It's time to stand up and tell our stories | Samantha Packwood | TEDxStGilgenInternationalSchool
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0u83LGUzXs Video ID: J0u83LGUzXs ============================================================ Transcriber: Shreya Arora Reviewer: Maurício Kakuei Tanaka My boys were three and four when I first asked them the question. They’d just been chasing each other around and had a break, sat at the breakfast table. So I asked, “Boys, what do you want to be when you grow up?” The older one instantly shouted, “A policeman!” The little one looked at his brother, then he looked at me, and then this huge grin spread on his face, and he said, “A robber.” And when I was reflecting on that conversation later in the evening, I realized it’s a really fun question to ask, but there’s another question, one that we never ask ourselves, and we rarely ask other people. And that is, “How do you want to be when you grow up?” We already have stories about ourselves - the hidden invisible stories - about who we are, how we are, what other people think of us, and what we think we can and can’t do. But what if we can influence the perception of ourselves through the stories that we have about ourselves? We can definitely change the value or the perceived value of objects through stories. In 2006, journalist Rob Walker bought 200 thrifty store items that were worth about $1.25 on average. Then he commissioned 200 writers to write individual stories about those objects. He posted them on eBay with the stories. And by the end of it, when all was said and done, those items were sold for an average round about $40 each. So a huge, huge difference. If we can increase the perceived value of an object, can we increase the perceived value we have of ourselves through the stories that we tell ourselves? I tried this. But I encountered three challenges, which I'm going to share with you. The first was expectations. Think about a TV program that maybe you’ve watched for years and years and years with the same actors. When you watch those actors trying to play somebody completely different in a film, that’s so strange. It’s so odd to see them outside of the character that we expect to see them in, and after actors have to work so hard to break out once they’ve been typecast. The same can happen to us in the real world. We have expectations of the character that other people are going to play in our lives, and they have expectations of the character that we are going to play in their lives. And when we go outside of that, it feels wrong. So, for example, you might be known as - the forgetful friend that always leaves their phone somewhere, or the class clown that makes everybody laugh, or the partygoer who’s always last at the party. But what happens when the class clown decides he doesn’t want to be funny in class anymore because it’s affecting his grades? Or when the partygoer decides they just need a few nights in? Well, we get confused. We’re like, “Hey, you’re not playing the role that I expect you to.” And we might inadvertently do things or say things to try to lure them back into the character that we expect of them. And that’s what makes it really, really challenging for us to flip our script and change our story. However, we can overcome that, we can overcome it by having a crystal clear vision of what our new story is, and how we want to be. US President Abraham Lincoln did this. He had a list of character traits that he diligently worked towards, and he practiced on a daily basis to express those character traits. So I wonder, “If you wanted to flip your script, what would be on your character list?” The second challenge is that we based our narrative on our past, and what we think we know about ourselves. But we are a little selective, and nothing demonstrates this better to me than a study done by Daniel Simmons and Christopher Chabris. It’s called the selective attention test, and it goes a little bit like this. You sit and you watch a video, and you’re told to watch for how many times a ball is passed between people wearing a white T-shirt. So the video begins. These people - there’s a mixture of them - some are wearing white T-shirts; some are wearing other colors; and they’re bouncing the ball, moving at the same time, passing it to each other. You’re so concentrated on keeping track of how many passes there are between the people in the white T-shirts. At the end, you’re asked the question, “How many passes were there?” And you felt super smug because hopefully, you got the right answer. And then you feel really a little less smug when the next question comes up, which is, “Did you see the gorilla?” When I first saw that question, I was absolutely gobsmacked. What gorilla? I never saw one. So I went back and started the video again. And there he was, brazenly walking through across the screen, stopping in the middle, in this crowd of people bouncing and passing the ball to each other. He stops. He even stops to beat his chest for a minute before continuing. But I never saw him. Even though he was there all along, I missed it. So what else are we missing when we create our narratives of ourselves? We might think of ourselves as unlucky and then selectively forget all the times that we’ve found money on the floor. I actually try to use that selective attention to my advantage. So my natural tendency will be to scour my past to look for all of the times I’ve messed up, or I haven’t lived up to my expectation of how I want to be. But I now really try to scour looking for evidence that I already have what I need. I already am able to live in that new story of myself. And that's been extremely helpful. The third challenge is that if you don’t start to write your own story, somebody else will. In fact, it’s happening right now. Companies have got so much information about us, information from the things that we do, even those late-night searches when you search, whether platypuses are venomous or whether fish pee. And all that information starts to create a profile of you. But what if instead of being reactive to this, you were proactive, you were the curator of your own content? You actually actively search from the position of your new story. Then you will be rewarded back by the technology, you will be using that technology to your advantage to help to feed content that fits your new story. So these are all the challenges that come back to our original question, “How do you want to be when you grow up?” We can know this, we can know it by dismissing our biased view of the past and actually looking for a more favorable one because ultimately stories do have angles, and if you’re the author, you can choose the angle. You can choose the one that serves you rather than the one that keeps you unstuck or steals your confidence. You can also look out for the stereotypes or the characters that you’ve been typecast, and that perhaps you’ve now outgrown and create new ones. The first thing you can do is pick up a pen and give yourself a great writer. Thank you.