The traditional Hero’s Journey represents a mythic structure of descent, struggle, victory, understanding, and resurrection bearing new knowledge. It’s the structure we love in epic films. It tosses the sometimes reluctant hero into adventure, chaos and mayhem, struggle and strife toward a valiant end. Finally, through persistence across many challenges, the hero emerges from a victorious final battle that brings a new level of peace and radiance to the world.
But when the film credits roll, we've been trained to step out of that amazing place and back into an everyday world with all its interest stripped away. One that we’ve been told is a dry, mundane, material place, full of boredom, lack and loss. One that's presented as always somehow dissatisfying and short of our expectations at every turn, unless we’re one of “the lucky ones” (wealthy? celebrity? both?) who appear to lead the perfect, glamorous lives.
This is the soul-pain of today's society. It is a world from which the colors have been leached. All in a cardboard gray, we’re supposed to be “realistic”, “rational”, “live within our limits”, “not reach for TOO much” and certainly, never have adventures or see ourselves as heroic beings. Where does this come from? It is the present-day product of the rationalist views of the post-Industrial world, coupled with the intensive mass-marketing insights of the advertising economy. This economy long ago discovered that the things human beings love, crave, and need the most for a thriving life can all be framed as unavailable, repackaged, and sold back to them in the form of things to be purchased or consumed. Advertisers and marketers win - and human beings lose. When everything is framed as cardboard, dissatisfying, and inconvenient (until you buy the "next big thing"), that's a great environment for sales, and a poor one for feeling life is fulfilling.
Within that structure, some of our humanity has been sacrificed along the way. A key sacrifice is the heroism of one's own story. It fell victim to the repackaging -- taking the living water of storytelling, and turning it into the passive entertainment of television. When you are sitting in front of the TV screen, passively consuming entertainment, you're in the grip of this great falsehood that those are exciting lives and yours is uninteresting and mundane. When you are the passive, addicted, dedicated binge-watcher of others’ stories, you are not the life-grasping, fully alive adventurer of your own.
When you are the passive, addicted, dedicated binge-watcher of others’ stories, you are not the life-grasping, fully alive adventurer of your own.
So to tell your own Hero’s Journey story is to take back your own power, and to take back the loss of story that may have made you feel victimized, despairing, and wondering if this is “all there is to life”, no matter where in life you are.
And even if you’re not despairing, it empowers you anyway, to recapture that vivid realization that RIGHT NOW, you are the hero of your own tale.
Begin to be aware of this phenomenon, and of how it trains you to devalue your own life (and watch more shows) at the expense of your own fulfillment and achievement. YOU are the only one who can counteract this. The Hero's Journey is your antidote. Appreciate the value of your Hero's Journey and let this begin to transform your life from "the everyday grind" into something in which you daily see richness, value, and opportunity - your own heroic epic of your one incredible life.
Your Hero's Journey Homework: Begin to see your life as a heroic journey As noted above, the Hero's Journey involves a structure of descent, struggle, victory, understanding, and resurrection bearing new knowledge. Review the life story arc you've written. Where in your life or career did you descend into the underworld? What new knowledge did you bear when you returned from it, back to normalcy? How did this strengthen you, what wisdom did you receive as a result? Could you teach this to others, as a traditional hero's journey individual does once they return?
How will you begin to renew your realization that your life is an epic journey today?
Keep Growing,
Katherine Lieber coaches and trains on self-leadership, limitlessness, energy health, inner power, and healing the wounded professional to recover core vision, joy, and high-powered performance in the workplace. She is the founder of TitaniumBlue Leadership. Be limitless - be the hero in a world that needs you.
© 2019 Katherine R. Lieber & TitaniumBlue Leadership
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