The greatest stories are all about change. What does a story have to do to change someone’s behaviour? Well, we should firstly admit that it is not just the story that changes people, but whole communities talking about stories.
Behind all behaviour patterns and thought patterns lies the “weight of past experience”. That experience determines the way we interpret future experience. Our past calls our future into being. When we are trying to evaluate the potential of a story to change people’s behaviour we should ask the question: How much does it weigh? Simply put – it will only change behaviour if it weighs more than the experience already sustaining that behaviour.
Our brains love pattern. They have been “coded” to find patterns and then cling to them. We are constantly searching for the patterns of life – patterns to make experience predictable and familiar. We cling to these patterns even if they are unpleasant. The woman who gets beaten by her husband, returns to him again and again, because it is familiar and predictable. To change is to risk facing the unpredictable – even if it promises to be more satisfying. Predictability is a stronger provider of psychological security than comfort and safety. (Also, while she is being beaten, someone is showing an “interest” in her. There is physical contact with life.) She may only reach her turning point after a nervous breakdown or near death experience.
During childhood we are quick to learn and experiment with new patterns. We experience the world with a different kind of curious intensity as a child. A lot of the clues to harnessing the process of change lie in our childhoods and their history of play. In most adult’s lives it takes either a lot of courage, pure craziness, a pattern shattering traumatic experience or a religious conversion experience to change patterns after the mid twenties.
When Einstein discovered his famous formula, E=MC², his body shook and he was overcome by a torrent of conflicting and confusing emotion. He was experiencing euphoria, ecstatic that he had made a breakthrough, but at the same time he was flooded with guilt and fear, afraid for what he had broken. He stammered through trembling lips, “Newton, forgive me!” Einstein had not changed the core story of science without experiencing extreme emotional resistance.
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