The late, great, always pithy Jo Carson once said, "Be the hero of your own story." My first entrée into the transformative power of storytelling was when Jo told me that I needed to stop telling all of my stories from the perspective of me being an underdog, and start telling stories as a hero. She looked me straight in the eye and said, "You need to understand that there's power in how you tell your own story."

Plato once said, "The ones who tell the stories rule the world." When we step outside our stories and see ourselves as not just a character, not a hapless victim, we become a role even more powerful than the hero--the narrator. We see that we have immense capacity to shape our own futures, to grapple with and find new meaning from our pasts.