” Madam, you have such lovely, beautiful fine hair,” said the massage therapist, a lady from Germany who speaks like a fraulein. I mean I honestly thought she was talking about someone else, except well I was the only one on the massage table and in the room for that matter.
Little did she know that she had just unlocked a story I had been telling myself all my life about my hair. I got the idea early on that my hair was supposed to look like the Breck Shampoo Commercials and since my hair is fine and straight I concluded I did not have pretty hair. It was a story that I was telling myself that happens to not be true. I do have pretty hair and what is more important is, it is my hair.
And all of this got me thinking about the stories we tell ourselves. I did not realize that I was telling myself a story about my hair. I just thought I didn’t have pretty hair cuz it doesn’t look like the Breck Lady’s hair! So if I am going to believe a story about my hair, why don’t I just decide to believe the German massage lady’s version?
I mean hair is one thing, and it is another thing when we believe stories about ourselves. These stories come from many places. Our families of origin, ads like the Breck Ads, school yards, and so on. The stories are varied and different, but a lot of the time they don’t serve us very well. So we absorb the stories and unless challenged we can tend to live our lives believing them as I did with my hair. Often my clients discover that they are believing stories that they grew up believing, things like not deserving, being a second-class citizen, or not measuring up in some way. In fact, a lot of the work of coaching is uncovering these stories and writing new ones.
What stories do you tell yourself? Do they serve you? What is the story about you that you want to tell?
I would like to share this with you.
The Eagle
There is an old fable about a farmer who discovered an eagle’s nest in his field one day. He placed the egg in his chicken coup where it eventually hatched with a brood of chicks. The only reality the eagle had was his community of chickens, so he grew up clucking and cackling and digging in the soil for worms and insects like all the other chickens.
One day, the eagle noticed several large and glorious birds soaring overhead. He asked his chicken friends,” Who are they?”
The chicken replied, ” Those are eagles, the most magnificent of all birds.”The landbound eagle said dreamily, ” Wouldn’t it be wonderful to fly like that?” The chicken quickly replied, “It’s pointless to dream like that, you and I are farm chickens, and this is where we belong.”
So, the eagle put his dream of soaring high in the sky out of his head and lived out his days as a well-behaved barnyard chicken.
So my question for each of us, is what story are we telling ourselves? What stories will help us to soar like an eagle?
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