The Value of Your Stories
The value of your stories of life’s challenges and struggles are many-fold. Everyone has them and almost everyone feels some sort of shame. Therefore, we don’t talk about them. That is also a shame.
“Strive to Create Value in all Things”
I’ll not forget the very first time I heard this sentence. Many years ago, I was taking part in a five-day workshop that was likely the most difficult and valuable experience I had encountered in a long time. And it stuck with me.
Life’s lessons come packaged in both flowers and thistles. It is up to you and me to search for the value in every experience. No matter how many times Life knocks you down, know this: you are Born to Bounce Back, and be better for it.
Taking a Peek Inside the Book
Every struggle you have in life has infinite value for you. What did this experience teach you? Were you able to take personal responsibility for it? In my book, I spend time explaining what personal responsibility actually is and how blame keeps you weak.
Inside this book are stories of seven of my private, wounding stories along with my powerful secrets to show how you, too, can Bounce Back to an ever-better life.
Why am I writing this book and why in heck am I willing to spill all my personal stories and secrets to the world??
I must be off my melon!
However, melon aside, there is a purpose.
It is twofold:
First, Our World is in a Mess
Divisiveness, pandemic, critical climate warming, wars, politics. I know it could be even worse, but please, can we not just halt and catch our breath for awhile? It’s exhausting.
In my thinking process, the disease of our time is the ease with which we toss around our judgements of others and then run to our little corners of divisive safety where there are only others of like mind who agree with us. Waiting in the wings, watching us minions ‘dividing’, are the politicians who seem to be hogtied with inaction.
How can we come back together and avoid these dilemmas?
The Great Equalizer?
Secondly, I have a hypotheses that just could miraculously be ‘The Great Equalizer’. It involves empathy, how to create it on very small to huge levels and everyone can participate. What creates empathy? Placing yourself in someone else’s shoes. Listening to them, really listening without thinking of what you want to say next. Feeling their pains and their joys along with them. It is so healing just to be heard.
It is just as healing to be able to share something you learned from your own experiences that may be of help to another life traveller. We are both student and teacher. Empathy grows with this kind of communication and genuine caring. This is the value of your stories, the true value.
As you read my emotional stories followed by the, knowledge and solutions I discovered in them, you will understand. You can do the same, I’ll show you how.
Excerpt from Story #2
“There was a pile-up of emotions all struggling at once to enter the doorway to my mind. My heart thudded and raced, my stomach fell, the hairs on my arms raised and little flames raced through my blood stream. No definable words formed in my brain, but tears found their way down my face.”
