Rewriting Success: The Stories We Tell Ourselves (and What to Do About Them)
Unlock the hidden narratives holding high-achievers back, and discover how mindful reframing can help you author a more integrated, fulfilling future.
"I won't hire you. And I don't see a future for you as a plastic surgeon." With that, he pushed the binder that contained my paper—turned pieces of my life—back over the table.
I shouldn't be here. I've been told this many times. My career path shouldn't have happened.
And yet here I am, in my early forties, head of department at a university hospital, double-tenured professor. And all because of storytelling.
The way we construct our inner narrative often determines whether we see ourselves as heroes pursuing purpose, or victims limited by circumstance.
And all stories start as thoughts.
The Loop of Repetitive Self-Narrative
We go about our day having around 6,000 thoughts, the majority of which are repetitive. Most of these are about things that happened in the past or things we think will happen in the future. If you look even closer, you'll find that many of these thoughts are actually mini-stories—stories we keep telling ourselves over and over, often without realizing.
Stories told often enough become a belief, and eventually, a part of the self.
But here is the thing: Thoughts are interpretations of feelings, which are summaries of perceptions and sensations.
These physiological processes happen so fast that we are usually not aware of them. Every thought is either triggered by one of your five senses or another thought. Your brain does a mostly great job packaging up several perceptions and sensations into feelings, allowing you to get a faster "read" on the situation and navigate life more efficiently. In the next step, your brain interprets these perceptions and thoughts and begins to add meaning to them. This is often where things derail.
Unfortunately, we take almost every thought at face value: its truthfulness, its validity, its justification, its conclusion.
That is not what they are, though.
They are not necessarily true or justified.
This realization is fundamental in many meditation traditions, which emphasize that you are not your thoughts. Nor are you your feelings. You have thoughts and feelings, but they are not your identity.
Meditation, Mindfulness, and Distancing from Thought
If we don't pay attention—which, let’s be honest, most of us, including myself, usually don't—we get lost in our thoughts. It’s similar to how we can lose ourselves in an engaging movie and forget that it's fiction, not reality.
This is where the metaphor of the "clay figurine" comes in. Similarly, we create little internal avatars of ourselves and the people we interact with—clay figurines, as I call them. When you first meet someone, you take a fresh human clay figurine template and start etching in the things you learn or infer: their name, looks, nationality, profession, and personal life, etcetera. The older we get, the more we rely on pre-formed templates—"Oh, an American," "Oh, a Christian"—etching in standard features. While this speeds up interaction, it misses the nuance of the actual person before you. We do the same for the figurine representing ourselves.
Your internal clay figurine is your self-image: a mental model that can be shaped, reshaped, or left to harden, depending on whether you deliberately revisit and revise it.
Now, here’s the thing—we all change, all the time. So, every time we meet someone again, we should actually look with fresh eyes and adjust our figurine. That requires energy and action—which are scarce resources. Instead, we go to our figurine shelf, assume nothing has changed, and interact more with the figurine representation of that person than the real being. Similarly, we seldom upgrade our own figurine. We end up with two figurines interacting—an artificial internal movie detached from reality. That's how people lose connection with each other.
When we look at ourselves and our figurine, we tend to forget it's made from clay. It's malleable. You can, and should, sit down ever so often and etch the version of your own avatar that serves you best in your current situation. Essentially, that's what all manifestation and affirmation techniques are about—when done right. Just thinking about it, though, is not enough.
Imagine picking up an old clay figurine of yourself and reshaping its features to better reflect the strengths and values you've developed over the years.
Trains, Monkeys, and the Inner Dialogue
I like to think of thoughts as passing trains. Some trains are fast, some slow, some look funny, some are weird and scary. You can hop on each train, and that train of thought can take you somewhere. While on it, you pass other trains you can hop on, getting carried even further away. But you can also hop off at any time.
The ability to select a passing train, hop on, go for a conscious ride, and hop off again is like a muscle that can and should be trained. Otherwise, you go through life like a five-year-old in a train station in Mumbai—lost.
Everybody has heard of the monkey in your mind—constantly chitchatting and storytelling while steering the mighty and powerful elephant that is you. Nobody remembers who gave him the mandate to take over the leash and steer. Few people remember that you have the power to silence or ignore him. Even fewer remember that you can actually train that monkey to tell stories that are useful and help steer you in the right direction. Realizing this is the first step in taming that monkey.
The monkey loves to tell stories, especially the same ones over and over. Like a broken record. You can notice that especially with older people who keep telling you the same stories repeatedly. As youngsters, we’re no better—we just do it quietly in our heads.
We sometimes see what happens when the internal guardrails keeping your monkey mind's radio station inside your head fail. During a psychiatry rotation as a young med student, I had to accompany a young patient my age, diagnosed with schizophrenia, across the dungeon-like subterranean tunnels of Berlin's Hogwarts-like Charité campus. All while we were walking, the young man was constantly talking—live-streaming his inner dialogue without filter or restraint. It was an incessant story, with an extremely harsh inner critic commenting on his every move and behavior. This made him so enraged at times that he began banging the walls with his fist, which frightened me. We reached our destination with me completely pale and deeply impressed by the insane power of the human mind over ourselves and our perception.
This experience highlighted for me how unchecked inner narratives can overwhelm our grip on reality—something we all risk, to a lesser degree, when we let negative self-stories go unchallenged.
No wonder we all seek to tune down that inner radio—especially when it's depreciating and negative—by any means available. Drugs, sex, adrenaline, and dopamine kicks of all sorts. Most come with harsh side effects when used over long periods of time.
That's why I grew so fond of meditation techniques—they work on the same biochemical receptors but use your body's own molecules to achieve the results without the side effects.
The crazy thing is that the internal radio station is mostly showcasing stories from your past.
The Malleability of Memory and Self-Narrative
These are mostly stories where you keep reenacting emotional states, keeping you stuck in that point in time and often hindering appreciation and acceptance of your current reality. Both fortunately and unfortunately, memory is a fluid process. Every time you tell a memory, it gets reconstructed in your mind—like rendering a scene in a 3D animation. This rendering is malleable both consciously—by thoughts—and subconsciously—by current emotions, for example. It is then saved as the new version for future recall.
What this means specifically: your memories are not real in any objective sense. You are remembering events interpreted in the context of emotions. People who have been at the same event at the same time can have completely different interpretations and thus memories. There have been experiments showing you can implement false memories by slightly changing the narrative of the memory when asking participants to retell the story.
Rewriting Our Stories
You can use this to your advantage. You can learn to reinterpret an event in your past that you saw as negative. This is very powerful and can have a greater impact, especially when you use that memory-story as a foundational building block for the larger story you tell yourself about yourself.
For example, I used to tell myself and others that I am a person who is bad at finishing things, bad at being persistent and long-term focused. The reason I kept telling this story was that I drew this conclusion from my past actions of trying too many things (see my post on the Dead Horse principle for example and "Either/And Revolution").
It wasn't until my wife looked at me with disbelief when I told her about that persistent thought and burst out laughing. She told me there are few people she knows that are as persistent and tenacious as me. My medical and scientific career path, as well as my long-term musical engagement in my wedding band and my at-least-decade-long standing daily yoga and meditation habit, should be enough proof to convince me otherwise. Honestly, it wasn't until that conversation that I was able to look at my story from her angle. She was right. I was able to drop that weird recurring story I kept telling myself then and there. It was so liberating.
For years, I lived with the 'victim' narrative of being unable to finish things. Reframing it as a 'hero' story—focused on curiosity and tenacity—completely changed my growth trajectory.
At one point, I realized that this is also the point of those ancient techniques of mantras: repetitive little story bits you keep repeating to overwrite old storylines or implement new supportive ones. During one of my yoga practices, one of these little mantras popped into my mind—"I am a healer, and I inspire people." It resonated and still does, so I keep repeating it for as long as it is useful.
Try creating your own mantra:
1) Identify a negative self-story;
2) Draft a simple, positive phrase that counters it;
3) Repeat it regularly for a week and observe your perspective change.
We do much of the interpretation of our past looking through glasses tainted by personal, familial, and societal assumptions we never really questioned.
It is quite refreshing to take these glasses off and openly question the stories you keep telling yourself.
Which story is the first one that pops into your mind?
All of this points to a much more malleable definition of yourself—one where you hold the pen and the power to change the writing.
The typical "That's just who I am" thus becomes not truth, but an excuse—a way of saying, "That's just who I want to stay."
Practical Application: Watch Your Words
One thing is to observe, question, and alter the stories you are already telling yourself.
Watch your thoughts, for they become words;Watch your words, for they become actions;Watch your actions, for they become habits;Watch your habits, for they become character;Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.– Frank Outlaw
The next step is to consciously begin crafting the stories you want to tell yourself going forward.
How to start rewriting your story:
Identify the self-story you most often repeat.
Ask: Is this story actually true? Is it helpful?
Draft an alternative, empowering version.
Test it as a daily mantra and notice shifts in outlook.
The Red Thread: Choosing Your Story
As mentioned earlier—I shouldn't be where I am now.
Plastic surgery is among the most sought-after medical specialties in training. Usually, people start very early to prepare themselves and their CVs to amass many credentials to get into training programs.
For a long time, I thought I'd become a dermatologist—sparked by an inspiring talk by an eloquent professor of dermatology. I quickly realized that wasn't for me. I went through the first series of doubts about a medical career, ended up in a private clinic, hated it, experienced my quarter-life crisis, joined general and transplant surgery as a resident, and then, at 3 a.m. fixing ruptured bowels, realized I wanted to become a plastic surgeon—with virtually no prior experience in that area.
I applied and that's when I got that pretty discouraging "I won't hire you. And I don't see a future for you as a plastic surgeon."
It was then that I remembered Steve Jobs' infamous line: "You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards."
So I sat down and looked at my life and my career. Gradually, a "red thread" emerged—a story tying together the disparate experiences and making sense of my path.
I realized that dermatology taught me the physiology of skin vital to plastic surgery; the private clinic introduced me to high cosmetic standards; general surgery gave me practical and emergency experience; transplant surgery taught me transplant immunology, and academic research rounded out my toolkit for advancing reconstructive transplantation.
This became my red thread and story.
All of this was actually true. It just wasn't apparent to me before.
Once I had written my application with that red thread, I got invited—and that is what got me into residency and ultimately to where I am now.
Which Story Are You Telling?
So, which story are you consistently telling yourself about your past?
Is that a supportive story?
Could you craft a different story from these events?
The longer you look at the stories you tell yourself—and others about yourself—the more you will find there are essentially only two kinds of stories to tell.
The stories where you are the hero.
And the stories where you are the victim.
And if you look even closer, you will see they are essentially the same. They are all hero stories. The only difference is that the victim stories are the ones where you are the hero, but some evil person or circumstance is keeping you from doing your hero thing.
So take a moment—put it in your calendar now. Seriously, right now.
Then sit down and re-examine the stories you tell yourself and others about yourself.
Which are the victim stories?
Look at your figurine—how do you view yourself?
Ask yourself: Is all of that true? Is there a way to look at this differently?
How do you want your figurine to actually look?
Now, take one story—just one—that’s been playing in your mind. Write it down, question it, and dare to rewrite it. Then comment below or hit reply: What story will you stop telling yourself today—and what’s the new story you’re choosing instead?
If you want, share your stories and changes below or send me a message with "figurine" for more support.
To better stories,
Nicco
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