Your hero’s journey

The context for your journey.

What are you doing today? Is it a good day?  Are you filled with joy and satisfaction?

Probably not.  That’s ok.  Life’s a journey and you need to understand that this journey is not easy or predictable.

There are (at least) three lies promulgated in every culture throughout the history of man.

The first is that you are going to be happy all the time.  The happiness lie. That doesn’t happen.  That is a false goal anyhow.  It’s unnatural to be happy all the time.  You can be peaceful. You can be confident.  You can be sanguine.  You can be stable in your emotional drift.  But you’re not going to be smiling and laughing all day every day.

Don’t set a goal to banish all challenging human emotions from your life.  Set the goal to be able to mange them through your journey.  The slight truth to the happiness lie is that life is better with a positive outlook and a smile in general, and you can, through practice, move your emotional set point to be more happy in general.  A good goal is to project happiness and practice happiness.  That’s more achievable.

The second lie is the destination fallacy.  The way this plays out in our world, the message we hear, is that if you only can get, achieve or acquire X, Y and Z then you will be happy.

This is the destination fallacy.  The most unhappy people are those that unexpectedly reach all their goals.  That doesn’t make you happy.  That just gives you no goals, no purpose.  That’s the winning lottery ticket scenario.  That will kill you faster than anything.

The third lie is the straight-line fallacy.  Simply stated this means that everything can be reduced to a straight line.  The lie states that the bumps, knocks and ditches in life are the exception, not the rule.  This is false.  Life is the exceptions, the knocks and the ditches.  It’s never a straight line.

Why does that matter?  It matters because if you approach life with a straight-line assumption you set yourself up to fail.   If you approach life with a squiggly-line assumption you will be much more emotionally robust in your journey.

How about an example from athletics?  When I set out to run a specific time in a marathon, I lay it out in a straight line.  I’m going to train; I’m going to show up healthy and fast.  I’m going to meet my goal.

How often does that happen?  What’s the reality?  It’s seldom that it goes exactly to plan.

The reality is that I’m going to try to train, but struggle to get all the workouts in.  Some of those workouts are going to go horribly wrong.  By the end of that training cycle I’m going to be injured and stressed out.  On race day the weather is going to probably suck and despite my best efforts I will miss my time.

Sound familiar?  I bet you’ve had that experience as well.

It reminds me of that old joke about project estimates:  Whatever the original estimate is change the time period an d double it.  If your original estimate is 3 days then it’s actually going to take 6 weeks.

But you know what?  Those are the good stories, right?  The good stuff is when things go wrong.

What’s my point?  Why do you care?  Because you can’t set expectations that you are going to be able to control things.  You can’t bend the universe to your will.

The truth is that the only thing you can control is how you react and how you handle the bumps.  This boils down to the questions you ask and the stories you tell yourself.

One of the most popular stories that we all know by heart is the hero’s journey.  The hero starts out on this journey, many times without knowing it.  Something happens and puts the hero on the path of the journey.

The hero faces challenges along the way, many defeats, setbacks and failures.  The hero is forced to or happens to consult a wise person who coaches then through their challenges.

The hero then emerges victorious at the end and overcomes all the challenges and lives happily ever after.

Look at your own story in light of the hero.  Maybe you are at the low point, the challenge.  Maybe the story you tell yourself is that this is just the natural challenge of the hero’s journey.  You will face these challenges and emerge victorious.  Maybe you need to find your coach, your Yoda, your Gandalf to guide you.

Isn’t it easier to see this challenging part of your life as a natural part of your journey?  Even a necessary part of the journey?  Isn’t this part of the journey that crafts you into the hero you are and will be?

And I know it seems hard when you’re facing these challenges.  You feel like you’ve been cheated or mis-informed.  It wasn’t supposed to be this way, this hard.  The path wasn’t supposed to be so squiggly.

But if you can tell your story in a different way, a different context, you can re-position these challenges.  If you can start asking better questions and telling a better story it is a short leap from suffering to gratitude.  You can contextualize and see anything as a gift.  As a part of your hero’s journey.

Because, you can’t control the path.  You can only control the story you tell.

Tell a hero’s story.