What’s your story?

You can’t spend more than 5 minutes on social before someone mentions the importance of story. That’s like telling me how important sleep is. You don’t need to convince me. I get it. 

I used to think my story was boring. Generic.

It felt like the good stories all had extraordinary overcoming of adversity elements like these:

• For a time she lived in a car with her single mother and became a famous actor through grit and sacrifice

• She had a baby at 16, walked away from her parents’ money to build her own life and became a successful country inn owner and operator

• She grew up isolated from society and never went to school but she taught herself to get into university and became a bestselling author

I’ve overcome challenges, yes. They just felt so uninteresting somehow. But I now realize that some of the most powerful stories may not be the most epic. 

They are the most relatable. 

Your story doesn’t have to be grand or adventurous to mean something to someone else. In fact, the more ‘normal’ parts tend to be the ones more people will relate to.

That common humanity helps us to feel not alone and connected. 

So the challenge is to be vulnerable enough to share my story even when it feels boring. To dig into what it means to be a human living a relatively ordinary life.

Because an ordinary life is still filled with a lot of hard stuff, good stuff and yes, interesting stuff.