The sense of story affects you dramatically.

Where is your front door?

What's written on the "welcome mat"?

What's your house like?

Metaphors are useful ways of gaining self-understanding, and are frequently used to ground stories. Stories need to be understandable, and so does self. Bu therein lies the rub: the self is essentially mysterious, and it is what the brain constructs so as to make a way in a chaotic world of experience.

Using language, the brain desperately tries to name and tame emotion and intensity. Using story, the brain manipulates, counter-manipulates and re-manipulates every way to construct stories of experience and reality. Yet the brain is not some kind of super-computer, but more of a living reflection of the body, its history, its habits, its patterns and its semi-conscious promises.

The thing is, the story you've allowed to be constructed and told about yourself to yourself is your own deal.

Very little is cast in stone, and stones themselves are made to roll before they eventually disappear.

To what do you commit your self and why? Lately I've had to challenge my own priorities, and this has been both demolishing and uplifting. Things I've held dear all my life have turned out to be irrelevant and ardent desires have proved to be misleading.

I've learned that language isn't language, it's a disguise for attitude.

So let's try a simple question: how do you receive your self?

When you pay attention to the most important creation you'll ever make, namely your self, what is your point of entry?

I was born randomly, I'll live hoping for better things and die desperately unknowingly yet wishing for heaven?

The attitude you choose determines the kind of words that emerge, and words are not merely words but are less obviously about the glue that puts them together.

When you talk to your self, you're at your own front door.

When I talk to you, I hope to find the door, and not an artificial path.

It's not easy. Authenticity can be hard to do in a world that goes exactly the other way, and knows more about faking sincerity.

The other day I had a conversation with a lady who manages twelve VIP airport lounges, and knows how to communicate with high-end people. She knows the artificial path extremely well, but more, she knows how to access the individual front door immediately. Without realising it, she gave me a first-class demonstration: a few moments of careful, full and courteous attention. This is the kind of attention that leads you to your story.

So I recommend paying attention in this kind of way to your self. If you want dramatic change of the better kind, this is how you do it. Your self is your story, and getting to know how you've told it to yourself helps the cloud of unknowing to lift. For more, please check www.story-clinic.com