What’s your story?

And why it matters

A favorite gift I once received is a lovely canvas designed by Kelly Rae Roberts. Her extraordinary work combines quotes and collage. Even though I don’t know her, I feel we share something in common and her art pieces always speak to me. The message on the one that I own is: Your beautifully, messy, complicated story matters. Tell It.

Don’t you just love that?

Do you believe that your story matters?

Are you telling it?

One of the reasons that I failed to tell my story in the past was because I believed it was not extraordinary. After all, the story of a shy introvert who was so afraid of her voice that she tried to live under the radar while she waited for her life to be “just right” so she could start making her dreams a reality, isn’t a story worth telling… is it? To have a story to tell, you need one that’s remarkable, right? You need to have scaled mountain peaks, and overcome great obstacles, maybe even slain a few dragons. I hadn’t done any of that, so what was there to tell?

It’s All in Your Perception

It wasn’t until I started telling my unremarkable story that I learned that telling my story could be an inspiration to others. It could bring comfort, hope, and challenge to someone else who felt the same way. And then this amazing thing happened. As I told my story, it became a remarkable story because through telling it I was no longer the shy introvert who tried be invisible and didn’t make a difference or take a risk. I became the take charge person who moved beyond the story I told myself to the confident, capable, make a difference in the world person that I am (most of the time!) today. That’s a remarkable story isn’t it? It’s a story of overcoming personal challenges, scaling seemingly impossible mountains of doubt and slaying some internal dragons. Turns out there’s a lot to tell. And there’s a lot of people who need to hear my story to give them the encouragement and the strength to slay their own dragons.