Your Epic Ordinary Life

Ten truths about telling your story

Maya Angelou’s assertion that “there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you” is hard to hear. We all know how it feels to be muted by others, by ourselves, or by life’s circumstances. It is as if we cannot breathe. On the flip side, there’s no greater joy than releasing our story into the world. Something magical happens when we let our lives speak.

Yet there’s more to it than our joy of telling. Your story does not belong only to you. You owe it to the world. Articulating your story—whether in the family, at work, or in a larger community—is one of the most potent and necessary catalysts for human transformation.

You might have a story about your diabetes, or about a daughter, or about a river, or about a place inside of you that you don’t even know how to name yet.

Looking back on helping hundreds of people tell a story that matters to people they love, while they are still around to enjoy it, has taught me something.

Most of the time, when people “introduce” themselves, they hand over a headline: a role, a company, a city, lines that fit neatly on a screen or a slide. Leaders do it in boardrooms. Elders do it at family gatherings. Meanwhile, the actual story—the early chapters, the near-misses, the ordinary Tuesdays that secretly changed everything—remains unspoken.

Friends miss the origin story. Children never learn what happened before they were born. Colleagues see only the public pages. It all seems efficient and responsible. But there is a quiet cost: an enormous amount of human wisdom disappears.

I am one of the co-founders of Your Epic Ordinary Life, a service that turns life experience into a source of inspiration, connection, and purpose for others. We focus on the stories people are actually living, in all their contradictions, fears, humor, and grace.

This article is about why telling your present story—on purpose—is more powerful than any strategy, course, or framework you could buy, and why doing it in a particular way matters.

Here are ten truths I’ve learned sitting with people at thresholds of change—leaders, parents, elders, grown children, people between chapters—who are ready to gather their lives into a story they can live from, live out, and share.

Which one of the ten truths resonates with you?

1. Your life is not a list.

Most of the tools we use to “capture” a life are list-shaped: résumés, bios, obituaries, LinkedIn profiles, family Christmas letters. Sorted by achievement rather than meaning, they reduce a person to a list of bullet points.

A list can tell us what you did. In the breathing realm where we live, however, far more important things are happening.

Honestly, none of us is interested in what you have accomplished. Whether in your family, your company, or a larger community. Have a list of values you uphold? Not interested. Your good deeds? Not interested. Your bad deeds? Not interested.

Here is what we are interested in instead: what you have done with what life has dealt you.

Tell us how you kept showing up at work while your marriage was falling apart in private, and what the cost was. Tell us about the late nights when you sat in a car outside the hospital, trying to decide whether to go back in. Tell us about the time you told your team the truth when a safer lie was within easy reach. Tell us about the ordinary evenings at the sink, when you chose to unpack your teenager’s half-formed anger instead of scrolling on your phone in avoidance.

That is the fierce heat of ordinary living. And of leading, and of loving. When you speak from there, we will all pull up a chair.

We want to know what courage looks like when your voice shakes in the boardroom or at the kitchen table, how responsibility feels when everyone is looking to you while you feel lost, how love behaves when the prognosis is bad, the deal falls through, or the person you trusted does not come back. However awkwardly, give us the moment, the tension, the small choices you made.

2. Silence is already writing your story for you.

We like to imagine that if we don’t tell our story, it simply remains untold, but that’s not what happens.

If you don’t tell your story, your habits will. Your anxieties will. Other people will. Systems will. You’ll still be living inside a narrative—“I’m the responsible one,” “I’m the one who messed up,” “I’m replaceable,” “I’m the hero who holds everything together,” “I’m an impostor,”—you just won’t have chosen it.

In organizations, silence turns into lore: “She never talks about that time,” “We don’t ask him what really happened.” At home, silence turns into guesses: “I think Grandma was just always like that,” “Dad never really liked to spend time at home.”

When we don’t tell our story, we don’t keep it neutral. We leave it exposed and vulnerable to distortion. It’s inevitable.

Telling your story is not self-indulgence. It’s the stewardship of your life. It is how you take responsibility for the meaning your life will carry forward—into your team, your family, and even your own future decisions.

3. The story decides what is possible.

We think we make decisions based on data: the market, the budget, the calendar.

We stand on those things, but underneath those things, there’s always a story, and the story invariably surprises us with its power.

The story you believe about yourself and your people quietly decides:

• Which risks are you willing to take

• What outcomes can you even imagine

• How much of your actual self do you feel allowed to bring into the room

The same is true at home. The story you hold about your family shapes:

• Which conversations “aren’t worth starting”

• What gets celebrated and what gets quietly buried

• Whether your children inherit a to-do list and advice, or a sense of rootedness and life-giving values

You can redesign your org chart or rewrite your mission statement every year, but if the underlying story doesn’t change, the same dynamics will keep repeating.

Working directly with your story is one of the simplest, most leveraged moves you can make. Change the story, and the field of possibility changes with it.

4. If you feel stuck, you’re stuck inside a story, not a circumstance.

We say, “I’m stuck.”

Stuck in a role. Stuck in a relationship pattern. Stuck between eras of my life.

From the outside, however, the circumstances are rarely as fixed as they feel. There are options, experiments, and conversations that haven’t been considered yet. There are feelings that haven’t been allowed yet.

What is usually stuck is the story:

“This is just who I am.”
“This is more than this organization can do.”
“This is how this family has always been and will be.”

When you work with a good guide, you begin to see the story itself. You notice where it hardened too early. You notice where someone else’s fear became your script. You notice the places where you were braver than you remember.

You realize, “Oh. I’ve been acting as if this chapter were the whole book. It isn’t, and I have a greater story to tell!”

A recognition like that alone can loosen something in you that’s been tight for years.

5. Every few years, life reshapes you, and only a story lets you harvest the transformation.

Most of us quietly become different people every 3–5 years.

We go through a crisis, a move, a birth, a loss, a promotion, a diagnosis, a burnout, a new love—something shifts outside our ability to grasp or even be aware of. You look back and you realize you are not who you were before.

But unless you consciously revisit and re-story your life, you keep operating inside the past narrative.

My favorite poet, David Whyte, sometimes says, “Your inner life is about six years ahead of you.” Fascinating.

This means I might still be making decisions as if I were the younger, more fearful, more ambitious, more wounded, more invincible version of myself—while life is asking something new of me and, with it, offering me what I need to respond.

Telling your story is how you harvest the change life has already grown in you.

You get to say, “I used to be that. Then life happened. Now I am becoming this.” Not as a slogan, but as a hard-won recognition that organizes your choices from now on.

Without that harvest, the fruits of change dissipate. Harvest turns hard work of change into a legacy—for you, and for the people watching you navigate your life.

6. You can’t see your own life clearly without a witness.

There is a reason you can’t see your own face without a mirror.

In the same way, you know how your life feels from the inside. But you don’t necessarily see the patterns, hear the echoes, perceive your quiet courage, notice the humorous, or experience the beauty of the whole.

That’s where a witness comes in.

Here’s the paradoxical truth: You alone are responsible for telling your story, but you cannot tell it alone.

In our work, Your Epic Ordinary Life is not just a project of helping people tell their story. It’s a relationship. It is a series of unhurried conversations where someone like me sits with you—not to interrogate, research, or fix you, but to be present and curious in a way that draws out your story.

Important side note about AI here. It is the ear of the listener that makes the story alive. If you let AI do the witnessing of your story, your story will sound like AI.

A good listener is someone who can hear the story beneath the story. They notice:

• The memory you almost skipped past

• The side remark about “that one person”

• The way your voice shifts

They help you hear your own life in a new key.

This is why trying to do deep story work entirely on your own rarely works. Left by ourselves, we tend to perform or minimize. With an unhurried and unconditional human witness, you don’t have to do that. You don’t decorate or defend. You tell the truth, and the story begins to take shape.

7. Being deeply listened to is itself a turning point.

People often assume the value of a life story lies in the final “product”—the digital record, the audio, the beautiful leather-bound book on the table.

Those things matter. These artifacts become touchstones, life’s reminders, and ways of being in touch with the sacred.

But again and again, I’ve seen that the real threshold is the experience of being listened to in a way most adults almost never are.

No rushing. No multitasking. No angling for a soundbite. Just time, attention, a few good questions, and space for being safely lost, for laughter, for grief, and for surprise.

When someone receives that kind of listening, something shifts:

• They stop trying to make their life sound better than it is.

• They start telling the truth.

• They hear themselves say, out loud, what they’re actually living.

You can feel the room change when that happens. People sit back differently. Their shoulders drop. Their story stops being something that happened to them and starts being something they are in conversation with.

That alone can mark the beginning of a new chapter—before anything is written down.

8. A simple story can transfer more wisdom than years of advice.

Most advice evaporates.

We give our teams long speeches about culture, strategy, and accountability.

We offer our children lectures about work, love, money, faith, and risk.

Some of it sticks. Most of it doesn’t. If you ask almost anyone what has actually shaped them, they will tell you about a story they have heard, witnessed, or been a part of. It will be a story behind a scar, a move, a business decision, a divorce, a reconciliation, a sunrise, or a storm.

Your stories travel within people who hear them. They come back to them in the moment they need them the most, long after your slide deck or your parental advice has been forgotten.

When you gather your life into a clear, honest story, you give people something sturdier than instruction, a lived pattern they can adapt in their own way. Instead of pushing a universal map on them, you gift them with your experience of the landscape.

That’s how wisdom actually moves between generations and teams, not through perfectly engineered messages, but through stories we absorb.

9. Your story is time-sensitive.

Memory is fragile.

Details fade. Voices blur. The “I’ll ask her about that someday” moment never arrives. The “I’ll write it all down when life calms down” season never comes.

Story work has quiet urgency.

We are not promised unlimited time to tell our lives. We will likely not be here next week, month, or year to enjoy the telling—to laugh at the ridiculous parts, to grieve what was lost, to praise what has been found, to share our life with the people who most need to hear it.

At the same time, the process itself does not have to be frantic or complicated.

The way we practice Your Epic Ordinary Life is intentionally simple: a handful of spacious conversations, some careful crafting in your own voice, and a tangible form for your story to live in. There’s no performance, no homework, and no need to “get it right.”

Urgent and unhurried at once.

We don’t know how long we have. But we can choose to use some of that time to let our life speak—to ourselves and to the people who matter to us.

10. You don’t need to be finished.

Some people assume story work is for the end of life—for retirement, or a hospital bed, or a farewell party.

In reality, the most potent storytelling happens in the middle. In succession. In reinvention. In an illness that isn’t terminal but is clarifying. In the messy middle years where you’re too old to pretend you’re just starting and too young to pretend you’re done.

You are not a monument. You are a living, changing human.

Telling your story is a hinge that opens the doors so that you can cross the threshold into your next chapter. It lets you say, “Up to now, this is what my life has been about. From here, this is what matters.”

It gives your family, your team, and your own future self a way to understand the moment, and the chance to be astonished by your own life while you are still in it.

Imagine! You get to enjoy the look on someone’s face when they finally hear the story behind your choices. You get to feel your own respect for the younger you who kept going. You get to bless the parts of yourself you once wished away.

You don’t have to be finished to be worth remembering. You just have to be willing to be seen.

The simplest work, the deepest impact

In a world that constantly tells us to do more, optimize more, effort more, story work can feel almost too simple.

Sit down. Talk. Listen. Share.

But in practice, telling Your Epic Ordinary Life is one of the most gentle yet radical things you can do—for yourself, for the people you love, and for the communities you influence.

If, as you’ve been reading, you’ve thought, I want this for myself, or I wish this existed for my mother, my father, my mentor, my boss, pay attention to that and make it happen in the way you can.

Some part of you already knows that your life is quietly epic, and that bearing the untold story within you would be an agony. The invitation here is to unmute yourself, let your life speak, and trade a little time and vulnerability for becoming whole.