You Are Not Your Story

What if the story that once helped keep you safe is now keeping you stuck?

Jerry Colonna, author and founder of Reboot, joins 100 Stories for a conversation about radical self-inquiry, childhood, safety, belonging, leadership, compassion, agency, and what it takes to become less controlled by the stories we carry.

Jerry describes the pivotal moment in his own life when, after years of depression and increasing professional success, he chose to stay alive. That decision eventually led him away from investing and toward the work he has now spent decades doing with leaders.

We talk about his famous question:

“How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?”

For Jerry, that question is rooted in curiosity rather than blame.

Why do I keep doing this?

What am I trying to protect?

What need am I trying to meet?

Often, he says, underneath the patterns are three fundamental needs: love, safety, and belonging.

We explore why something that helped an eight-year-old survive can continue shaping an adult decades later, why awareness alone may not be enough to change a pattern, and why compassion may be one of the capacities that allows agency to become action.

Jerry also challenges me on one of the central questions of the Narrative Intelligence Project: How much agency do we really have when culture, identity, family, and systems have helped shape the stories we live by?

His answer brings us back to liberation.

We can examine what happened.

We can understand the story we made from it.

We can recognize why we needed that story.

And we may eventually discover that we no longer have to obey it.

When I ask Jerry to define Narrative Intelligence, he offers a beautifully simple answer:

You are not your story.

The question I’m leaving with:

What story are you still living because it once helped keep you safe—and who might you become if you no longer had to obey it?

Content note: This episode includes discussion of depression and suicide.

More about Jerry Colonna: https://www.reboot.io/

More about Paige Williams: https://paigewilliams.co/

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

The 100 Stories Project: https://100storiesproject.com/