What's your superhero origin story?
Talking about narrative identity
My father is a regular reader of this newsletter (hi, Pop!), and he commented after my letter from two weeks ago on calling, vocation, career, and job that I had told the story of how I came to my calling as a teacher before. It’s true, I have to admit, I tell that story a lot. More often than not, I am telling myself some version of it. It is my narrative. It helps me explain to myself how I got here and why, and why I am doing this and not something else, and why I am going to keep doing it, even when faced with other opportunities. In the psychology literature, this story is called a narrative identity.
Dan McAdams and Kate McLean have a very readable, short paper describing the concept of narrative identity that I recommend. You can download it for free here. Here is how they describe it:
Narrative identity reconstructs the autobiographical past and imagines the future in such a way as to provide a person’s life with some degree of unity, purpose, and meaning. Thus, a person’s life story synthesizes episodic memories with envisioned goals, creating a coherent account of identity in time. Through narrative identity, people convey to themselves and to others who they are now, how they came to be, and where they think their lives may be going in the future.
My narrative is the story of a lonely kid who feels like the system is grinding him down until someone chooses to see something in him, to tell him he has potential, and that validation empowers the kid to see something in himself, and helps him to believe in himself despite the system. That kids grows up to be a man who does the same for other people. That’s my narrative. It is what I have come to jokingly call my “superhero origin story”. Every superhero has a narrative about how they came into being. Superman, Batman, Spiderman - we know all of them. Launched from a dying planet as a baby; seeing his parents killed by bad guys; bitten by a radioactive spider and told to use his powers for good. The origin story gives the superhero not only powers but purpose and direction.
I use that phrase, “I want to hear your superhero origin story” when I interview people for my careers research, or even when I am preparing a guest for one of my podcasts. In my research and in my podcasts, I am usually talking to successful people who have achieved quite a lot in their lives. When I ask about their superhero origin story, I am really trying to get at how they retrospectively make meaning out of their life’s journey, professionally and personally. What was it that gave them the drive to excel, and to what end are they working?
I just published my latest Health Leader Forge podcast on Friday. I interviewed Darin Roark, the new president of Wentworth-Douglass Hospital, our local hospital. Darin is a nurse by training, but his first degree was in marketing. He was grinding away at an insurance company, making good progress because of his work ethic, but when he got electrocuted and spent time in the hospital, he realized he wanted to do something different and more meaningful. I would say here that working at an insurance company can be quite meaningful if it is a good fit for you. After his accident, it became clear to Darin that what he was called to do was to be a caregiver, not work in insurance. However, in his narrative, he keeps getting called to not just be a nurse at the bedside, but to be an organizational leader. His narrative gives shape to his journey, and it provides meaning by explaining why he is a nurse who has gone on to lead healthcare organizations, and why he is good at it. He actually comes off as a very humble guy who gives a lot of credit to others for his success, but what is important about his narrative, and it is common across all executive narratives that I have collected, is he has a sense of agency. While he gives credit to others for his success in a healthy way, he also expresses a belief in himself and his ability to affect change not only for himself but for others.
Agency is another really important psychological concept that I will probably talk about at more length another time, but the essential idea is that you believe you have control over your life in a meaningful way. If you have agency, you don’t believe you are just a victim of intersectional forces beyond your control. Instead, you believe you can affect the outcomes in your life. A good narrative identity is a source of empowerment. You may indeed have disadvantages others do not have, but if you have a sense of agency, you believe, and therefore act, as if you can achieve the outcomes you set out to pursue.
McAdams and McLean note in their article that therapists work with their clients to change their narratives:
Therapists work with clients to re-story their lives, often aiming to find more positive and growth-affirming ways to narrate and understand emotionally negative events... Those former patients who currently enjoyed better psychological health tended to narrate heroic stories in which they bravely battled their symptoms and emerged victorious in the end. In these accounts, the theme of personal agency trumped all other explanations in accounting for therapeutic efficacy. Moreover, agency emerged as the key narrative theme in a prospective study of psychotherapy patients who provided brief narrative accounts about the course of their treatment before each of at least 12 therapy sessions. As coded in the succession of narrative accounts, increases in personal agency preceded and predicted improvement in therapy. As patients told stories that increasingly emphasized their ability to control their world and make self-determined decisions, they showed corresponding decreases in symptoms and increases in mental health.
I call the narrative identity the superhero origin story because a good narrative identity is one that helps us see ourselves as having agency. As McAdams and McLean note, it is through helping their clients “re-story” their narratives to help them believe they have agency that precedes them getting better. Successful people have a narrative that gives them agency. It is highly unlikely you will be successful in your life if you don’t believe you have agency.
People like Darin have high levels of agency, but high levels of agency aren’t limited to executives. I recently interviewed David Krempels for the FITW podcast. David was involved in a tragic car accident a few days after he was married. He lost his wife and he suffered a brain injury that cost him his emerging career and continues to be a challenge to him some 30 years later. David maintained a belief that he was called to do something good in the world and to make a difference. When he received a financial settlement, he went on to found what has become the David Krempels Brain Injury Center (KBIC) here in Seacoast New Hampshire. David found his calling through tragedy. His narrative is centered on a phrase he shared with me, “You're not who you were, be who you are.” In other words, even if you have suffered a loss, you can still have a positive narrative identity. And if anyone has a right to say that, it is David.
Most of us don’t need a therapist in order to develop a positive, agentic narrative identity. Human development studies show that we start to really build our narrative identity in adolescence. It is important for the adults in an adolescent’s life to support the development of that identity. As a parent of adult children, I have learned that having supportive adults other than my wife and I in our childrens’ lives was (and is) vitally important for the children to develop positive narrative identities. As adults, we need to help the children around us grow positive narratives. It’s a serious responsibility being a grandparent, aunt or uncle, family friend, but especially being a teacher. Those people have powerful effects on the development of a young person’s narrative identity.
Our narrative identity development doesn’t stop when we emerge from adolescence. It changes throughout our lives. I was joking with David before our interview about how his statement “You're not who you were, be who you are” resonated with me. At 53, I am not who I was. My recent return to training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu has demonstrated that to me. I don’t bounce back the way I did when I was in my 30’s. It’s not just true physically, but emotionally and intellectually. The normal course of life changes us, and what we worried about as emerging adults is not the same thing as what worries us in middle adulthood, and won’t be the same things that worry us as we move into late adulthood. My conversation with Kathy Kram about mentorship and developmental networks really highlights the importance of surrounding ourselves with people who can help us continuously respond to our changing needs and reconfigure our narrative constructively.
I have been telling the story of how I came to want to be a high school English teacher for 35+ years. It changes a bit with time, and of course there is more to my narrative than just my professional goals, but I suspect I’ll still be telling it many years from now (God willing and the creek don’t rise). My narrative gives me a sense of purpose and agency, and helps me make meaning of my life. It helps me appreciate my calling and it helps me shape my vision of where I want to go and who I want to be.
What is your superhero origin story? Does it give you a sense of purpose and agency? I hope so. If not, maybe you need to work on retelling your story. Find someone who believes in you and ask them to help you re-story it. It might be a lie to say that we have complete agency over our lives, but we are also not just ping-pong balls being knocked around by the vicissitudes of fate. At least we have to act as if we have control to be successful and flourish. As Machiavelli said, “I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less.”