Narrative power
We all have our own personal history.
We experienced parts of it as high points and other parts as difficult and perhaps as low points. . We are all storytellers to give meaning to our lives.
But unlike the many stories we've been told from childhood, our life stories don't have the structure that exists in existing stories.
We as protagonists in our life stories are constantly changing as our experiences are also constantly changing. Telling our stories helps us understand life.
By bundling the multifarious events of our lives into our narratives, we create a story, perhaps like a soap opera, that enables us to understand our lives as a coherent sequential story, coherence of events and to give meaning to our actions.
In this way we develop our narrative identity,
our inner story we make about ourselves and tell ourselves; our personal myth with roles of ourselves and others as heroes, villains, good and evil, success-makers or failures and the many other extremes of virtues that others have taught us in our upbringing and those to which woes are challenged in our present existence.
We make of our past that mattered, stories that set the plot, of challenges we overcame or suffering we endured.
If we want other people to understand us, we share with them our stories, or paragraphs of them. If we want to know who another person is, we ask them to tell us something about themselves; to share a paragraph of their story.
The life story of an individual is not the same as the exhaustive history of everything that happened.
When we create and tell our life story, we make 'narrative choices'.
Our stories tend to focus on the events that really mattered to us; good or bad.
Those "critical incidents" are the experiences to which we are linked through the feelings they have provoked in us and through which they characterize and shape our narrative.
For example, for a person in primary school, the experience of being pushed into the water in the very first swimming lesson, before he knew it, by the swimming teacher and then held above the water with a long iron hook under the chin, _cc781905 -5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_as a critical incident can influence how he as an entrepreneur must learn to take risks and how to deal with the tension that this creates. But equally, that experience could play a role in why he dislikes swimming or distrusts authorities. But perhaps the story of the critical incident in the past does not play a role in the present moment.
People who consciously use the narrative power are better able to engage with others,
can develop better and are more inclined towards moral authorship.
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Through self-examination you can discover how you have developed and used your narrative power?
How do you explore what practical wisdom you have developed and how you tend to incorporate this wisdom into the stories you create and tell,
to deploy?
The stories we tell ourselves and the stories we share with others reveal how we develop our practical wisdom. The stories are a tool to connect our daily experiences with our knowledge, the values and norms that we hold and our drives, our motives why we enthusiastically try to do our job as well as possible every day.
Through our internal and external stories we commute between the different dimensions of knowledge and skills learned, our developed core qualities and the dimensions of our resilience, the values and norms we stand for, what we want with our life and work and
our personality as an opportunity for sustainable successful (work) behavior.
This is how moral force develops through and in our narrative force.
We call that moral authorship.
By shuttling between the internal stories and the external stories, the choices we make every day become more conscious and richer.
We see moral authorship as a narrative (learning) force
to better understand ourselves morally.
By 'joining in' as people professionals in telling stories about your profession, your profession and your work,
together we develop our narrative power and demonstrate our collective practical wisdom,
as the breeding ground of our moral strength.
It is the process of continuously thinking through three questions:
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How do I 'know' (how do I 'know') ?
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Who am I?
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Which relationships am I involved in?
To get a better grip on discovering the answers to the three questions,
we have the concept moral authorship developed.