Stories are self-fulfilling prophesies (Part II)

If we keep our personal story 'uncontaminated'', we can change the arc of our life

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This is Part II of the series, where I insist we tell our personal stories more positively. The first edition focused on tweaking our stories to make them more ‘redemptive’. (If you missed reading the first part, check it out here).

Once we have crafted our redemptive story, it’s important to keep it that way and not ‘contaminate’ it with negative versions. This edition discusses how to keep them clean from ‘contamination’. And it all starts right here, inside our own heads, by:

1.Managing self-talk

2.Managing context, and

3.Behaving our new story

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1.Managing self-talk

Stop everything you are doing for 10 seconds.

Take three deep breaths.

Put your phone aside.

Close your eyes.

And listen.

There is a voice in your head saying things to you.

What is it saying?

Mine, at this very moment, as I’m writing this, is an endless stream of disconnected thoughts, "my thumb hurts, maybe I should turn the air conditioning down… global warming… breath deeper and concentrate… hope people like this essay, no no it’s not good enough, I am not getting many hits on the website, but look how far I have come, I have another idea for an essay, should I leave this and start that instead? I’m thirsty, but too lazy to get up, I hope I have time to write tomorrow...” on and on and on.

A large chunk of our self-talk is an endless drone of the mundane, and even worse, it’s negative.

This is our monkey mind… of the mindless chatter fame. This voice berates us, creates doubt about what we are doing, and worries about what we did not do. In real life, we would walk away from a boss like this. And yet we listen to this voice in our head 24/7.

We can change our story if we change this voice in our head.

That’s what I did with my stop-start fitness journey.

While I liked working out, I’ve never been able to build a regular fitness habit. I felt guilty and labelled myself lazy. But I changed my story. I started calling myself an athlete, which led to hiring a fitness trainer as a birthday gift for myself.

I worked out regularly, at least for a while after that :-).

In summary, once you have crafted your redemptive story, it’s important to keep the negative feedback loop in your head from becoming your own worst nemesis.

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2. Manage the context

Don’t underestimate context. Unless we are made of grittier stuff like Viktor Frankl, we will mould ourselves into our context.

And we won’t even realize it.

The 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment turned perfectly normal students into psychopaths.

Professor Philip G. Zimbardo, who led these experiments, said: “What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph? These are some of the questions we posed in this dramatic simulation of prison life conducted in 1971 at Stanford University. How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound you. Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress."

Check out the unpalatable details of the experiment here.

Marketing is all about changing the stories in our consumers’ minds. But even this starts by changing the story we tell ourselves about our context.

Here’s an example.

Veolia Environmental Services (Mexico) broke free from its self-limiting context.

Old story— Waste Management

Veolia Environmental Services is a B2B waste removal company. The story they told themselves was that their industry is ‘Unsexy’, and customers only want rational messaging. They had limited their brand world to corporate buyers via faceless, boring transactions.

New story - Social Responsibility

They sponsored Wildlife Photographer of the Year and redefined the brand to stand for progressive and emotionally charged narratives on Wildlife and environment preservation.

This new story resonated not just with corporate buyers but also with authorities, employees and the public at large.

Source: MarketingWeek

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3.Behaving our new story

Behaviors create our new reality. Once we have written our new story, it is important for us to start behaving like it. Otherwise, the new story will live only on paper—like the ambitious annual plans of a brand manager, written to impress the CEO and then left to gather dust in the top left-hand drawer while he launches last year’s marketing programs again.

Mimicry is a great way to start.

A criminal rehabilitation program, Changing Lives Through Literature (CLTL), worked with eight hardened criminals. They would read and discuss various books with the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth professor Robert Waxler.

One man started identifying with Santiago, the fisherman in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. He said that he sometimes felt the need to go back to drugs, but he remembered Santiago’s perseverance and stayed sober.

“It was not an exaggeration to say that a story had caught this student’s attention and perhaps saved his life that day.”

Robert Waxler

This program of changing realities through identification with fictional positive role models was a huge success. Rates of criminal activity declined by 60% among 600 participants, compared to 16% in a control group.

Sometimes, it’s good to shake things up - Tiffany & Co.

Tiffany is rewriting its hundreds-of-years-old story to write a new one for the next hundred years.

Old story— 184-yr iconic prestige jewellery

New story - 184-yr iconic prestige jewellery made young again

Mark Ritson writes about Tiffany in MarketingWeek, “It is more famous for its history than its future”. 

The colour Robin Blue typifies Tiffany & Co. just as bezel screens in iPhones. But new management from LVMH slaughtered their sacred cows to propel Tiffany to the top of the luxury ladder and appeal to Gen Z.

Source: LinkedIn

On 1st April 2021, flagship stores were temporarily painted yellow, to announce the launch of a new product - Yellow Diamonds.

yellow pop-up in Beverly Hills, a sign that the April Fool’s switch to yellow from the brand’s classic robin’s egg blue was more than just a joke.

Marketing experts comment that the move had four immediate impacts.

• First, the shock value led to free press coverage worth billions.

• Second, removing blue reinforced the power of ‘Tiffany Blue’.

• Third, the new launch of a Yellow Diamond product line became unmissable.

• Fourth and most importantly, this strategy strongly signalled the modern, confident and younger brand.

A perfect one-two punch of Pull creating Push for the brand.

The Tiffany Yellow Diamond. Source: Tiffany & Co.

Behaviors get seeded only when they are consistent. So a month later, Tiffany launched a limited-edition sports products collection, which was sold only at their flagship Harajuku (Japan) store.

Traditionalists would call this blasphemy! But then, traditionalists are not 18 years old.

The Tiffany Basketball. Source: Google Images

It doesn't end there.

Then came the outdoor campaign, an in-your-face attempt to appeal to younger consumers. Again, it earned billions of free publicity and got noticed. It built brand appeal amongst a new target audience that hates self-important brands.

Tiffany’s “Not Your Mother’s Tiffany Campaign”. Source: Google Images

The learning? Important to behave like a new person, but strategically and consistently.

The bottom line of all this is the same as we started with: write yourself a better story. The rest will follow.