Our brains naturally use stories as a hook to hang facts and emotions on, giving us a shortcut for remembering what strikes us as important or significant. Stories can help us connect
with people or organizations that share our values and priorities.
But sometimes the stories we carry around in our heads shape us and mold us in not-so-good ways.

Your personal story is a complex narrative that incorporates all the positive – and negative – events, relationships, and emotions that have impacted how you think about yourself.

But it’s also a lump of Play-Doh that can be reshaped and reformed into something new.

So how can changing our story help us relaunch our work and lives in a new direction?

One of the key elements in a good story is what Hollywood scriptwriters call the inciting incident.

An inciting incident is something unplanned or unexpected that happens in the life of the story’s main character, upsetting that person’s status quo.

How the main character then chooses to respond to that inciting incident shapes how the story unfolds and what adventures, trials, and triumphs the character will experience.

There are certainly times we all have inciting incidents that are totally outside of our control and that change our lives in dramatic and unplanned ways.

But we can also jump-start change in our stories in a bit more controlled way by stepping into discomfort or uncertainty and providing opportunity for something unexpected to happen.

For Charles and me, travel has often been a key component in our inciting incidents.

On several occasions over the years, we’ve planned international trips to Europe and Asia, knowing we’d have to find clients who would hire us to work on photography assignments while we were there if we were going to be able to pay for the trip.

Purchasing non-refundable airline tickets was our way of creating the accountability we needed to go out and find clients who would provide the work we needed to fund the trips.

Twenty years ago, we were both burned out and bored, feeling like we were locked into work that paid relatively well, but had little real impact on the world. We felt like misfits in suburbia, out of sync with the more sustainable lifestyle we wanted. We wanted a life more in touch with the natural world and space to plant a big garden to grow more of our own food.

In our restlessness, we started looking for a piece of rural property to purchase, thinking we would retreat there for weekend camping trips in the short term, and maybe eventually build a
home there.

As so often happens, we start out with one plan and quickly find circumstances change the landscape of possibilities. We fell in love with a 100-acre farm with a 1940s farmhouse in much need of repair. It was way more land and a much bigger investment than we had planned.

We decided to take on the risk of a second mortgage, knowing we’d be pushing ourselves financially to keep our house in the city and purchase the farm. Two years later, the stock photography agency that produced 80 percent of our income was sold unexpectedly and the terrorist attacks on 9/11 sent the economy into a tailspin, resulting in many companies cutting back on marketing and communications budgets. We were quickly faced with the choice of
selling either our house in the city or the farm.

We were by no means ready to make that decision, but we’d set in motion the possibility that we’d come to that crossroads sooner than expected by taking the risk of buying the farm.

Without a great deal of hesitation, we chose to keep the farm, move into a house still in the early stages of renovation and sell our much more comfortable place in town.

That decision resulted in a dramatic shift in our lifestyle, our relationships, and our work. We’ve had adventures we could never have predicted, learned to be more resourceful and self-sufficient, and even added ‘organic farmer’ to our resumes.

None of that would have happened if we hadn’t consciously made the decision to do something that was a bit risky but was a step
in moving us toward a change in lifestyle that we wanted next in our lives.

It’s tempting at times to sit still and hope that forces outside ourselves will force us into changes that will break us free from the rut we’re stuck in. Sometimes that happens. But pursuing the next chapter in your work-life and career will most likely require that you step into uncertainty and risk, shaking loose from the comfort and security that you’ve built.

What inciting incident do you need in your life today to open space for possibility and change to happen? We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.