The story that finally made sense
Over the past year, coaching has given me a front-row seat to something I had already started noticing through writing. People rarely arrive carrying a lack of information. More often, they arrive carrying a lack of explanation. They are trying to understand a career move that no longer makes sense, a relationship they still think about, or a decision that continues to shape how they see themselves.
The more of these conversations I have, the more convinced I become that we are not just looking for answers. We are looking for stories that help the pieces fit together. An explanation can bring enormous relief because it turns uncertainty into understanding. The challenge is that once a story starts making sense, we often stop questioning it.
The benchmark we rarely examine
One of the strongest human drives is the need to make meaning. We are uncomfortable with loose ends, ambiguity, and experiences that don’t fit neatly into a narrative. So we create explanations. We tell ourselves why something happened, what it meant, and what it says about who we are. Most of the time, these stories help us move forward.
The challenge is that we rarely revisit them. The explanation that helped us understand a career decision years ago may not be the explanation that serves us today. The same is true of relationships, successes, disappointments, and turning points. Familiarity can make an explanation feel true long after it has stopped being useful.
What I’m noticing
Leadership
The strongest leaders I know seem willing to revisit conclusions they once felt certain about. They treat perspective as something to refine rather than defend.
Life
Many people are not limited by a lack of self-awareness. They are limited by an explanation about themselves that has gone unquestioned for so long that it now feels like fact.
Culture
One of the reasons Inside Out resonated so deeply is that it gave people a new way to understand experiences they had already lived through. The most powerful cultural stories often do exactly that. They do not change what happened. They change the meaning we attach to it.
Reader question of the week
Between Lines crossed 10,000 followers on Instagram this week. What struck me was not the number itself but the reminder that the most memorable conversations are rarely about the theories. They are about the moments in people’s lives that they are still trying to understand.
So this week’s question is simple. What is a story you tell yourself about your life that you have not revisited in a long time? Not because it is necessarily wrong, but because it has become familiar. Hit reply and tell me. I read every response.
The question leaders rarely ask
Most of us assume the stories we tell ourselves are accurate because they feel familiar. We rarely stop to examine when those stories were created, what purpose they served at the time, or whether they still reflect who we are today.
Yet some of the most important transitions in life begin when we revisit an explanation we have carried for years and realise it may no longer be true. The event has not changed. The meaning we attached to it has.
Which explanation about my past am I still carrying because it once helped me make sense of it, rather than because it is still true?