{"id":269691,"date":"2025-10-01T17:18:20","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T17:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/269691\/"},"modified":"2025-10-01T17:18:20","modified_gmt":"2025-10-01T17:18:20","slug":"this-simple-exercise-makes-you-the-author-of-your-own-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/269691\/","title":{"rendered":"This Simple Exercise Makes You the Author of Your Own Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elise Loehnen wrote her 2023 bestseller, On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good<\/a>, on the core premise that women are culturally programmed to perform goodness while men are culturally programmed to perform their power. After the book came out, Loehnen was inundated with messages from women who were newly aware of how this programming was ruling their lives, but unsure what they could do about it. Loehnen realized that she didn’t know either, so she teamed up with renowned Enneagram expert and coach Courtney Smith to write a workbook to turn the lessons of On Our Best Behavior into concrete actions. <\/p>\n

Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness: A Process for Reclaiming Your Full Self<\/a> guides readers through a core process that helps readers recognize the stories that are unconsciously ruling their lives and to actively choose more fulfilling narratives. Recently, Loehnen and Smith sat down with Oprah Daily to guide us through an exercise designed to help us recognize the power we unconsciously cede to stories, and the potential we have to rewrite them.<\/p>\n

“We start with this core tool of ‘fact vs. story,’ <\/a>where fact is that which can be recorded on a video camera and story is everything else, because for most of us, when we talk about ‘culture’ or ‘community’ or ‘tradition,’ or ‘that’s just the way that it is’ what we’re doing there is we’re calcifying and codifying stories as immovable and treating them like they’re fact,” Smith explains.<\/p>\n

Watch the exercise demonstration in the video below to kick off the process of regaining control over your life, and the stories you tell about it. <\/p>\n

\"Play\"choosing<\/p>\n

Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness: A Process for Reclaiming Your Full Self<\/p>\n

\"Choosing<\/a>Member Exclusive: Read Our Trending Wellness Stories\"Chevron\"Chevron\"Lettermark\"<\/p>\n

Charley Burlock is the Books Editor at Oprah Daily where she writes, edits, and assigns stories on all things literary. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from NYU, where she also taught undergraduate creative writing. Her work has been featured in the <\/a>Atlanti<\/a>c<\/a>,<\/a> the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>, Hyperallergic, the Apple News Today podcast, and elsewhere<\/a>. You can read her writing at charleyburlock.com.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elise Loehnen wrote her 2023 bestseller, On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":269692,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,2392,140253,1201,171,3181,2875,140252,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-269691","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-content-type-feature","10":"tag-contentid-f574cde0-582b-49c2-a6be-8b24c0854b72","11":"tag-displaytype-standard-article","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-hasproduct-true","14":"tag-locale-us","15":"tag-shorttitle-how-to-break-free-from-limiting-stories","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115300055664918297","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269691\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}