Assessment, Story, and Action:
Exploring our Ability to Observe Differently and Change the Future
Introduction
This white paper is a brief explanation of how our perception of reality is always a construct that we build and maintain to help us efficiently make meaning of, and engage in, the world as we see it. This “lens” works well for us, often for a lifetime. But at other times the lens itself can be a problem: our understanding of how the world works, as “True” as it seems to be, may be inadequate to help us understand our world as we evolve to take on more than we thought we ever could. The assumptions that have helped us live in harmony with the world as we “know” it may fall short, or even be counter productive, in serving us when we need to grow. In times of change, this can leave us holding space for two competing realities, a “break” between an old way being in the world and a change we are ready for that requires us to revise our understanding for how the world works. This rupture can leave us stuck with ineffective emotions like resentment, resignation, and anxiety. But, it doesn't have to. When our worldview gets in the way of evolving personal ambition, we can challenge our assumptions, shift our story, and be transformed as we live into new perspectives for what is possible in our future.
Making meaning: the stories we tell ourselves.
We make up stories about everything that happens. These stories help us make sense of things and give us a context in which to place ourselves with the things we see happening. Sometimes the stories we come up with are accurate/useful. Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves are inaccurate but nonetheless functional. Sometimes our stories are neither accurate nor useful. For the sake of continuity, we’re going to include all of these under the umbrella of “making meaning from our observations.” The fact that each of us that makes meaning of our experience of the world suggests that we can and do explore alternative stories about how the world works. That we might do so with awareness is a premise of this paper and a powerful invitation to explore change in your life through coaching.
We live in the stories we tell about the assessments we make
When something happens, we make meaning from it by creating an assessment of it. This judgment allows us to take new information and place it in the context of our values, experiences, preferences, and prejudices. The assessment cues a Story that is in harmony with our way of being in the moment. Remembering that our being (ontology) can be understood through our state of Body, Emotion and Language, we can also say that all Story shows up in Body, Emotion, and Language. (I’ve capitalized Story, Body, Emotion, and Language as ontological concepts in this paper.)
Definition of story
When we tell a Story, it includes the disposition of our Body (our posture, how and where we feel energy in the body), the feelings of Emotion, and the Language of our inner narrative. When we use Language to say to ourselves, "I am lucky and so grateful," we can't do so without also feeling the Emotion of gratitude in that Story. At the same time, gratitude shows up in our Body as a physical disposition. So, when we talk about Story, we are talking about our whole response to being in the Story. Another way to look at it is to say that, instead of us having a Story, the Story we live in often has us. This is because our Story shows up as an ontological state; in our Language (the narrative we tell ourselves), Emotion that reflects our narrative, and the way our Body holds that emotion, e.g., feelings of heaviness or lightness, tightness or expansiveness, the focus of our eyes, our posture, our breathing, etc.
We make meaning so that we can do something
Story, while clearly our own interpretation of how we see things, could not feel more real to us because we make meaning for good. It’s how we make sense of all things we observe in the world. We are meaning makers and, while it is possible to make sense in a way that includes some ambiguity (I think that this thing I just observed could mean either this or that), that’s not how we survived as humans 50,000 years ago, coming out of the trees on the Savanna to match wits with saber-tooth tigers. We evolved to draw conclusions from our observations, sometimes in the blink of an eye, so that we can begin taking action. In our well-practiced ability to find a reality that fits the frame of our perspective, we are similarly quick to know what we’re going to (need to!) do about it. It’s part of the Story.
We may thus say that Story tends to create an indelible commitment to the future, indeed that the Story we choose to live in predicts the future that we see as possible (and keeps us from seeing other possibilities). This happens so fast that it seems like a unitary process, with an inevitable desire to take action for a desired outcome that is held in our assessment. However, there is a chain of causality to consider. Our ability to make different meaning of events in our life (assess differently, decide to take different action) opens up when we acknowledge that the observer we “are” is a variable rather than a fixed point of view. Said otherwise, we can choose to assess differently by choosing to observe differently. This will always open up other possibilities for the future.
Opening ourselves to alternative possibilities
To reiterate, we make this stuff up. An example is to see something we find exceptional, say an attractive urban landscape. We perceive the beauty of economic prosperity, desirable services, and a livable neighborhood. We find our judgment to be not just our truth but also “the Truth.” It is based on our values, experience, preferences, and prejudices. However, someone else may see the same scene and perceive destruction and loss of vital animal habitat. The assessments of these two people result in two different Stories and two different paths toward action. A) How beautiful! This fills me with joy and I feel an opening to make a difference! B) How awful! This makes me angry and I feel an opening to make a difference! The actions that these two people are ready to take are remarkably different. One is going to volunteer to be on the neighborhood arts council and the other is going to join a march for animal rights. Each action is a legitimate response to different observations of the same urban scene. The difference is in the assessment (meaning making) that is made through observation. In this example, our two subjects will be unable to see the other’s point of view while they are in their respective Stories. Consider then how our assessments are both the beginning of what we see and our blind spots. In order to see another Story as equally possible (what the Buddhists call equanimity), we need to be open to alternative assessments.
The OAR Model* as a way to see into our blind spots. Our ability to find ourselves in alternate Stories is rooted in the fact that reality is what we make of it. We can tell ourselves different Stories about the same observation, e.g., what I see fills my heart with hope vs. what I see fills my heart with despair. However, we enable a different Story (and a different future) only when we allow ourselves room for equanimity. The OAR model gives us this power. We know that shifts in our Body, Emotion, or Language allow us to make different meaning of the world as we observe it.
When we shift our Body and hold ourselves differently, our perceptions change (start skipping down the road when you’re in a bad mood and see how you feel!).
We can change our Emotions and get a similar result (challenging persistent moods and deciding we could feel differently).
We can use Language to tell ourselves a different story (shift old narratives, recognizing those that may have served us in the past as current barriers to learning and growth).
Any of these three ontological domains may serve as an entry point to change our perspective. In doing so, we become different observers, framing our Story from an alternative “way of being” (with new possibilities to consider), and see ways that we can take different action for getting the results we want.
Changing our ontology as a means to second order learning
“First-order” learning happens when we take feedback from an unsatisfactory outcome and experiment with different approaches to getting the result we would like—all from within a fixed perspective (an ontologically stable Story). Changing the observer that we are invites a different kind of learning. Ontologically speaking, a fixed frame of reference may be what is keeping us from seeing other possibilities (our blind spot). The power of Body, Emotion, and Language as domains of being gives us the ability to change the observer we are and in doing so, project ourselves into the future with a different perspective, one that may allow us to grow our agency for getting the results we’re looking for. This “second-order” learning often comes in moments of breakthrough and transcendent understanding. When it does, you will often find the change you were looking for, not on a far horizon but rather, in steps you had been looking to take that were close in but hidden from view by an ontologically stable Story. When we change the way we observe the world, we allow ourselves to make different assessments, land ourselves in a different story, and change the future to which the Story will lead.
*For more on the OAR Model and ontological coaching, see these on this site’s Resource Library: