Little stories – one-liners, are sometimes the most powerful kryptonite in the story arsenal. Kryptonite had the power to drain Superman’s strength – it was the one thing that could bring him down. His Achilles heel. In fact, in the original comic it was suggested that he was a boring character because he had NO weaknesses. That was the point that Kryptonite was introduced into the story. We humans are anything but boring. Complex and filled with beautiful gifts, we also all have this voice in our heads that speaks to us, most often in derogative, critical tones, if not outright comments about our worth and our abilities. Let’s talk about this voice, these powerful one-liners, because they do the same thing to humans that kryptonite does to Superman. They take away our power, leave us weak and unable to use our strong and capable gifts. It’s time to get rid of them.
Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Power serves you best when you know how to use it.
Last week we talked about forgiveness – how we do not give anyone the right to smoother our light. Today we are going to talk about one-liner lies that eat away at our souls. Sounds dramatic, but it kinda is.
The swimmer pulled his body from the pool as the water slid from his sleek physique. He grabbed a towel and dried his hair relishing the time of his last set of laps. He smiled to himself as he turned to head to the locker room, and just that quickly he heard the familiar voice in his head whisper, “Well ya, but you’ll never hit the next goal. You’re just too slow.” His momentary success was lost, that quickly, under a pile of words that played across his mind every day while he trained. As he walked toward the locker room he hardly noticed the smile on his face disappear, or the lilt in his step slow.
Across town a woman in a red dress, who loved to sing and dance, even dreamed of doing it on stage, shuffled around at her coffee shop job, singing when she closed in the evenings because daring to dream for anything more was just silly. Whenever she toyed with the idea of trying out for a production at the local theater the voice in her head reminder her that she was nobody. “Why would you be able to do that?” it queried. “Who do you think you are?” And so she shuffled and sang to the walls and the expresso machine, and the paper cups as she stacked them next to their paper sleeves.
The teen walked with his friends down the long hallway at school. The sign taped to the gray locker caught his attention. Tryouts for the soccer team were next week. He’d love to play. He’d been toying with trying out, but he knew his skill was somewhere in the middle of the road, and what if he made a fool of himself. What if he tried and didn’t make it? It was so much easier not to stand out because then you could fly under the radar. “you’re not that good,” the voice in his head parroted as it did every time he thought about trying. “It’s safer, not to try.”
These three examples are simple, standard, happen over and over every day, in a 7 billion individual ways. You’re not alone. I don’t know why, but it seems to be universal that everyone has this voice in their head. I’ve often wondered, what if that natural voice in our head was a cheerleader instead – a voice that told us we are wonderful and can be and have wonderful things. What if the little nit-picky voice wasn’t nit-picking and amplifying our fears and was instead creating possibility for us. What would the world be like then?
Well, this is the point where the powerful take control. And, yes, YOU are powerful. Today’s podcast is an...
