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What is confabulating? It is telling a story based on actual things that happened… But you can make, based on actual things, hundreds of different stories. But alas, most people retell the same boring story… and they are surprised that their life is predictable, boring, and not fun.
Storytelling is part and parcel with humanity. It seems that without stories people shrink, people get narrow, people can boring.
I crave stories.
When I was an architecture student, there was no time to read. It was horrible for me.
Luckily architecture, the actual doing the work doesn’t need all your attention. It is only 5% that is brain-dependent, and the rest of it is manual work. That is what I hated about being an architect, by the way. I like to use my brain, and 5% is not enough for me.
To give you a sense of what 5% is, it’s about the time you spend drinking coffee in a normal business day.
Of course, most jobs are like that… but for a brainy chick like myself, that is not enough. I like the opposite, seven and a half hour intense brain work, and half an hour rest…
Anyway, I digress.
I used to listen to the radio… stories stories and more stories.
And today I read. Not science, not politics, not non-fiction, not business. No. I read stories. And the more story behind the story, the deeper the writer goes the more satisfying for my story-hungry brain.
Why am I talking suddenly about stories?
I know I know, everything has to have a reason. We humans always ask: why? And we make up stories if we must. And we always must.
Why? Because the way most of us sees the world it is sooooo boring, so linear, so no depth, no artistry, no details, no real story, that we need to make up 90% of it.
Here is an example, mine. After all I may want to show some humility, and make fun of myself first… ugh… right?
Anyway. Here is a great example of confabulating.
I was 3 years old. We lived in this apartment, part of a bombed out house… Remember, I was born a little after the second world war. My father went around looking for us a place to live, and found this house that had a police station downstairs, but the upstairs was not quite livable: there was a hole in the roof, and a live bomb in the room that later became our living room. Big room.
Anyway, I was three years old. I was old enough that I knew I was going to get a little sister. I was really happy about it, because in my world I was alone on one side, and everyone was on the other side.
So in my imaginary world I suddenly got this little sister, long red hair, fierce and loyal to me… to us… and we’ll be more than a match to the hostile ‘others’, my brother, my parents… the others… got it?
So one day the phone rang, and I jumped on the sofa to reach for it… It was an ornate sofa with some gold in the fabric, and the back of the seat was shaped to look like a throne… A It was hard stuffed, not bouncy like today’s sofas… but I digress.
The call was for my father. It was to notify him that my sister, Kati was born.
I was over the moon. I won’t be alone any more! I screamed from the top of my little lungs.
But Kati died a few days later. Like me she was a preemie, and she didn’t make it.
I don’t remember the days in between… the ‘camera’ of this story cuts to a night scene: I am in the other livable room of the apartment. The room has this full wall size tapestry curtain of a medieval hunting scene, horses, hunters, hounds, castle, horn blowers, trees, meadows. The trees in the garden cast eerie moving shadows on the curtain make it look alive.
I am in bed, and I am staring at the curtain and the waving shadows of the trees, and I am pondering why I wasn’t taken to my sister’s funeral. My brother was!
I decide that I must have been the one who killed her. How? I think long and hard and remember that I was angry that she died. So I killed her with my anger. Yeah, that is what I was punished for. I am a killer. No, make it a murderer.
I killed with my anger. I felt majestic, powerful, and crushed at the same time. With great power comes great responsibility… I learned that sentence some 40 years later… but it really applied to me then and there.
From thereon I gave myself no permission to get angry, not even frustrated. No, lest I kill someone again.
And every time someone died, and they did, it was me who caused it. No arguing, was the next restriction…
Now, why did I tell you this story?
I want you to see it side by side with a story, the kind of story my students tell.
This is a typical ‘the birth of the anchor to doom‘ story I hear on our webinar. Watch for depth, richness of details, the extensive vocabulary, the entertaining value of the story. You won’t find them.
OK, here is a story.
OK… this little girl liked pretty pictures. One day she was rummaging in her father’s record collection… when her father unexpectedly entered the room and demanded that she hands over the record with the really pretty picture. The little girl refused… and the father, gasp, slapped her across the face.
That’s the story. No depth, no details, no rich words of emotions… no entertainment value.
Result: a boring life. Blaming. Self-justifying. A poor life experience. Also looking outside for stories, experiences, outside of oneself… and still being bored, feel restricted, still not knowing who she is.
By the way, I love my students, but love doesn’t make me blind…
Would her life be better had she made up stories like I did? Maybe a little. So the point is not that life would have been better. It is more like she would have more stories and more interesting stories, that we can work with…
Why? How? Stories to work with?!
OK, let me explain.
Your stories are made up. Not necessarily the part that happened, although if you are looking at my story, a lot of fact-sounding elements were literally made up. Was I lying? No. I filled in the unknown details with my imagination. Does that make me a confabulator? Maybe. Confabulating is the ability and the practice of making up likely stories and make them believable… believe them yourself.
But if you have only one story that your ego bases your whole existence on one story, then my work as an energy person and a transformational coach is more difficult, maybe even impossible:
Your ego will have a hard time letting go of the story.
Because without your story who are you? Right?
My goal in the work on your anchor to doom, your doom story is to unhook you from that doom… But your ego won’t like it.
Here is a story I didn’t make up, I heard in some class… but it’s as good as any story.
You want to redecorate your apartment. You decide that the old furniture must go. (be mindful that the furniture in this story stands for your habits, your mindset, for your doom… whatever you consider yourself thus far.)
You order a whole apartment worth of new furniture. It is due to be delivered tomorrow morning, so you put out the old furniture to the curb to make room for the new.
When five o’clock rolls around, you find that you have no place to put your coffee cup, no place to sit, so you go outside and drag back a coffee table and a chair.
At 7 pm you want to have supper, but same thing… you have to eat on the low coffee table… but it is breaking your back, so you bring in the dining table.
At 8 pm you turn on the TV… but it is sitting on the floor… and watching it from a dining chair is mighty uncomfortable, so you go out and bring in the TV table and an armchair.
Unhooking you from your doom is taking out the old furniture. But watch… you have nothing to replace it, moreover, you have no habit, no talent, no practice to make up a better story. I do, because I’ve made all my stories deep, and detailed, and interesting.
No, you are waiting for furniture delivery… you are waiting for ME to give you a better story.
Nature abhors vacuum. If you don’t have the practice of making up better stories, you’ll continue telling the same story, and <gasp> have the same boring, predictable life where 90% of what you do is trying to avoid your ‘probable, almost certain future’ of the doom.
For the student with the pretty pictures on the record jacket: the probable almost certain future is to be beaten to a pulp… NO MATTER WHAT SHE DOES.
Can you guess what she does in her life?
If you guessed NOTHING, or nothing much, you are right on the money.
And the likelihood that she is going to continue to do that is, unfortunately, very high.
Half of the work of ‘ascension’, or climbing out of the ditch that your life is, the climbing out. The other half, as important as the first, is having a new life to look forward.
And that is where being a poor story teller, having no vocabulary, no imagination, nothing to say, is why you don’t get ahead, why you don’t stay out of the ditch… and why you don’t build a new and grander life for yourself.
So I see that there is an urgent need for you to learn to do crafting likely stories… aka confabulating.
The most fun course I have ever given that teaches this is The Soaring Method: in essence that is a course in confabulation.
It’s all about this. All about expanding your ability to create with words. To furnish your apartment without having to drag back the old worn stories that created the life you know all too well and you came to me to exchange to something better.
Whether it is in the area of money, health, fulfillment, relationships, is immaterial. In every one of those areas what gives you who you are today is the stories you tell. And the stories tell you how to feel, what to do… and if you are here, I can guess that they haven’t given you the life you’d like to have… so you need new and better stories.
I talked to a friend from university the other day. She asked if I remembered that I told her that she was aggressive? Forceful?
I didn’t remember, it was 49 years ago, but I knew she was.
She told me that her mother used to call her Bunny, because when she was three years old she was in the hospital. The children weren’t allowed to leave the ward, and when parents came to visit, they could talk to them only through a small window cut into the door…
The window was was on high, so the children needed a chair to stand on the be face to face with the visiting parent.
She was a little slip of a thing… still is. So she could never climb up the chair, the bigger, stronger children pushed her off.
Her experience of herself, her story was that she was a pushover, a bunny. But when at age 19 I told her that she was aggressive and forceful, she took it on… a new likely story, and as a result she became a very successful architect who is now, in retirement, is the matriarch of her big family, and her word is law.
Yeah, she changed her story, and created a more successful life than where it had been heading.
And, most important, she likes herself. She hated the self that behaved like a weakling…
Now what? Yeah, good question.
If you are any intelligent ( I have my questions about that 🙁 ), you enroll in some course that will teach you to craft likely stories, rich in detail, rich in expressive words, so when you finally decide to pay me to pull your anchor to doom, you’ll have the skill to create a new life, craft it with words…
Ultimately for a human, homo sapiens or human being, for a human everything comes from words. That is the huge contribution of the Hungarian engineer, Margoczi to humanity, and to all of us.
How does it work?
You can’t even see anything, not consciously, until you say something.
Krishnamurti, Osho, and probably many Indian gurus jabbered about living wordlessly… but they were mistaken. There is no life for the wordless.
Until you name it and claim it, you live like an animal. That has been the contribution of Helen Keller… that we can see the before and after… the before the word and the after the word. The 1962 movie, The Miracle Worker is priceless..
From animal to human…
As I said, until you say something, there is nothing. Most things you say are not said consciously. You don’t know you said that. Or you don’t know you heard that. But if you see something, feel something, then you can be 100% sure that there are words there. Maybe they are in the invisible. Maybe they are not your words. But words nevertheless.
All your feelings, all your emotions, all your actions, all your results come from words.
And if you want to change your life, change how you feel, change what you do, change your results, you must become skillful with words.
- Say the same thing, and you’ll remain the same. Guaranteed.
- Say something new, but ordinary and boring… not much can happen.
- Say something inspiring that has the power to replace your original, same old same old words, stories, and you have a chance for a new life… happiness, fulfillment, abundance, love, whatever life has to offer.
A good writer works on the backstory of every character in their work, whether it is in a movie, or in a novel.
Depth.
A story created without depth, without a backstory, isn’t going to hold up and replace your old story.
So you, I am sorry to break it to you: you have to learn the craft of backstory, depth, so your new, created story can stick, and give your new life staying power.
You don’t have to worry, you’ll be in a class of other numbnuts… other beginners, so you have nothing to be afraid of. It is normal that you are beow zero.
Just be afraid of not practicing, not believing me, not believing that without learning the art of story, you will not be able to change your life… even though I may pull your anchor, I may give you all the activators your heart desires… If you don’t do your own work, nothing will change.
Bummer, eh?
This is a long article. Most people will never read it. That immediately disqualifies them from this work, by the way.
Obviously, if your anchor to doom is like the student’s whose story I shared above, and you said: if I do anything, I’ll be beaten to a pulp, you probably won’t do it. Can’t do it. You are too afraid. You won’t even read this article fully. Doing anything fully is the certain way for you to fulfill the doom… so you start and not complete…
And you can see, that unless she creates a new story, using the same exact things that actually happened, she will be stuck in that predicament of never actually finishing anything, never actually producing anything… because she is circling the drain.
Your doom is different, but not different enough… because the essence of the doom is that it is ‘a probable and almost certain future’ that you must avoid at any cost. Death, disgrace, left to die, being called a liar, being a mama’s boy, never amounting to anything… etc.
OK, I will create this course as we go… but it will start with The Soaring Method… a story crafting course, stories that create miracles, true magic. True confabulation. Truth taken to extreme.
You can even buy the recording of the course I had a few years ago.
Or buy the whole new story-crafting course, monthly live sessions, email support… meaning you can email me your crafted stories and get guidance, feedback… so you can self-correct.
If you buy the whole course before Friday, February 5 (OMG, it’s February already!) I’ll let you have the recorded course, so you can get a head start. a $45 value, for free.
The only thing that is left to determine: when to have the monthly live session. My suggestion is Friday. It has to end before 7 pm ET, so the European students can get to bed at a decent time.
Learn crafting stories so you can change your life
