Choose Your Stories, Change Your Life

By John Sautelle

Are you living life the way you really want to? Is there something you would like to change? Maybe you want to manage your emotions and relationships better, deal with conflict constructively, be more confident, less stressed, get fit, lose weight or achieve something else that is really important to you? Do you have a repeat pattern of New Year resolutions, committing whole heartedly to them year after year until you give up and take them off the list?

Have you ever wondered what stops you from making really important changes to lead the life you want? The answer, surprisingly, lies within your own stories. As humans, we are story making beings. We make sense of ourselves, other people and the world we live in through deep-seated stories, in the form of beliefs and assumptions, which either help or hinder us achieve what we want in life. Our stories create the results we are currently getting, the good and the bad. In the words of Terry Pratchett: ‘We think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.’

Some stories are within our awareness while others are hidden, often created early in life and long since forgotten. Ultimately, everything we do and say in life is determined by our stories. At their creative best, they are wise and helpful. At worst, they are misguided and over-protective, causing us to jump at shadows, creating unnecessary fears and anxieties, and holding us back.

Growing up we inherit and adopt our most impactful stories; from our immediate and extended families, from people who care for us, teach us and discipline us; stories from the culture and environment we grow up in, from fairy tales, myths, movies, books and social media. These stories activate survival circuits in our brain, moving us towards things that sustain life, or away from or against perceived threats. They are the real drivers of how we show up in the world.

For the first forty odd years of my life I struggled with the impact of these stories. Self-help books and personal development workshops proliferated, often generating insight and hope which quickly foundered on the rocks of intended actions. The deep, lasting change I craved for remained will-of-the-wispishly elusive.

From my mid-forties, things turned around as I progressively discovered, applied, synthesised and built on the work of key mentors. Sometimes in person, sometimes through their writing, these mentors helped me develop a practical Choose your stories process to surface and rewrite my most unhelpful stories. As a professional coach, I have used this process to help more than one thousand leaders make changes they could not previously make. Inspired by the impact in their lives, I have written this book to make the process available to anyone wanting to overcome the pain experienced when we are ‘stuck’ and unable to make the changes we really want to make.

The Choose your stories process is brought to life through the stories of four characters; Lili, George, Jan and Stefan. While based on real people I have coached or worked with in leadership development programs, the characters are fictional. Their challenges, however, are real, and it is likely you will find some of your stories in their stories. Using our story library as a metaphor, I explore different types of stories we inherit, adopt, create, and sometimes disown. These include Purpose, Identity and Values stories which drive our lives. The book is filled with rich examples of these stories and coaching sessions with our characters, illustrating how they can be surfaced and rewritten in our metaphoric writing laboratory. Referencing the latest research in psychology, neuroscience and adult development, this book provides a practical tool to re-write your life-limiting stories and make the lasting changes you want in your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Oct 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781925666489

Book preview

Choose Your Stories,

Change Your Life

John Sautelle

This is an IndieMosh book

brought to you by MoshPit Publishing

an imprint of Mosher’s Business Support Pty Ltd

PO BOX 147

Hazelbrook NSW 2779

http://www.indiemosh.com.au/

Copyright 2017 © John Sautelle

All rights reserved

Licence Notes

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Advance praise for

Choose Your Stories,

Change Your Life

Choosing your life stories can indeed change your life. In this fabulous book, John Sautelle explains why you create the life-limiting stories you now carry, and how you can build new ones to unleash a new and greater life.

– Michael Marquardt, Professor of Human Resource Development and International Affairs at George Washington University,

co-founder and first President of the World Institute for Action Learning, and author of 24 books in the fields of leadership, learning, globalization, and organizational change

There were times where I felt I was the author, there were times when I was one of the characters in your stories; you stopped me in my tracks and made me rethink, you took me places I hadn’t been and other places where I had long avoided, and had me hearing things that I so needed to hear; you stretched my mind, made me laugh and cry.

– Allan Parker, best selling author, behavioural scientist, international business consultant, negotiator, mediator, facilitator and trainer

John Sautelle has integrated a variety of practical ideas for helping people overcome the ingrained habits and unconscious drivers of behavior that plague everyone. Through easy to believe stories and simple explanations of complex topics, he guides even the most uneducated reader into a deep understanding of unconscious mental processes. Due to the personal authenticity in which Sautelle tells his own stories of self-defeating scripts and self-discovery, the book is a compelling read that increases the credibility of its message. In the end he provides a step by step guide for taking control of the unconscious scripts and narratives that guide the way people make meaning and therefore make decisions and take actions.

Unlike most books of this kind, this is not an overly simplistic recipe nor does it rely on only one or two perspectives. Instead, Sautelle draws from a wide variety of methods and perspectives, some of high academic quality, others long tested in practice, some of them recent breakthroughs in psychological research. He offers a personal integration that comes from decades of experience. It is a unique and creative piece of work that will enrich coaches and clients, regardless of how knowledgeable they are (or are not). Although the book is aimed at increasing effectiveness at work, the methods he provides are useful for all aspects of life. I enthusiastically recommend it.

– Gervase R. Bushe Ph.D., Professor of Leadership and Organization Development at the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University, author Clear Leadership and co-author Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Organizational Change

Some personal development books are engaging, but do not lead to long lasting self-improvement. Others lead to short term improvement by scratching the surface of human behaviour, but are not overly engaging. Choose Your Stories: Change Your Life is both engaging and self-improving, over the long term. Written with compassion as well as experiential and academic insights, this book shows readers how to free themselves from negative life patterns using an easily relatable and clever ‘books in a library’ metaphor. This book will help people change their lives forever.

– Major Luke Foster, Psychologist,

Australian Army

Choose Your Stories is a practical manual for creating lasting change in the area that is most troublesome –our own beliefs. John Sautelle shows the path to change through easy to read compelling case studies that showcase the subtleties of any personal change process. As a reader, you feel safely guided by compassionate and experienced hands.

– Zoë Routh, leadership speaker, author and adventurist

This is the most easily digestible personal development book I have ever read and I have read a lot of them. It gave me a really powerful tool I could take away and implement straight away with both my clients and my team to help them make positive change. The story format is brilliant on many levels, making it really easy to read and understand. So often books of this nature are heavy going. Not with this book, it is absolutely fantastic!

– Chris Foy, co-owner of Vision Personal Training, North Sydney and Wollongong, Australia

This book can transform thinking about potential growth beyond our perceived limits. John describes in an engaging manner how to recognise and lighten hidden influences coming from within your system. John’s insights into his own life and his examples will resonate with many.

– Saan Ecker, PhD, Director, Peakgrove Equine Assisted Experiences, and Joanne Byrnes, Master’s Gestalt Therapy

This is a brilliant book! Sautelle has taken so many perspectives and concepts and stream-lined them into a very practical resource. It’s marvellously simple and sophisticated at the same time.

– Kristin Boag, Manager, Capability and Performance, Human Resources, Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade)

Throughout my life I have grappled with anxiety, depression and identity issues. As I come from a wonderfully supportive and loving family, I often felt great shame for seeking help for my issues, feeling as though admitting my troubled emotions and thoughts would give the impression that my family had done something wrong in my upbringing.

After feeling like an undeserving tourist in the self-help section of the bookshop many times, and seeking various forms of counselling and therapy over the years, reading John Sautelle’s book was an emotional experience for me. Tears rolled down my face as his words resonated with me and I finally read something that I felt was perfectly applicable to my experience within my own life narrative.

John’s enriching, engaging and broadly applicable approach to unlocking hidden fragments of our past and having real contact with their effects has been invaluable to my own understanding of self. A transformative piece of literature, I cannot recommend it more highly.

– Eloise Fisk, student, artist and florist

For eons we have used story to convey knowledge and social mores within and across generations. It is the function by which we make sense of our world and form our identity. We are hard wired for it.

At a time when we are being informed to death, the power of story as a tool for personal and collective transformation is ripe. John Sautelle’s book is a critical contribution that enables us to begin to harness that power.

In a world so in need of new stories John’s book gives us the head and heart food to understand, along with