Episode 10 - Events vs. The Story You Tell Yourself

Today’s episode is short and sweet—because life threw a few curveballs, and I chose to roll with it. I'm talking about the difference between what actually happens and the story we create around it. Inspired by Dag Hammarskjöld’s own self-awareness and relentless inner work, this episode explores how he used personal triggers not as excuses, but as invitations to grow.

• How can we separate the raw facts from the narrative?
• How do we stop ourselves from spinning into old patterns (like Chicken Little)?
• And how did Dag approach personal development not as punishment, but as purpose?

This one’s a quick listen—but it might shift the lens through which you see your day.

You can find Dag's journal, Markings, here: https://a.co/d/7qrCM3Q

📘 Want to learn more about Dag Hammarskjöld?
Check out my award-winning book Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld
👉 https://a.co/d/gp5fvrk

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💌 Join the Unicorn Dispatch for updates and reflections: https://sara-causey.kit.com/2d8b7742dd 

#DagHammarskjöld #SelfAwareness #InnerWork #MindsetShift #EmotionalIntelligence #PersonalGrowth #DecodingTheUnicorn #SpiritualGrowth #StoryVsEvent #TriggeredButWise #PodcastWisdom #ConsciousLiving #ModernMystic #LegacyAndLeadership #ShortAndPowerful 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Podcast episode, creative living, self-awareness, journaling, morning pages, Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way, self-improvement, emotional triggers, storytelling, catastrophic thinking, flow, inspiration, Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings.

Welcome to the Decoding the Unicorn Podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 10 of decoding the unicorn the podcast Today's episode will be short and sweet, out of necessity, because I feel like I am absolutely slammed to pull the curtain back. I normally record episodes for this podcast on either Sunday or Monday, and for the past few days, I have just been swamped with things that had to be done. It seemed like everything had to occur within some very narrow, compressed window of time, and I would just be sitting there like, this is not how I typically live my life, feeling like I was about ready to tear my hair out. Today is no exception. Unfortunately, it's Monday at about 115 and I'm like, Okay, there's no other time for me to record this episode, process it and upload it. So here we go, flying by the seat of my pants, highly improvising. Had to throw on some headphones. I don't even have access to my normal microphone right now. So if the sound quality here is not the greatest, I do apologize. Things should be, and I'm going to knock on wood, things should be back to normal for next week. At any rate, it definitely inspired today's episode topic, because I was thinking about you've probably heard teachers say before that in life, when something happens, it's typically not the thing itself that has happened. It's the story about the thing. So in other words, we might get really catastrophic, something mildly annoying, or maybe even super irritating, happens to us, and then we start imagining the worst possible scenarios, and we also start imagining that it's just going to be a cascade of failures, a cascade of bad things. And unfortunately, when we do that, it has the tendency to turn into a self fulfilling prophecy, and that's definitely been on my mind as I've had these few days where it was just like, come on, I need a break. Things are just feel hectic and Loony, and I'm just, I'm ready to have some flow, you know? And I definitely feel like when we choose creative living, when we get into an artistic space, and we're living as whatever a painter, a writer, a sculptor, we really cherish those days of flow, whether you're in a studio or you're sitting at your laptop typing away, and it just feels like there's all this inspo. And I feel like I've had tons of inspiration. I've definitely been making a lot of notes for future stories and things that I want to write, but who it's it's really to, I think, transmogrify and transmute all the wackadoodle things that have been going on into something creative. You may have heard comedians say before that it's like taking pain or taking something awkward, taking something embarrassing and then making it into a joke so that everybody can laugh about it. For example, I've heard Ricky Gervais say before that if you can turn something into comedy, if you can find a way to laugh about something, then you can also start to heal. Not everything is a laughing matter, to be clear, but I do think there's some truth to that idea, that if we can make that change, if we can figure out a way to poke fun at something, to laugh at it, and sometimes that thing is ourselves, which is part of what I want to get to in this short episode today, the better just being honest with ourselves. That was something that we really see in Dag's life, especially as we go through his journal, which was posthumously published as markings he took self awareness, knowledge of the self and in a way, I guess in modern parlance, we would say, taking his own inventory, being very clear with himself about what he didn't like in himself, what he did like and what he didn't like, things that he wanted to change, things that he saw in others that annoyed him and then like doing the shadow work to look At. Well, why does that annoy me so much? Clearly, I must have some trait like that myself. Otherwise it would be triggering me the way that it does. He was so ahead of his time in so many ways. And I highly recommend the book markings. And I've just been in the space of like, okay, wait a minute. These things are happening. I don't want to turn into Chicken Little The sky is falling like today. I didn't have time to fix my hair, I didn't have time to put on a lot of makeup. I didn't have time put on a dress shirt. It's like it this is going to have to be go time. Gonna have to throw on a pair of cheap headphones, record it. If somebody complains about the sound, that's their problem. I just have to do it perfect is the enemy of good or good enough, and I have to just get this done. When we start to tell ourselves these stories, this is terrible. It means I'm a failure. I'm not organized enough. I can't believe this. And that happened. Sometimes we just have to let that go. And as I've been working through Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way, one of the things that she talks about quite a bit is living in the moment. Living in the present moment, as opposed to trying to think about what's going to be happening in six months, six years, we think about the pandemic, right? We saw that coming in March of 2020, when it seemed like the world itself was up ended. Surprise, everything's changing on a dime, and it happened so fast. And then even now, we're supposedly post pandemic, but are things completely and totally back to normal? I don't know. I don't I don't really have the answer to that question. But we tell ourselves these stories, we make these events mean something more than they do. So if you're having to have a home repair, maybe you've lost your job. A lot of layoffs are happening right now in the job market, we start to get super catastrophic. Nothing good is ever going to happen again. I'm going to wind up living under a bridge. I'm going to have no money ever again. If I spend this money on a home repair, I'm never going to make any money ever again. And disaster is going to strike. And that's that's not true. We can think about it rationally and say, well, is, Has that happened to us before? No, I know that I'm being Chicken Little. I know that I'm overreacting, but emotionally, it could still be a challenge. And I think that's why it's so good to have a practice like what dag was doing, having a journal, even if you don't necessarily write in it every day, having a journal where you are thinking about your like your character, the things that you like, the things that you don't like, the things that you would like to improve upon, the things that you see in others that you find annoying, that are triggering you. So you can say, hmm, I'm getting triggered by this. There's bound to be a reason why Julia Cameron also talks about this in The Artist's Way, doing what she calls morning pages, where as soon as you get up out of the bed, you hit that notebook and you just start writing. You write for three pages, which can be difficult, to be honest, I've cheated a little bit, and my Notepad is fairly small. I don't have, like, a full size spiral notebook somebody would use in like, a college class. Kids even do that anymore? Probably not. I'm dating myself at some college in the 90s. So they probably just use laptops now for tablets, but I have a smaller notepad because I'm like, I don't know that I could fill three full pages that way, but it has helped me a lot, because you start getting stuff out, you don't have to move through the day with a lot of junk weighing heavily on your mind. You can get that stuff out on paper and then say, all right, like I knew this morning, when I was doing my morning pages, I knew like, today is going to be, oh, it's going to be the kind of day where I'm just grateful at nightfall. I'm grateful when it's all over with, and my head can hit the pillow, and I could just go because during the daytime hours, it's going to be a lot. It's going to be a lot to process, and I already know that it's not going to be fun. See, the phone is beeping, huh? Live television, folks. I forgot to turn the ringer off, and God only knows who that is. I'll have to deal with that in a minute. So I knew that I was going to be going and going and going, and it felt so good to at least get it out on paper, to feel like I have heard my own self speak. I've heard from myself. And having those touch ins with yourself, I think, is huge, and it can also help us to keep from going down that chicken little spiral of telling ourselves these stories, the world is burning. Everything's on fire. Everything's wrong. It'll never be good again. I'll never have a day of calm and chill and flow. I'll never be able to just get in the zone and just write chapter after chapter and feel so good and feel so alive and electric, like those days are coming again. It's just this day, today, right now, feels a little bit and I'm ready for it to be over with. And that's okay. That's totally fine. Life will go on. So to sum up this very brief episode, I really encourage everybody to start a practice like dag have of journaling, looking at things, so that you identify your triggers, and then when something hits against one of those triggers. You can say, wait a minute, I've already thought this through. I know that this is making me feel wonky because, and I also really enjoy what Julia Cameron talks about in The Artist's Way, about doing the morning pages so that before we start to get catastrophic, before we start freaking out, we can get out ahead of it and get all of that stuff purged on paper, and then we don't have to carry it with us through the rest of the day. I appreciate so much you tuning in. I think should be back to normal. I do hope next week, I'm supposed to record a guest episode that I'm super excited about later this week, hopefully that'll hit next week. So thanks for sticking with me through thick and through thin. I do appreciate it very much. If you don't have a copy of Dag's book markings, I highly recommend it. If you're not super familiar with Dag and his legacy, shameless plug, please check out my award winning biography, Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld , and I will see you in the next episode.

Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast and share it with others. We'll see you next time.