When you look in the mirror, who do we see?

The person we see when we look in the mirror is the person we become, the person we fight to defend and persist with.

If you see someone who doesn’t have a lot of friends, then every time a potential friend comes along, you will find a way to distance yourself from the heartache of being rejected, and you’ll continue to not have a lot of friends.

If you see someone who isn’t happy with inputs you can’t control, then when new inputs come along, you’ll find something wrong with them and seek more control not less.

If you see someone who thrives on challenges, challenges will become a chance to thrive.

Each day gives us the best chance in the world to see a different person in the mirror.

A chance to change the stories we tell ourselves.

Airplanes rarely crash. It doesn’t matter. Turbulence isn’t fatal. It doesn’t matter. If you want to tell yourself a story about air travel, that’s your story and as far as you can take it, it’s true. It’s your story and no one can take it away from you.

Perhaps you’re homesick. Home is great. Home is wonderful. Missing home is a sign that you have a home worth missing. Being homesick is a story we tell ourselves about who we are.

But who will you become? Who can you become?

It turns out that when you’re surrounded by people who care about you, when you have freedom and a chance to lead, you can become a different, more generous, happier, more powerful, more friended version of yourself.

If you want to become the kind of person who can teach an 8-year-old how to play basketball, you can start doing that right now.

If you want to be the kind of person who leads, you can begin to lead.

If you want to.

Because you’re smart, you care, you have something to say. Because there are people who love you and care about you.

And the best way to honor those people, and honor yourself, is to become the person you were born to be.

If you want to.

Today is the best day to begin that journey. If you wait, it gets harder.

Who do you want to be when you look in the mirror?

- Seth Godin

Human beings are massively creative.

We do not usually think of ourselves as creative. We allow that we might be a little creative at Christmas time when we wrap presents or decorate the house. But in every moment, we massively creative: we ongoingly create the stories that we tell ourselves and other people – the stories that give meaning to what happens in our life.

You might not usually notice how voraciously you produce stories because every three seconds the Box regenerates stories identical to what it created for you in the previous three seconds. This is how the Box keeps things the same; it ongoingly creates the same stories.

There are two classes of stories that you can create about what happens.

By far the most common story you create characterizes you as a victim of the circumstances. That you are a victim seems completely inarguable. The inarguability comes from your habit of interpreting “the facts” to show how you were hurt, insulted, abandoned, betrayed, abused, neglected, etc., forcibly establishing yourself as a victim in a Low Drama.

When you tell a victim story about what happened, the part of you that is telling the story is either your Child, Parent, Gremlin or Demon Egostate.

You could take the exact same circumstances, the same incident, the same people involved, the same actions, and you could create a Responsible story about being involved in these circumstances. Responsible stories place you “at cause” or “at source” for the circumstances. Responsible stories come from the Adult Egostate.

Creating Responsible stories is a skill, perhaps a new skill.

It may not have occurred to you that you could, in every circumstance, create a Responsible story showing exactly how you caused, allowed, or, in some conscious or unconscious way, promoted what happened.

You may have failed to listen to your intuition, for example, ignored obvious signals, or hesitated with timing, and in this way landed yourself directly in the situation on purpose, perhaps an unconscious purpose, but still on purpose, even if it was a less than optimal situation.

What could you possibly gain from creating a less than optimal circumstance for yourself? What may have been the benefits for you telling a Victim story instead of a Responsible one?

Consider these: A well-crafted Victim story attracts kind attentions from powerful people, maybe allows you special exceptions, provides acceptable reasons for receiving extra comforts, justifies you taking revenge, undermines frightening intimacy in relationships, and so on. The idea that you could actually be Responsible for creating things the way they turned out in every case may be a very startling perspective.

Here is an example: Cynthia, for instance, could not make the leap to figuring out how to take Responsibility for her father committing suicide when she was only nine years old. This one event, about which she had always felt like a powerless victim, had dominated Cynthia’s life decisions and her relationships to men and to authority figures in general.

When something happens and you make up a story about it, you can choose between making up a Victim story or a Responsible story.

Cynthia wasn’t immediately able to see that her Victim story actually robbed her of Responsible power. Like Cynthia, if you create a Victim story for yourself then you only get the irresponsible power to complain, to blame someone else, to feel resentment, to get revenge, to prove yourself right, or to prove someone else wrong.

When Cynthia created a Responsible story about her father’s suicide, the results were remarkably different. To create the responsible story in this example, Cynthia asked herself “Who picked my parents?” and answered that question by affirming that she did. The choice was hers… as our choices are ours. Suddenly it was clear that she was not a victim at all, but had actually had a part in setting the whole thing up. Through creating a responsible story Cynthia claimed the responsible power of Choice.

When choosing to adopt a Responsible perspective, you get to see how you set things up for yourself all along the way, and then derived benefit from having an outstanding Victim story for all the previous years.

When creating a Responsible story about what happens you vibrate a different sort of power. You have Responsible power, the power of ownership, the power of causing to be, the power of being at source.

Choosing to create Responsible stories about what happens to you creates High Drama and opens the doors to the Extraordinary: Extraordinary Human Relating and Extraordinary Human Creation.

Instead of saying, “I do not have time for this” as a victim, you responsibly say, “I will not make time for this.” Instead of saying, “I can’t do this” as a victim, we responsibly say, “Until now I have always chosen not to do this.”

It soon becomes clear that of the two stories you could create about what happens to you, victim or Responsible, the Responsible story gives you - meaning your Authentically Initiated Adult Egostate (in other words, your Being) more power.

Now we come to an even more interesting question, the Archetypal question: Of the two stories we could create about what happens to us, which story is true?

What a puzzling question!

Which story is true?

Some of us might think that the Victim story is true because what happened to us really did happen to us. We really were victimized. Therefore we really are victims. Those of us dedicated to creating Victim stories tend to live in the domain of the Ordinary.

Some of us think that the responsible story is true because we cannot avoid Responsibility so easily.

Regardless of what happens to you, you cannot deny the fact that it is you who made the choices that got you into those specific circumstances so that these precise things could happen. You could have made other choices and you did not, so you are Responsible for making it happen exactly that way. Those of you who declare and step into Responsible stories tend to live in Extraordinary Human Relationships.

But there remains this nagging question: Which of the two stories is true?

Try answering the question, “Which story is true?” with another question: “How could a story be true?”

Stories are stories.

There is no such thing as a true story. How can a story be true? No matter how convincing a story is, no matter how useful a story is, a story is just a story, a fiction, an editorialized point of view.

Unconsciously made, a story is an interpretation of circumstances slanted to produce a certain meaning that is useful for supporting our Box’s unconscious purpose: Low Drama.

Consciously made, a story can be useful for supporting you Being your Bright Principles in action: High Drama.

In either case, you use stories to create the theatrical performances we call Relating.

You make up a story and then you walk into the universe of conditions created by that story as if the conditions were actually true. You play characters as if your life depended on it, even though you just wrote the script for yourself!

Taking an Archetypal step beyond stories requires tremendous courage.

Can you admit that no matter how grim or how funny your piece of theater is, it is still theater? If so, you free yourself of the confines of any particular story and you become a Storymaker.

Taking actions from the realization that 'I am the storymaker' is part of Radical Responsibility.

Radical Responsibility is based on the tacit, irrefutable understanding that every story is a fiction. Using Radical Responsibility, the storymaker goes ahead and consciously makes stories anyway, not because they are true but because they are useful.

Taking Radical Responsibility for being a storymaker permits you to produce stories where you can behave with kindness, generosity, and compassion with yourself and with others, no matter what the circumstances.

Responsibly observing the stories you make may reveal another pattern: that your Gremlin is controlling your in-house movie projector!

You may have a long history of making stories that include positionalities such as, “I can’t. It is impossible. You are wrong. That is not fair. It is not my fault. You are bad. You are stupid. You hurt me. I hate you. I am better than you. I can get away with this. This does not apply to me. You betrayed me. I don’t trust you. I will get back at you.” and so on.

Radical Responsibility reveals the true intention of these stories: to serve the unconscious Shadow Principles of your Hidden Purpose. Taking responsibility for being the story maker assumes your willingness to find yourself personally responsible for hurting other people and feeling glad about it. This makes responsible self-observation risky. What you see may not be a pretty sight.

Observing the intention of your stories does not mean trying to change your Victim stories to Responsible stories.

This could directly lead you to regarding victim stories as “bad” and responsible stories as “good.”

Victim stories are not “bad.” Victim stories are just victim stories and produce certain known and predictable results, namely Low Drama and Ordinary Human Relationship.

Responsible stories are not “good.” Responsible stories are just responsible stories and produce certain known and predictable results, namely High Drama and Extraordinary Human Relationship.

The whole “good vs. bad” dichotomy is itself an irresponsible Shadow Principle and automatically produces the likes of the Catholic Inquisition and Nazi death camps that typically proceed in our mind and heart during Ordinary Human Relationship.

Replacing Victim stories with Responsible stories is a process that occurs gradually over time through the painful experience of redemption. We are redeemed when objective impersonal remorse about creating Victim stories becomes so intense in our moment-centered experience that it is too painfully ridiculous to continue creating victim stories.

You can slip into Archetypal Relationship reflexively through a shift of context. Included in the shift of context is the awareness that “I am the story maker. I make up no story accidentally. Every story is meaningless, and, every story has a purpose. Either I am not aware of the purpose of my story – in which case I serve unconscious purposes and I enter Ordinary Human Relationship – or I am aware of the purpose of my story, in which case I serve conscious purposes and I enter Extraordinary Human Relationship.”

The context of Archetypal Relationship has such Clarity about story making that you can let all stories pass, as if you were a surfer in the waves. You are the surfer, not the wave. With each wave that comes along you have a choice. The wave does not automatically drag you along. As the surfer you can either ride the wave consciously without thinking that the story is anything but a story, our you can let the wave slide by you and crash purposelessly on the seashore.

Freedom from the meaningfulness of stories does not imply freedom from stories.

There will always be stories. You may as well use stories that let you walk through your day with some bounce in your step. For example, no matter what has happened to you so far in your life, and no matter what previous stories you have so far used, you could make up an entirely new story right now that releases you from being a Victim of all of your previous Victim stories.

Your new story would be a Responsible story. It could go something like this: “I am so grateful for everything that has happened to me so far, no matter how painful it was at the time, because what happened has given me the wisdom to make better choices now.”

The new story is you taking full responsibility for creating your past circumstances just exactly the way they went so that you could learn all that you needed to learn to get exactly here, in this moment.

The new story tells how you start over at this point to create an interesting, challenging, love-filled future, full of experiments in relationship and adventures delivering your full contribution to humanity.

And after you have been in the storyworld for 15 minutes, realize that that is just another (fucking) story world, and then move into storylessness.