journalist, and consummate seeker, I offer you a framework, tools, and insights gleaned from both sides of the therapy couch. My aim is to help you respond to all the moving pieces in your life so that they conspire to help grow the best possible version of yourself — I want to help you to play your best role, so to speak, in the story of your life, your family, your society, and perhaps even the world.
To do this, I will guide you in applying classic storytelling elements to your own life, using the third-person narrative to elevate your perspective. This is not just a gimmick; rather, it’s a therapeutic technique inspired by a growing body of research that shows that viewing your life as an objective observer can help you see yourself through gentler, more compassionate eyes. It is also aligned with narrative therapy techniques that put emotional distance between people and their storylines so they don’t overidentify with their problems.
My book doesn’t follow any single ideology. Rather, it is a carefully constructed stew of ideas, consisting of several parts psychology; a few heaping tablespoons of Buddhism, Kabbalah, and Mussar (a nineteenth-century Jewish character development program); a dash of very basic literary theory; and a sprinkle of imagination sifted through my life-long fascination with human potential.
This method presumes that a) telling our story is a fundamental way that we come to know ourselves and make meaning of our lives; and b) how we “read,” or rather interpret, our story affects how we feel about ourselves, which can influence how our lives unfold. For example, if we tell the story of a cancer diagnosis as a tale of finding new sources of resilience and deeper connections with loved ones, this feels very different from telling the story as one of divine punishment or meaningless misery. In concrete terms, a positive narrative can influence prognosis, as study after study shows that positive emotions are good for our health and affect medical outcomes.1 Similarly, seeing a failed relationship as a lesson in intimacy, resilience, and humility will make us feel a whole lot better than shaping the story as one of self-sabotage and personal worthlessness.
In order to find the redemptive narrative, we first need to understand the transformational power of storytelling, be willing to wrestle with the scripts running our lives, and step out of our stories through the third-person voice so we can identify the places we get stuck. While it’s true that we can’t control everything that happens to us — in this way, we are not the sole authors of our stories — we can take charge of our story’s narration, actively mining experiences for positive meaning. This power of interpretation is the heart of your personal power as coauthor of your story and the key to making meaningful improvements to your character.
An essential part of reframing your narrative with this particular lens is to redefine success. As you craft your story, I will ask you to recognize the subtle, often unrecognized personal victories that build character — such as facing a fear, changing an attitude, or kicking a bad habit. This is not necessarily how society traditionally measures success. When was the last time you bumped into a friend who announced, “Great news! Yesterday, I conquered my need for my boss’s approval, and today I didn’t scream at my son when he accidentally spilled milk all over the floor!”
These aren’t the usual “happy endings” we crave. And that’s okay. Sometimes, what we think will make us feel happy and successful — a six-figure income or a trophy spouse — doesn’t necessarily bring us the same level of inner peace or satisfaction that we experience when we break old problematic behavior patterns and change in positive ways we never imagined possible. For psychotherapists and writers, these kinds of changes mark meaningful progress in someone’s lifelong development, whether that person is a client or an imagined character.
“Character development” is why I became a psychotherapist. It is also one of the reasons I go to the movies or pick up a book — I want to witness personal transformation and be transformed in the process. It is also the reason I wrote this book — to offer a new method for personal transformation by embracing one’s destiny as an ever-evolving protagonist.
So shamelessly dive into the wonder of your own character, knowing that the treasures revealed will not only deeply enrich your life but also the stories of others whose lives you touch. As you weave seemingly fragmented pieces of your life into a coherent and meaningful new narrative, my hope and wish is that you will discover how character development is the heart of any story worth reading — and worth living.
What This Process Is and Is Not
This is not a book about writing your memoir. In fact, it’s not about writing at all. Whether you can turn a nice phrase, or use punctuation properly, has no bearing on the nectar that can be extracted from this process.
Rather, this book is about deconstructing and reconstructing your personal narrative using a very specific type of architecture — the elements of a story. While there is no particular right or wrong way to do this, there is a best way.
For starters, I suggest you use this book to more deeply understand, work through, and of course positively reframe your experience of your life’s current chapter, especially if you are feeling stuck in old, unhelpful storylines. I emphasize the present moment because now is the optimal time to change your story, but also, applying this framework to your whole life is an enormous undertaking. That said, at the end of the book, I invite you to do so if you wish.
However, I think you will reap the greatest benefit from the exercises if you try to write only a single “chapter” of your life, one that, like a typical book chapter, restricts itself to a discrete, limited stretch of time — typically several months to at most a year.
As you identify that period, you will reconstruct your story, element by element, eventually reassembling all these pieces into an empowering new narrative about where you are now and where you’re heading.
How This Book Is Constructed
The book follows the classic story arc (as illustrated here and explained in chapter 1), which is designed to give you a sense of being walked through the natural progression of your story. Each step will provide you with a new piece of scaffolding for your story remodeling, with each element building on the one that preceded it. Here’s how the process flows:
EXPOSITION: Chapters 1 through 7 introduce the basic concepts of this method and invite you to explore who you are as the hero or heroine of your own narrative. You will:
• learn how “the story lens on life” or “novel perspective” can help you reclaim and reframe your personal narrative;
• see how writing about yourself in the third-person narrative can free you from your inner critic, helping you to see your storyline through gentler, more compassionate eyes;
• discover what it means to be the hero or heroine of your own story;
• identify your character arc through a common author technique known as the “character sketch”;
• look at the roles and scripts that get in the way of playing your character to the best of your ability;
• name and describe the current chapter of your life;
• look at how the ways in which you spin your story are working for and against you; and
• distinguish the objective outer story from the subjective internal story.
CONFLICT: Once you’ve gotten better acquainted with your story’s protagonist, chapters 8 through 11 harness this knowledge to help you identify
