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A world-renown psychologist dishes on how to “redirect” the story you tell yourself.
Today I’ll wrap up a magazine feature that’ll appear next month. To report the piece about an entrepreneur I researched aspects of religion, philosophy, and the DSMs III and IV. Part of that psychological research included Dr. Timothy Wilson’s book, Redirect.
That thing is fascinating.
Wilson’s research concerns how the thoughts we have become the stories we tell ourselves, which become the behaviors we exhibit and the lives we lead. Wilson’s studies find that if you edit people’s thoughts — “story editing” as he calls it — you change people’s lives. A single, half-hour story-editing session helped students at risk of failing pick up their grades and then, years later, make the Dean’s List.
Story editing to Wilson is simply that: the ability to choose to accept the thought as is, delete it entirely, or edit it into something else. The whole book looks at peer-reviewed science on how to do this but I’m sharing its findings here because I applied Wilson’s mental story-editing even as I wrote the actual story.
You should do the same the next time you write a piece on Medium or anywhere else.
