Your Evolutionary Narrative

You do a workshop or performance or whatever – 12 people give you feedback. Eleven people praise you, but ONE PERSON says your work was dismal, ill-informed and boring. 

Which feedback do you think about most?

I often ask this question in workshops, and universally I get the same reply…

The one person who hated it – you obsess about that. Correct?

This is not your personal issue, this is an issue of our species. Human beings are hard-wired to approach life like that – it is part of your evolutional inheritance. In the long distant past, creatures had two things to worry – eating, and not being eaten. Even though times have changed - we still weave these emotions into our personal narrative. We turn one person’s feedback into an imaginary story about our failure - when the real story is about our success…

Why do we do that?!

Tommy Thompson puts it this way: we have a personal narrative and an evolutionary narrative. I think this is an elegant way to think about it. Recently, I have been looking out for factors that influence my behaviour that are part of my evolutionary narrative. We often interpret our movement habits as personal failures – part of a personal narrative - when they are more obviously part of our evolutionary narrative. It is not your fault – everyone is like this. 

Recently, I have been thinking of arms in this way.

In fact, I have been exploring quite a radical way of using my arms, which is having amazing results for both myself and my trainees in Zen BodyChance – which comes out of this evolutionary narrative.

What is that?