Rewrite your story and transform your life with life scripting

Do you struggle to make positive changes? Life scripting helps you rewrite your life story so you can start living with more purpose and passion. Life scripting is a powerful tool to explore your past, and present, and start to actively design the future you want. Here’s how to create a brighter future.

What is life scripting?

The term Life script comes from Transactional Analysis (Berne, 1972). TA asserted that our life script begins at childhood and is reinforced by parents as a way to strengthen our beliefs and identity.  

Throughout our lives, we form a narrative of who we are. This is an unconscious process and can affect how we shape our self-image. Parents, friends and workplaces can all impact our self-image. We then become a product of our past, environment, and experiences. This can limit our progress and hold us back. 

Life scripting is a powerful psychological tool that allows us to rewrite our lives, reshaping our stories for a more positive future. If we can re-interpret our past, seeing the life lessons from setbacks—we can begin to see our lives in a new light. 

This can help us break free of old patterns and negative ways of thinking, growing more empowering beliefs. This helps us develop resilience and confidence in ourselves.

Why do we need to create a life script?

Stories make up our sense of self, as we are often protagonists in our own lives. Our story shapes our thoughts and actions and the beliefs we tell ourselves. 

Transactional Analysis defines how we see ourselves through a parent-adult-child model. Script messages come from:

- Modelling: Seeing how adults and peers behave

- Attributions: Being told, “you’re just like…”

- Suggestions: Hints and encouragement such as “do your best”

- Injunctions: Demands to do or not do certain actions.

From childhood, we are socialised into acting a certain way depending on the culture, values and upbringing of our parents. This makes life scripting a passive process. If we don’t challenge our story, our lives can be full of sadness, guilt, and setbacks. Becoming attached to these stories makes it hard to change our beliefs and narrative. 

Rewriting our stories as adults can help us reframe negative experiences, letting go of blocked emotions, creating new paths for possibilities. 

Life scripting can also help us process traumatic experiences, and difficult emotions—breaking patterns of negative thinking and self-sabotage. We can also learn to forgive ourselves and others, so we can move forwards.

How to create a life script

Here are five tips for writing a compelling life script:

✍️ Write in the present tense about what you’d love to happen, living it now. 

✍️ Engage the senses: See, hear, smell, taste, and touch what you want. Include areas such as what you’ll look like, how you’ll talk, what is surrounding you, your financial future etc. 

✍️ Make it as real as possible: Feel, believe, and have a sense that it is happening now. 

✍️ Review it daily: Read it as many times as possible to anchor in feelings of excitement, belief, desire. Keep on the lookout for opportunities and clues that can help you step towards this vision. 

✍️ Cause and effect: Come from a place of power, designing what you’d like (instead of blaming, or being ‘at effect’ to circumstances). Take radical responsibility and challenge excuses.

How to challenge negative thoughts patterns

It can sometimes feel impossible to change negative thought patterns that contribute to a limited life script. You may create a vibrant new life script yet there is still negative self-doubt such as, “it isn’t possible.” To challenge negative thought patterns, start to do the following:

〰️ Build mindfulness around what beliefs, words and actions keep you stuck. 

〰️ Get crystal clear about specific negative thoughts and fears. Challenge them by asking if they are 100% accurate. Understand that familiar beliefs often act as a protection from disappointment.

〰️ Do new actions and habits daily. You can ‘manifest’ and dream all you want but for change to happen you have to step into your discomfort zone and take bold new action.

〰️ Accept that failure and setbacks can happen when you are growing. Instead of seeing your situation as either positive or negative, see things in a more neutral way.

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