On history of help – A confrontation with personal myths

1. Personal myths and mythology building can insulate you from the realities of your current mental health
2. We are all the heroes of our own stories but make sure you are telling an authentic one
3. Be explicitly aware of your core beliefs, as a foundation of your mental health make sure they give you confidence not regret

---

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. […] Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. […] The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

Barak Obama, July 2013 (In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_didn%27t_build_that)

Have you read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius? It is a “holy text” of the resurgence of Stoicism as a philosophy for life, with the big M as one of the main prophets of the truth, alongside Seneca and Epictetus. Like most other secular texts (e.g. Wealth of Nations, The Selfish Gene) it seems to be more for the quoting than the reading. Given he wrote it for himself, and even if he hadn’t the modern publishing industry and its editors and agents wasn’t exactly thriving in 180 CE, it is no surprise it is in parts long-winded, complicated, and duplicative. I imagine that McKinseyius & Companyium hadn’t invented MECE yet. That said I’d like to start off with Chapter one, where Marcus expresses gratitude for those people in his life who have given him various directions, gifts, role models – a “history of help”.

Personal mythologising

To be aware of your own personal myth and those who you are gracious towards in it is key to developing a rounded perspective on your own mental health and your underlying values and drivers. Feeling that you aren’t the hero of your mythology could be an indicator you’re under a lot of strain, are experiencing lower self-worth/ belief or lack of confidence. Of course, this is a side effect of anxiety and depression as well, but not everything is a mental health indicator (sometimes you’re just a bit run down and sad, that’s the human condition).

Personal myths are often deeply ingrained beliefs about you and the world that may be limiting and hold one back from personal growth. That’s why they are myths, they aren’t necessarily the full truth about who you are and what got you here. A myth provides you with your outlook based on where you do and don’t have agency, what has helped or got in your way, what you can take responsibility for and where you were just bashed around by the winds of fate. You can either have a more holistic “growth mindset” about your personal myth, or it can be the root cause of quite a bit of your suffering. I find that confronting the cognitive dissonance your personal myth can build up to be a challenging but ultimately rewarding process.

How to write your personal myth in a more authentic way

• Write your history of help: A useful framework to understand just where you’ve come from and what scaffolding your life has been built around is thinking about your “history of help”. I found the concept in Marshall Goldsmith’s rather very good book “The Earned Life”. We often underestimate how much support we have received in life and overestimate our own personal qualities and sacrifices for hard-won achievements. More dangerously we can also paint ourselves as succeeding based on our qualities but our failure is someone else’s fault (this links in to an idea called Locus of Control which I’ll come back to in a future post). The concept is simple enough, think of your top 5 proudest achievements, the ones that you really struggled for and take ownership for achieving. Now, who would you thank? Think hard: who provided support, wisdom, coaching, influence on your thinking or expansion of the content? Not an easy piece of homework but I think you’ll find it challenging and fulfilling all at once.

---

• Challenge your beliefs and assumptions: Take some time to reflect on your beliefs and the stories you tell yourself your positioning in the world (your mythology). What are your core beliefs about the world? Do you have a central narrative about your place in the world and how you interact with it? Think about you, society, your relationships and values. If you negate/ remove some beliefs how does that change your outlook and your actions that have shaped where you are? Figuring out which of your core beliefs are truly limiting/ negative vs which are actually valid, sustainable and helpful is not easy and there is a lot to unpack here! Exercising some mindfulness to let the subconscious do some of the heavy lifting here can be helpful, as is looking up some lists of negative core beliefs and use that as something to riff against.

---

• Seek feedback and react with self-care: Discuss with your close friends who have been on your life journey with you, or people who were involved in the achievements you have outlined – how does their account of what you did, and how does your contribution align with your recollections? Indeed, doing the history of help may shatter previously held illusions, another topic of fruitful discussion. The key point here is not engaging in a negative narrative about your metacognition. In normal English that means don’t beat yourself up! Practice giving yourself a break, compassion, and perspective in your self-care. Try not to get angry about being sad or frustrated for feeling regret. You will encounter a number of negative feelings and moods – that is ok, continue to react with self-care in this process and you will strengthen your own. Trust me this is a natural healing process, that will take time to master but the more you practice and go through feedback loops the easier and more powerful this will become.

---

It’s important to remember that confronting personal myths can be difficult and uncomfortable, but I believe it is necessary for personal growth and providing more sustainably strong mental health.

Did you go through any of the exercises above? We’re they helpful? Any revelations or re-evaluations? Or just know you don’t want to read Meditations?

---

Resources (top 2 via Google search):

• Ineffable living
• Inside-out Mastery
• The Daily Stoic
• The Earned Life – Marshall Goldsmith (2022)
• Meditations – Marcus Aurelius (~180 CE)