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Change your Story, Change your Life. If you want to change something in your life, a way to start is to change your story. Start telling a different story. You can live yourself into a new reality by deciding on a different ending to your narrative. You can give your power away, or you can take your power back. How you construct your own narrative will determine that. It’s true for individuals, organizations and countries. That’s what Nelson Mandela did, what Martin Luther King did, what Mother Theresa did, and what many artists and actors do. Rewrite a New Ending You will know people in your own life who are rewriting their narratives because they can. Universal Touch Points Storytelling is a powerful way to deepen connection and understanding. As you talk to each other, you set the course for action.

Appreciative Inquiry can Change your Story Those of you who know me, read my posts or listen to my podcast, realize that the world view and practice of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) informs who I am in world. You are a Storyteller. The MY HERO Project. How Changing Your Story Will Change Your Life | Recovery Warriors. How to Change the Story You Tell Yourself - Video. How You're Defined by the Stories You Tell Yourself | Oprah's Next Chapter | Oprah Winfrey Network. Change Your Story to Change Your Life [Animated] Untitled. Untitled. Untitled. Untitled. 'I Regret Everything': Toni Morrison Looks Back On Her Personal Life. This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies in for Terry Gross, who’s off this week. Our guest, Toni Morrison, is one of the most celebrated writers of our time. She won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988 for her novel "Beloved" about a former slave looking back on her life after the Civil War. In 1993, she became the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Morrison, who’s now 84, published a new novel last year that’s out in paperback next week called "God Help The Child. " Toni Morrison, welcome back to FRESH AIR. TONI MORRISON: Sure. GROSS: That's Toni Morrison reading from her new novel "God Help The Child. " MORRISON: Well, I wanted to separate color from race. GROSS: So were there times in your life when you've been exposed to that kind of hierarchy of color within the African-American community? MORRISON: I have. GROSS: And you went to a traditionally African-American college, Howard University.

MORRISON: Yes. MORRISON: I don't know. GROSS: Do… GROSS: Why not? Editing Your Life's Stories Can Create Happier Endings. It was a rainy night in October when my nephew Lewis passed the Frankenstein statue standing in front of a toy store. The 2 1/2-year-old boy didn't see the monster at first, and when he turned around, he was only inches from Frankenstein's green face, bloodshot eyes and stitched-up skin. The 4-foot-tall monster terrified my nephew so much that he ran deep into the toy store. And on the way back out, he simply couldn't face the statue.

He jumped into his mother's arms and had to bury his head in her shoulder. For hours after the incident, Lewis was stuck. But then, suddenly, Lewis' story completely changed. In that instant, Lewis had overpowered Frankenstein — if only in his mind. "Well, your nephew is a brilliant story editor,'" says psychologist Tim Wilson of the University of Virginia. Wilson has been studying how small changes in a person's own stories and memories can help with emotional health.

This process is essentially what happens during months, or years, of therapy. The Secret Lives of Stories: Rewriting Our Personal Narratives. Around the time our daughter turned four, she started making what seemed like odd requests. “Tell me about the sad parts of your life,” she would say at the dinner table. Or, “Tell me about the scary parts of your life.” This phase went on for a while. I played along, telling her about my appendectomy in Africa, the time I almost fell off a cliff, the time I got a fishhook through my finger. We talked about deaths in the family, and she would sit with her eyes wide, not saying a word, listening as if her life depended on it.

It wasn’t until I’d gone through a whole list of broken bones and broken hearts that I realized what she was really asking: How can I deal with sadness? What should happen when I’m afraid? After thinking about this for some time, it occurred to me that I had done a similar thing. In search of answers, like many beginners, I approached other writers and bombarded them with questions to learn their secrets and to find out how they got where they were.

Three Ways to Rewrite Your Story and Embrace the Future. Raghava KK: Shake up your story. Shekhar Kapur: We are the stories we tell ourselves. Brené Brown: The power of vulnerability. Untitled. Untitled. Untitled.