursue worthwhile endeavors that require a lot of time and work is, for most of us, not a question of laziness but rather due to an unconscious defense mechanism meant to protect our psyches from painful existential anxiety cued off by the threat of failure. For many of us failure as a […]...
How To Achieve Success Even when you find success you will recognize that many factors completely outside of your control had to go your way for things to work out. The relationship between skill and luck is a tangled mess and is sometimes difficult to tease out. The fact that external success is dependent upon variables outside of your […]...

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