The ‘core story’ that’s been running your life for 20 years
Quick one before we get into it: My Best Journal spring sale is live. 30% off with code SPRING30 at checkout. If you’ve been meaning to grab it and use journaling to change your life, now’s the move. Enjoy today’s newsletter!
Hey Reader,
I can still remember the chalk trembling in my hand as I stood frozen at the board.
Behind me, kids snickered while I stared at “11×7” like it was quantum physics.
Spoiler: it’s 77.
I wrote 109.
Kids laughed as I sat down. And my eight-year-old brain learned a new core story that would quietly run the next fifteen years of my life:
“I suck at math.”
That’s all it took.
One moment, one wrong number, and suddenly it was true. Not because it was accurate, but because I decided it was, and then I spent years collecting evidence to prove myself right.
I avoided numbers, I took the “creative” path, and nearly failed out of college because any time something looked like math, my brain shut off before I even tried.
I didn’t write that story though. A room full of third graders and one embarrassing moment wrote it for me, and I defended it like it was gospel for over a decade.
You’re probably doing the same thing right now and don’t even realize it.
Most of the stories running your life were installed before you were old enough to question them. Which is wild when you think about it, because it means the operating system you’re running on was programmed by a version of you that still believed in Santa Claus.
Nobody sat you down and said “here’s what you should believe about yourself for the rest of your life.” It just happened. And now you’re walking around defending a story you didn’t even write.
People spend their entire lives protecting someone else’s conclusion about who they are.
- The “I’m not a leader” story from your first manager.
- The “I’m too much” story from one relationship where you were just with the wrong person.
- The “I’m bad on camera” story from your handful of attempts at recording videos.
They’re only true if you make them true.
And the sneaky part is how invisible they become. You stop noticing the story because you start becoming it. You don’t think “You know… I have this story that says I’m bad with money” you just tell yourself “I’m bad with money.” The story disappears into the background and becomes the lens you see everything through.
That’s why affirmations rarely work. You can stand in front of a mirror and tell yourself “I am confident” fifty times, but if the story underneath says “people who look like me don’t get to be confident,” the story wins every time. And you’ll never out-b.s. a core belief because you have to see it for what it really is first.
There’s a journal prompt I come back to whenever I catch one of these stories running me.
I call it the ICB exercise.
Just fill in the blank: “I can’t _____ because _____.”
- I can’t build a business because…
- I can’t get in a relationship because…
- I can’t make money because…
Don’t overthink it, just write whatever comes up first. And not the polite version you’d tell your therapist… the raw, ugly truth.
That’s your core story.
Once you see it on paper, you can start questioning it. Is this actually true? Or is it just some bullsh*t story that’s overstayed its welcome.
You don’t have to rewrite your whole story. You just have to notice you didn’t write it in the first place.
Because once you see that the story was handed to you and not chosen by you, it loses its grip.
So back to my “I suck at math” story.
When I started my business I had no choice but to look at spreadsheets and revenue numbers. And something funny happened. When the numbers were tied to something I actually cared about, I realized I kind of love this. Numbers aren’t scary, they’re just information, binary and clean and emotionally neutral.
Fifteen years of “I suck at math” and the story was never true. I just never tested it because the story told me not to.
That’s what these stories do. They don’t just describe your limitation, they protect themselves by making sure you never get close enough to prove them wrong.
So what if you’re not stuck because you’re ‘more messed up than most’ but because of a story you picked up so long ago you forgot it wasn’t yours?
And the only way to find out is to do the thing it says you can’t.
My latest YouTube video
How to quickly escape the ‘dopamine hole’ destroying your life.
This one’s on a heater – over 250k views and climbing.
We get into dopamine, why life feels different than it did three years ago, the brain fog story I’ve never told before and what $2k of lab tests taught me about burn out, and three things that actually fix this.
What I’m listening to
Been on a massive Elvis kick. Dude had way too much aura. Even got this used coffee table book. I’ve always been inspired by that 50s-’60s Americana era, something about the style and the vibe.
Quote for the week
“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.”
Carl Jung
A gift from me
Sending this out again in case it got buried last week. 50 books that changed my life, pulled from the 400+ I’ve read. Might change yours too.
Get the free reading list here
See you next saturday,
CK
