By asking yourself some basic questions about how you feel about what you do, and how you conduct yourself in those areas and by really, honestly looking at your story in these areas, you begin to get a better sense of what’s really going on.

I do want to take one quick sidetrack here before I get back into looking at your stories.

I want to talk about happiness for a second. Because I think that quite often, people confuse pleasure and happiness.

Pleasure is all about instant gratification. Pleasure is like that second piece of chocolate cake. Long term pleasure doesn’t lead to happiness. For the most part, long term pleasure leads to pain while happiness leads to more happiness.

Happiness is a feeling that you’re making progress; that you’re headed in the right direction. It’s the anticipation of joy. While pleasure doesn’t last, happiness does.

Every depressing story about a celebrity who dies of an overdose or anything like that, you can see they were chasing pleasure as opposed to happiness. So I just wanted to give you something to think about as we talk about your stories. Understand that when we’re talking about work, family, health, and friendships, we’re talking about happiness here, not pleasure.

So back to your stories.

Step one in trying to get a better handle on your stories and make the edits that are necessary, is to identify the areas of your life where the stories that you tell yourself or the story that you tell others is clearly not working. Areas where they simply won’t take you where you ultimately want to go. Where they aren’t currently getting you the results that you want. That could be in your business, in how you work. It could be in your family, your health, your friendships, or wherever.

The bigger question here is in what areas is it pretty obvious that I’m not going to get to where I want to go with the story I currently have.

Let’s say for example that you keep avoiding certain work. Well there’s a story there. So you’d want to focus on that. Once you’ve done that, what you want to do is actually articulate as clearly as you can the story that you currently have that’s not working. You want to put it down on paper. This is your old story.

There’s two ways that you can attack or alter or edit a story that’s not working for you.

The first is to identify the faulty elements of your old story. You can do that by asking yourself these questions:

Now once you’ve identified the story, the great news is that as soon as you alter your story, you should immediately experience a change. The challenge is how do you change the story?

One way to change the story is to take massive overwhelming force to the story. Kind of like killing an ant with a sledge hammer. If you’ve always told yourself a story that you can’t do X, then you want to focus a lot of energy on doing X.

If you tell yourself you’re a procrastinator, then for a day, for two days, for a week, you’re going to start to actually make massive action so that you can actually redefine your story.

The second way is to actually alter the story on paper first and then really think through how would you have to live in order for you to be on the path of this story. Ideally, you get pretty clear on that.

Now one other alternative that really kind of weighs into that second course of action is to create a turning point in your story. Take your story as it is up until now, and then you create some kind of turning point and then change the story. A lot of other elements relate to this. Your larger purpose becomes the premise of your story; your overall purpose in life and your values become important elements too.

But for right now, I think it’s a good start to really start getting your head around the idea that you’re living a story. We all do because we need a story to make sense of the world.

Right now, either that story is either helping you or hurting you. It’s either taking you closer and closer to your goals each and every day. Or it’s pushing you further and further back. As you develop your new story, you want to make sure that it’s taking you where you want to go and that it is founded in truth.

I really believe that confidence stems from your story. Your willingness to do what it takes stems from your story. How you approach your work stems from your story. Whether people are attracted to you or not comes from your story. Basically, pretty much anything that you do, feel, think relates to your story.

So here’s your homework. Identify the story that you’re living right now. And ask yourself if that’s the story that you want to live. And if not, start thinking about what has to change so that the story changes.