By Bill Collier- Own your own narrative, don’t give it to others. People will misread you, ascribe wrong motives to you, misunderstand you, misrepresent you, and judge you falsely. They will create a narrative about you and even try to make you agree with their narrative about who and what you are, what you did or didn’t do, why you did or didn’t do it, and what that says about your character or intentions. They have no such right and you owe them nothing.
A strong desire to experience affection and acceptance is common to most people and this often causes us to be very concerned about how others feel toward us or what they think about us. So we find ourselves as focused on the appearances of what we do as on what we do, which begins to consume more energy than the things we are doing.
Although I often say “relationships are the brass ring of life”, the weakness of this idea comes when our desire for those relationships clouds our thinking to such a degree that we are trying to ensure not only that our actions make these people happy but that they also appear in the best light. This is high energy focus directed at the wrong things and it is a fool’s errand.
When you feel uneasy or stressed it is usually for fear of some kind of unpleasantness, which could be a loss or hazard or just something that doesn’t feel good to us. If in our minds we get a “high” from people liking us and thinking well of us, then we will experience unpleasantness when we feel rejected or neglected.
My life has become a pressure cooler experience for lots of reasons, and I am sure many of you have the same thing happen at times. But one good part of these pressure cooker experiences is that they bring a certain clarity as to who and what should be paid attention to, or how much energy should be used.
That friend who is so easily offended or needs constant attention or reassuring and who essentially threatens your relationship over small to medium “infractions” becomes unessential. In your pressure cooker experience, their expectations, even if reasonable but beyond your present emotional or time constraints, are just not worth adhering to. So, sadly, they may threaten to or actually move on and whereas you may have once had the energy to assuage them, now you just let them go.
All this tends toward a more inner focus, hopefully toward Christ within us, but definitely away from the voices and demands of others. When we don’t have the psychic, emotional, or physical energy to give yourself to meeting other’s expectations and when they therefore cast judgements upon us, we find it easier to move on and ignore them. It’s not that this makes us happy to do, it doesn’t, but in comparison to whatever has you in a pressure cooker experience, it’s just not nearly as important as it once was.
Sitting around playing scenarios in your head about why someone misjudged you or, worse, and this is our focus here, doubting your own narrative about yourself is a “crazy making” exercise. In a pressure cooker experience if you want to get through it daily, you begin to either lose the energy to do this or, if you persist in this, you begin to lose functionality in life in general.
Your narrative about yourself should come from your relationship with Jesus Christ and your best understanding of God’s Word and the leading of the Holy Spirit. If you understand who you are, what you are, and why you are in God’s mind, then you begin to craft your own narrative, a story of adventure and overcoming, that describes your past, defines your present, and guides your future.
You will make mistakes and sometimes your motivation may be suspect. You don’t want to become so full of yourself that you don’t welcome criticism or evaluate yourself on the basis of a truth standard. But these things don’t define or change your narrative about yourself and your story about who and what you are.
Getting to a place where you genuinely care about other people but you don’t obsess or put too much energy into what they think or feel about you, or how they want to define you, is a process of controlling your own focus. Thoughts of what others think or feel about you can come unbidden, it’s just natural. But what we give ourselves to focus on is mostly up to us.
One technique I have used is to interrogate those feelings to see if in this opinion others express about me there isn’t some truth. Some of my harshest critics and haters, who meant me no good will at all, have offered me a chance to see a hint of truth in their over-the-top accusations which I have leveraged to make improvements.
I have at times experienced being “misjudged” and sidelined in what I saw as an underhanded way because I was unable to make certain truthful things about myself visible in a convincing way. I was misread and probably misrepresented in my capabilities and resources, perhaps even my intentions, by people who should have known better.
Each time my focus returned to the core truth behind the broader lies. The core truth may have been that I was not very good at presenting myself or something about me or I wasn’t digiligent enough to avoid a minor mistake that my opponents used to justify tearing me down and rejecting me. Often our harshest critics and haters have actually siezed on something of substance and we should be thankful for the opportunity to see this and deal with it.
This is different from someone trying to define a narrative about you that isn’t what you believe about yourself. It is true that only God truly knows your heart, but this doesn’t mean anyone other than you is better at knowing your heart, nor that they speak for God.
I have lived a life more in public that most people and my actions and words have been seen my hundreds of thousands of people at different times. My life has been an open book and people have sometimes used this to paint and untrue and malicious narrative about my life. Every word or deed I have ever done in public, and most have been in public, becomes a potential for an opponent to misrepresent and twist around in the worse possible light.
The fact I have always believed in trying over and over until you succeed has even led to me being accused of either being a failure or being a schemer. The internet is littered with the debris of countless efforts to actualize the inner push of my life and I bear absolutely zero shame about it! The fact it has seemed to come together of late, over the past few years, may make some think I got lucky, but essentially my strategy was to keep trying and surviving until the dice rolled my way.
Regardless of what the future brings, whether more success or failures and setbacks, the narrative of my life belongs to God who has given it to me. If you think my narrative is a bunch of hooey, that’s all fine, I cannot give myself over to feeling any concern about that.
My own history is largely ruled by my own predilection toward being concerned with what people think and feel about me. I want warm and loving affection and unconditional acceptance of my personage probably more than most people, though I may be wrong about that. For this reason, the many times others have totally changed my narrative into a hideous caricature of weirdness, bad intentions, or whatever based on lies or misreading things, or taking things too far and inflating them out of proportion, have been painful.
Again, because I often do things on a larger scale seen by more people, I have had what I think is a high dosage of this sort of narrative hijacking that can totally invalidate a person even in their own eyes.
Why do I like military things, is it because I am a warmonger? Why am I so ultra-conservative in my life, is it because I am intolerant of others? Why do I strongly prefer being self-employed, is it because I have a problem with authority? Why do I say I have a grand purpose connected to historical processes, is it because I am full of myself?
On one hand, I truly desire and actually do live my life openly and publicly with a lot of transparency but on the other hand I have struggled with what others think and feel about me and I have been devastated when they said things about me that were not a reflection of my narrative about myself.
What has begun to happen, and what I am sharing for your edification, is that I realize I cannot necessarily change what I feel or desire so much as I can choose what I focus my energy and time on. It still stings when someone tries to hijack my narrative and defines me in a way that isn’t fair or truthful, but what I choose to do, after I have already interrogated that feeling to find any grain of useful criticism, is to focus on other things.
I find that the longer I put my focus elsewhere, the less a situation upsets me and if this happens quickly I realize how unimportant that situation is in relation to my own journey.
What is your narrative, how do you define yourself and your ambitions, and how do you define your journey and destination? I would counsel you to go to the well of God’s presence, to search the Scriptures, and to seek the leading of the Holy Spirit until you feel you have a solid understanding of these things. Find how God in His mind defines you and consciously seek to align your behavior, words, and choices with that person. Vocalize who you are in such terms.
The other thing I do is simply choose to connect mostly with people who, while they may critique me, I feel and know are essentially on my side. They are people who are “for” me, they are people who believe my narrative is substantially true even when I do not perfectly follow it. My inner circle don’t expect perfection from me, but neither do they accept when I go against my own narrative or drop the ball. I don’t have to worry about how they feel about me and when they do critique me, I can trust they are coming from a good place.
At times I am forced, by necessity, especially in business, to deal with people who frankly aren’t the kind of people I would place in my inner circle. But my goal is always to get closer and closer to a place where all my relationships and associations are with the kind of people who could become inner circle people in my life.
I have either turned down or let go of major “opportunities” when the people I would need to be connected to aren’t fair or decent toward me for whatever reason, even if my own mistakes contributed to the situation. In other words, I can refuse to blame people for misunderstanding me or thinking the worst of me while also choosing to limit my connections to people who wouldn’t ever do that to anyone else.
So in my focus, when people not liking me or believing false things about my narrative begins to bother me I try to focus on other things, even if it’s s funny video. I also try to spend my time and energy with people who will both critique me and nurture my own narrative about myself.
The people in my inner circle aren’t easily offended, don’t threaten the relationship for anything but a very serious breech (and very few things qualify as such), don’t cosign my nonsense, tend to interpret my actions in a most charitable way, give me the benefit of the doubt, challenge me to get better, but also nurture and celebrate my narrative about myself. The reverse is also true.
I don’t have time for non-essentials and, right now, under the current pressure cooker experience I am going through, I barely have time or energy for anything beyond very basic survival and taking care of essential business. My life doesn’t give me the luxury of being terribly reliable for anything that isn’t truly mission critical, which includes both my mission and that of those who are in my inner circle.
The control of your narrative belongs to God and then you, in that order, and anyone outside of you and God has no right to think that they know you better than God knows you and you know you. Avoid such people of you can, ignore their judgements by focusing on other things if you must deal with them. But you own your narrative, God and you, nobody else!
