Why You Should Tell Your Own Story.

"So I stood there, alone and misunderstood. Nobody really knew who I was or what I was going through. Some people say people assume wrongly about them but in my case, they didn't even have a thing to base their assumptions on. Where would they start from? I was a complete mystery and mystery is often associated with the dark and evil realms. I had to fit into one of the many boxes; it's the way humans operate. I had to be either this or that but they were wrong - I was neither. I was me and they could never had known me had I not opened my heart to share with them the secrets of the suspected mystery. Then I didn't have to fit in a box or worry about getting the right tag or label on!"

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What's Your Story?

Every entity that exists has a story to tell and this story could either be told by the entity itself or by others. It has to be one or the other. Stories have been known to have a huge impact on our lives as humans and it's been how information has been passed down through generations.

I think we can all agree that no one can tell a story better than the one who lives/lived the story. The question then is, why do we let others tell our story?

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Controlling the narrative.

Most times, people don't tell your story out of love for you but to highlight your shortcomings and blow them out of proportion.

Imagine the media telling stories of the slums from the comfort of their penthouse. What are they most likely to highlight? It'll most likely be the things they see as being different from what they are used to. The crime, sufferings, and standard of living.

Now imagine this same story being told by a child that has grown over the years in the same slum. Yes, they'll definitely also touch on the poverty and crime but are more likely to also highlight the success stories of the community that only the residents would know; The mothers that push against all odds to make things work, the kids that survive even when the entire universe seemed to be against them.

When you tell your own story, you're able to control the narrative while also putting out the correct information.

So are the slums so dangerous that no one should ever go there? Well, they might be dangerous but there are humans there doing positive things!

Is Africa really a strange and dark continent? No. Even though it's true there are crimes and poverty (like everywhere else), there are many wonderful places that's relatively calm, secure and beautiful.

What's so special about your brand; special enough to make people want to be associated with it? Aren't you just another copycat brand? You don't think so? Then tell us your story!

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Stories Shape Mindsets

You can't blame people for thinking evil (or not so great) of you if the only stories out there about you are stories of evil.

It's why brands spend loads of money on advertising. They take control of the narrative by showing you examples of people that use their products. They also do this via the wordings of their commercials and every interaction you have with them.

When chocolate beverages claim to give you energy and then their commercials show a kid going out to play basketball just after taking the beverage, kids will also want to imitate that, believing that the drink will give them the energy to perform well.

Long before I moved to Lagos, I never rated it as a legitimate state. A quick look at the map of Nigeria would show you how tiny Lagos is in comparison with Ibadan, and Ibadan is only a city while Lagos gets the title of a state. It took me actually living in Lagos and experiencing what it felt like to live there before I acknowledged that Lagos wasn't that tiny after all.

These days, Lagos is being sold as the tech hub of Nigeria but long before now, the only stories of tech in Africa were from Nairobi, Kenya. This didn't mean other countries weren't active, it just meant that Kenya understood the power of storytelling and took it upon themselves to sell their stories to the world.

From afar, when you hear of Los Angeles, you see Hollywood and the rich lifestyle. It took me forever to realize that Compton and Long Beach were actually in LA. Many of the stories never really associated these places as being in the same region. Compton was like a dark world and LA was like just Hollywood.

If you want to control people's perception of you, you should start to tell your story yourself!

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"...and the more I told my story, the more people wanted to listen. Everyone began to see me in the light I should be seen. It was slow but sure. The narrative had been changed and I was now being accepted. I told the world about me."

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