My American fiancee has a way of smuggling in words and expressions I often use in to her vocabularly. She was talking to a friend when she was referring to someone as having ‘lost the plot’. The expression makes her giggle for some reason, but her friend didn’t know what it meant so she had to explain it.
She then explained that it means to be irrational, to go off of the storyline. It’s like dumping the script and forgetting your lines. We often say it when someone has gone a little crazy.
I thought to myself: I need to lose the plot. Everybody should lose the plot!
Our sense of identity is shaped by what we tell our selves. The stories we feed ourselves. Our own narrative. We live our lives according to our narratives.
“That won’t work for me”
“I couldn’t do that”
“That would too crazy”
“I would never be able to get that off the ground”
“They would never take me for that job, I don’t have the resume for it”
“I don’t think people would be interested in that”
That is the voice of a narrator that is really, really vested into the script it is used to. It doesn’t want to change the storyline. It doesn’t want to go off the stage. It doesn’t want you to change stations.
Its a narrator that fears change…bad…and good. And that is where the problem is.
It’s a limiting voice telling a limiting storyline and all it wants to do is tell it as often as it can. Even if it is sucky storyline.
How many people do you know that repeatedly pontificate how bad their situation is, over and over? And when it’s all done and in the past, they are still going on about it?
Most of us do that to some degree.
Ever notice how some people avoid success? They avoid doing the things that could make them go forward, or worse still, they sabotage themselves (I know I have).
That’s that narrator trying to stick to the old storyline. It doesn’t want a new story. It will cut off new opportunities for growth the moment it can. It will wait to strike at just the right time.
When you’re feeling a little bit off. When you get a bit of a setback. When you are confronted with uncertainty.
It will take the batteries out of your remote control if it can.
It lures you in with the comforting appeal of certainty. Since doing what you were already were doing will bring you the same results. Nothing to fear. Same script. Same storyline. That’s how the narrator wants to hear it.
But you got to be a ruthless director. You are the author of your life. You get to write, direct and play in your own storyline.
It’s important to get regular reminders: change your story. Change your story! Stop being normal. Stop sticking to the script other people would like you to stick to. Stop with the storyline that your inner narrator fears to lose.
It’s so easy to forget that can change our story, just like that. Whenever we want to. We so often fall asleep to what we are accustomed to doing, believing and expecting.
Go with a new storyline. Forget your lines. Go off the script. Do something worthwhile. Do something different.
If you got a project that you know would mean moving into a new storyline, ask yourself why you haven’t started it yet. Loyalty to what?
And that is what it reminded me off, ‘losing the plot’.
There are no oscar awards in life for playing it safe and small.
Thanks for the reminder fiancee of mine.
Let me know how you lost the plot, flipped the script, changed your story and how that worked out for you. Would love to hear it.
Wow! Excellent post. Even though I have just now found your blog, I have to agree with what you said on Twitter… your best post so far. Nice work!
I’m trying to take the improv approach to life. It just seems a lot more fun and more interesting things happen along the way.