The Power of Narratives and How They Shape Our Reality

The Creative and Destructive Potential of Stories We Tell Ourselves and Others

Photo by Girl with red hat on Unsplash

Narratives are the stories that are told about reality. These narratives paint pictures of how things have been and how things came to be. 

Narratives frame our perspective on how we see reality. Narratives create realities. Narratives have power. 

The problem with this is that these narratives, at times, are acted upon even though they contradict the actual factual events. Reality is built based on the narrative rather than the actual real events of the situation (e.g., data). 

We’ve seen that narratives can be told to either populations or individuals. 

And narratives, as we mentioned, are powerful because they are what build societies. 

For an example of a mass narrative, we have the pandemic. 

• Within the pandemic, the narrative was that this was the deadliest virus ever. 

• The reality was that it had a 99% survivability rate. 

However, we enacted policies based on the narrative versus the actuality of what the data showed¹. 

The truth, however, is when t…