Who are you storying for? The subtext to this question is don’t make assumptions about what other people are thinking or feeling.  This was a challenging one for me for several reasons: 1. This is a habit that I have that I thought came from a good place.  I decide what people are feeling before they confirm it with me.  2. I got this habit because I had to learn how to interpret and manage the feelings/emotions of others around me. 3. I’m really good at reading people. Even if it’s just a gut feeling, it’s hard to not jump forward when I know my gut is telling me something, especially when it hasn’t steered me wrong before.  It may have taken time to come out in some cases, but I’ve rarely been wrong.  4. I’ve been trained to not trust those instincts because other people didn’t see what I saw “soon enough” so they chalked it up to me being wrong. 

As I’ve gotten older, I clearly know that people are capable of telling their own story.  I’ve also learned that while I can be empathetic and sympathetic to people’s experiences, that doesn’t mean I feel the full range of what they do—it is still their story to tell, not mine, regardless of how similar the circumstance.  When we are trained as people pleasers, reading the room is important.  We need everyone to like us and we need to feel love and accepted and the only way to do that is to make sure people are happy with us and our behavior at all times.  Even if we feel it is for the other person’s benefit, we need to stop telling their story and assuming that’s what they want.  We have to learn to draw the line and understand that if people don’t like us when we stop doing what is best for them, then they weren’t meant to be in our lives regardless.  The other side of this is to stop believing we know how people feel at all times.  Sometimes they are simply tired and we misinterpret that as anger toward us.  Most of the time how people feel has nothing to do with us.    

The most important thing we can do is learn to tell our own story and to stand firm in who we are.  The more we know about ourselves, the more we trust ourselves, the less likely we feel the need to control others.  That is the essence of storying for other people—we think we have a modicum of control over the outcome if we know where their story is going so we start telling it for them.  We can’t steer the ship for other people’s lives (some people barely have the capacity to steer for themselves) so we need to learn to embrace the power and stand at the helm of our own lives.  How people react and interact with us depends on so many factors, we can’t make assumptions about their feelings and we always need to give them space to figure that out first.  We don’t always know how we feel immediately and if we give ourselves and others time to figure that out, communication improves.  Tell our own stories and watch everything improve.