Want to know what a story is? Here’s a real life example

Japan’s former world No.1 tennis player Naomi Osaka recently put a post on Instagram that courted a lot of attention.

If you didn’t see it, you can check it out here.

In a nutshell: Osaka detailed how she’d been through a year of reflection and realised she spent her entire time striving for achievements, but never recognising when she achieved.

She realised she spent a lot of time criticising, and no time celebrating.

Such a realisation shows tremendous self-insight from Osaka, as those sorts of stories often require the guiding support of a psychologist or counsellor to uncover.

However, it also made me realise that we – here at Story of My Life Journal – spend a lot of time talking about stories and their immeasurable impact on your life, without necessarily having explained what a story is in that context.

So, what’s a story?

The word ‘story’ conjures images of a Disney classic, or a work of fiction.

You know something that lives in the pages of a book, or the frames of a movie, as opposed to living within you.

However, stories, especially those that apply to you and your life, are far from fantasy.

They are the narratives we use to see, understand, and operate in the world.

They define what we believe, what we subscribe to, how we feel about certain events and people, they define our values and drive our behaviours, they dictate our experiences.

What Osaka uncovered in her self-reflection was, in fact, a story.

And not just any story; it’s a common one.

I hold the same story.

Contingent self-esteem

The first story buried within me that I uncovered and began unravelling with the help of my psych was one of contingent self-esteem.

I wrote about that in a bit more detail in the blog post detailing how your Story of My Life Journal came about, but I was hinging my self-worth on achievements.

This is such a common narrative that we tell ourselves that we have a name for it: contingent self-esteem.

And that means exactly as it sounds – that the self-esteem of someone is contingent on something or someone.

You can get a more comprehensive rundown on contingent self-esteem from this great post by Amplifying Performance.

Mine was a story that dated back to my childhood and stemmed from the attention I would (or would not) receive from those whose attention I craved, in particular circumstances.

Unbeknownst to me, my psyche identified that I received attention when I achieved something, and it began crafting and reinforcing that story through my behaviours and the emotions I experienced.

You see, stories are tricky like that; they become self-fulfilling prophecies, because they’re creations of the mind and the mind controls your entire reality.

My mind created a story, then it drove my behaviours to play out that story and used my own emotions to reinforce it.

It drove me to strive for achievements, then it made me notice the recognition and attention that created, and it pumped me full of happy juice as a result.

When stories go bad

You probably read that and think, “So, you’re saying your story drove you to achieve things? What the hell is wrong with that?!”

Here’s the thing: an achievement is only an achievement for the briefest of moments and, when they disappear, they take with them all sense of self-worth.

If I wasn’t achieving something or actively pursuing an achievement of some kind, I would go through bouts of depression, dissolutions of identity in which I would have no idea who I was or what I wanted to do, and I would feel worthless.

And, in the interest of transparency and honesty, I should say this story still grips me to a certain extent, because 35 years of storytelling doesn’t come untangled overnight.

A study published in the journal Frontier Psychology in 2015 discussed the findings of two studies that looked at the relationship between contingent self-esteem and depression symptoms and found an irrefutable link between the two.

It also found that girls/women present with this duality earlier than boys/men, but that, over time, its presence in – and impact – on men increases.

That’s an interesting point when considering 23-year-old Osaka and 37-year-old me are telling ourselves the same story.

Back to the star tennis player

Something about Naomi Osaka you might not be aware of was earlier in 2021 she refused to take part in post-match press conferences at the French Open.

Her reasoning was the impact they had on her mental health, particularly after a loss, or in the doubt seeded in her mind before a big match (ABC.net.au article).

Understanding what we just ran through on contingent self-esteem is like suddenly casting a spotlight on Osaka’s internal story that had been festering in the shadows for years.

Her mental health struggles, her behaviours and her pursuit of achievement – while simultaneously and totally contradictorily ignoring those achievements when they came, instead fixating on the NEXT achievement – smack of a very common story of contingent self-esteem.

Of a person who does not believe she is worth anything unless she achieves, so she pursues achievement.

However, if a person doesn’t believe they’re worth anything, then even when they achieve, it will never be enough, and they will move onto the next pursuit.

Constantly chasing a sense of self-worth that they’ll never catch.

Re-writing the story

And they’ll never catch it, because a sense of self-worth can come from only one place: the self.

The only way the cycle of contingent self-esteem can be broken for people such as Osaka and myself, is to go inward, identify the story, and consciously correct it.

That is because our entire experience of the world rests on the stories we’ve told ourselves – the stories in which we play the lead role – and all those stories are created by our mind.

That is what we’ve tried to do with your Story of My Life Journal: we’ve created a system that supports you in uncovering the stories that have developed and taken hold within you.

Sometimes, those stories are harmless and even positive – “I’m worth something, regardless of what I achieve or what others think” is the opposite of Osaka’s and my story, but it’s still a story – but sometimes they’re malicious.

You have stories buried within you and they’re driving every experience you have in this world.

Change those stories, and you change your life.

Osaka is showing us all how it’s done.