You’re Not Stuck. You’re Just Telling Yourself aStory That Says You Are.

By Jason Shelfer

Host of The Living Lucky® Podcast | LivingLucky.com

I want to tell you something I’ve told a lot of people sitting across from me in a coaching session, usually somewhere around the point where they’ve just finished explaining why their situation is different. Why the thing they want isn’t possible for them specifically. Why the timing is wrong, the circumstances are wrong, the deck is stacked in a particular way that makes their stuck different from everyone else’s stuck.

I listen. And then I say:

You’re not stuck. You’re telling yourself a story that says you are. And the story feels so true that you’ve stopped looking for the exit.

That usually lands somewhere uncomfortable. Which means it’s usually right.

Where do Stories Come From? Words.

Every belief you hold about yourself and your life started as a sentence. Someone said it out loud — a parent, a teacher, a coach, a friend, an enemy — or you said it to yourself in a moment of pain or disappointment or fear. And somewhere along the way, you stopped questioning it and started living it.

“You’re not the smart one.”
“Money is always going to be a struggle for people like us.”
“You’re too sensitive.”
“Don’t get too big for your britches.”
“You always find a way to mess things up when they’re going well.”
“You’re why we can’t have nice things.”

Sound familiar? Maybe not those exact words. But something in that neighborhood, delivered at just the right — or just the wrong — moment, that lodged itself somewhere deep and quietly started running the show.

Here’s the thing about stories: they are not neutral. They are active. They shape what you notice, what you attempt, what you believe is available to you, and what you decide isn’t worth trying. A story you believe is a story your RAS is constantly finding evidence to support.

The story isn’t describing your life. It’s creating it.

This is where people sometimes push back on me. And I get it, because some things really are facts. So let’s be honest about the difference.

A fact: Jana was paralyzed from the chest down on May 23rd, 1990. That is not a story. That is a fact. It happened. It is real. It does not change.

A story: “This means my life is over.” “My life was great. Now it is completely different.”

Notice what’s embedded in that second story. If life was “great” and it is now “completely different,” the assumption baked in is that different means worse — because the event has already been labeled an “accident,” an “injury,” something horrible. That label shapes the story before the story even begins. And the story feels true. It might feel overwhelmingly, undeniably true in the moment. But it is an interpretation of the fact — not the fact itself. And interpretations can change.

The most important skill in Living Lucky® — and honestly in life — is learning to tell the difference between the two. To look at what is genuinely true and what is a story you’ve been telling yourself about what’s true.

Because you cannot rewrite a fact. But you absolutely can rewrite a story.

And here is the question we always come back to: is there a more empowered version of this story that is also true?

There almost always is.

Jana’s Story About Her Story

The fact of Jana’s accident is unchangeable. May 23rd, 1990. Rural Kansas. Paralyzed from the chest down at 15. Craig Hospital in Colorado. Weeks of crying herself to sleep every night.

Those are facts.

But the story she could have told — and the story many people in her situation have told, understandably and with every reason to — was: “This is what my life is now. Limited. Defined by what I can’t do. A before and an after, and the after is smaller.”

That story would have been understandable. It would have felt completely true. And it would have been wrong.

Because on the night that changed everything — the first night she didn’t cry herself to sleep — Jana encountered a man in the lobby at Craig Hospital who, with eight words, handed her a different story to try on.

“You have no idea how lucky you are.”

And she wrote four words in her journal that helped her start rewriting the whole thing.

The fact didn’t change. The story did. And from that new story, an entirely different life became possible.

Here’s the challenge with your own story: you’ve been living inside it for so long that it doesn’t feel like a story anymore. It feels like reality. It feels like just the way things are. I could almost make a living off how many times people have told me, “but the reality of it is….” or “Let’s be real,…”

This is exactly why we talked in Blog 05 about not being able to read the label from inside the jar. And it’s why journaling is not just a nice habit — it is a tool for getting outside the jar long enough to read it.

When you write your thoughts down — consistently, honestly, by hand — something happens. The thought stops being the air you breathe and becomes a sentence on a page. And a sentence on a page is something you can look at. Something you can question. Something you can decide whether you actually believe or whether you’ve just never challenged.

I’ve watched people write a sentence in their journal and then stare at it like they’ve never seen it before. Like it just walked in from somewhere else. Like they can’t quite believe that’s been running in the background this whole time.

That moment of recognition — that pause — is everything. Because you cannot change a story you cannot see. But the moment you can see it, you have a choice.

Give yourself a chance to get curious Instead of critical. Most people have a critic authoring their story.

When people start to see the story they’ve been telling, the first instinct is often to get critical about it. To turn the awareness into another reason to feel bad about themselves.
“Of course I believe that. Of course I’m the kind of person who does this.”

That’s just a new story replacing the old one. And it’s not more helpful.

What we do at Living Lucky® is get curious. We look at the story the way a good coach looks at it — with genuine interest, not judgment. We ask: where did this come from? What was it trying to protect? What did it cost me to carry it? And most importantly: what becomes possible if I set it down?

The story is not a verdict on who you are. It is information about where you’ve been. And where you’ve been is not where you have to stay.

“Where your attention goes, your life will flow.”

That’s not just a nice phrase. It is a precise description of how the RAS works and how your stories shape your reality. Change what you’re attending to — change the question you’re asking, change the story you’re standing on — and the life that flows from it changes too.

You don’t have to overhaul your entire belief system this morning. You don’t have to figure out where every limiting story came from or spend years working through it all before anything shifts.

You just have to be willing to ask one question.

Is there a more empowered version of this story that is ALSO true?

Not a fantasy version. Not a version that pretends the hard things didn’t happen. A version that is honest about the facts and chooses a different interpretation. A version that finds the exit the old story said wasn’t there.

Write that question at the top of a page. Write the story you’ve been telling underneath it. And then write the more empowered version.

You might be surprised how quickly it comes. Because the more empowered version was always there. You just had a story that said it wasn’t.

The 4-Minute Formula Journal gives you a daily practice for examining the stories you’re telling and replacing them with questions that point your brain toward something better. Available on Amazon and at livinglucky.com.

Your question for today:

“What is one story I’ve been telling myself about why I’m stuck — and what is a more empowered version of that story that is also true?”

Write both versions. By hand. See which one feels more like the person you’re becoming.

Start Living Lucky® — you are not stuck. You are one story away from the exit.