NUBIAN WELLNESS: Keep telling your story

This October marks our accomplishments 10 months deep into the second decade of the 21st century on the Gregorian calendar. Congratulations!

BY TIFFANY MAYES EHOLOR

I wear a necklace every day, and people from around the world often ask about the meaning of the symbol on it. I explain that it is a bird flying forward while its head turned backward — taking an egg from its back and carrying it in its mouth. The egg symbolizes the future. The future is held in the bird’s mouth. It expresses the importance of reaching back to knowledge gained in the past and bringing it into the present in order to make positive progress. The Sankofa bird is a metaphorical symbol straight from Africa.

Why Tell Your Story?

A native son of Africa once told me, “Everybody is somebody.”

The most important question one chooses to seek is their story. “What is my story?” No one person can tell your story better than you. Have you ever visually mapped out your life, from the beginning to now, on paper? What does it look like?

What if I told you that telling your story to others can and will change the world?

Each living being holds a very specific reason as to why they are here.

Let us pump the brakes on judging ourselves or comparing ourselves to others for a change. Let us take a moment and gather our own personal experiences and acknowledge, unapologetically, how powerful our unique individual strengths have led us to this moment we live now.

Mapping your story out with paper and pen is one of the many powerful ways to understand why we are here. There is only one rule: be honest with yourself.

Guidelines to mapping your story

Just get started today.

Grab a piece of paper and a pen and draw a line.

1. The beginning of the line is your earliest memory experienced from the inside out. This memory is the first time you formed an ideal on your own, based on a specific experience that introduced you to your own personal independent voice.
2. The end of your line is your present moment and position you currently are living now.
3. Fill in the “in between” with anything you feel like has influenced you to become who you are today. I like to always work backward. I like to check my personal beliefs by tracking when and where I formed them and why. This personal project is never really finished, so just work on it often.

Benefits of mapping your story:

You may be wondering, What is the point of doing this? Know your story to change your story. You may be thinking to yourself, who has time for that? Five minutes at a time is more than 0. If you don’t make time for yourself, how do you expect anyone else to make time for you? Connecting with oneself is the first step to connecting to one’s next level. Self-evolution is an internal process for everyone.

Sometimes, without even realizing it, humans have a tendency to repeat emotional trauma via everyday habits. Taking a moment to revisit our emotions — by revisiting our most memorable experiences — can give us perspective instantly re-navigating our future strategies. By mapping our personal story, we gain a bird’s-eye view of our lives. This switch in perspective allows us to see both our strengths and challenges. The goal is to become more self-aware today than we were yesterday, and to move forward in self love. Forgiving ourselves first for not knowing better is the key to doing better.

Next steps after mapping your story

This project enables you to tell your story with conviction. I find that when I do this, I usually realize that I’m stronger than I was giving myself credit for. Bird’s-eye perspective is everything! When we acknowledge our emotional responses, and then allow those emotions to subside (healing process), it is only then that we can effectively take the pen and write out our futures.

On purpose for purpose, let us transition into the third decade of the 21st Century by both accepting our own personal story as the powerful gift it is, as well as sharing our own personal story with others to set up future generations for success!

When you heal yourself, you heal others. Together we are stronger — always have been, always will be. Discovering our personal strengths is an action to celebrate every day! Just give it a try, and remember: you are never alone. We have more in common than we realize.