The Stories That Hold Us — and the Futures We Can’t Yet See

There’s a conversation I keep having — with athletes, with leaders, with women navigating the particular pressures that come with both — and it goes something like this:

      I know what I’m capable of. I’ve just never quite believed it.

That gap, between what we know and what we allow ourselves to believe, is where so much potential quietly disappears. And it’s not a character flaw. It’s the result of a story — one we’ve usually been telling for so long we’ve stopped noticing it’s a story at all.

When the Map Becomes the Territory

In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, we have a name for this: cognitive fusion. It’s what happens when we become so entangled with our thoughts that we treat them as facts. Our internal monologue might sound like:

      I’m not the kind of person who leads. 

      I’ve already peaked. 

      Starting over now would be a failure.

These aren’t observations. They’re narratives. But lived from the inside, they feel like reality — they take root and quietly shape every decision we make from there.

I was reminded of this recently in a conversation with futurist Reanna Browne, founder of Work Futures, whose work in strategic foresight explores how the stories we carry about the future shape what we believe is possible in the present. 

These stories are often held in place by assumptions we have stopped noticing: about who we are, what is realistic, what is risky, and what is available to us. They don’t just influence what we believe. They shape what we notice, what we dismiss, and what we consider possible enough to act on. We can’t act toward a future we can’t imagine. And we can’t imagine a future that our current story has ruled out.

The parallel is striking: whether you’re working with the psychology of an individual or the strategy of an organisation, the mechanism is similar. The story running in the background determines what’s possible. 

Of course, individuals and organisations are not changed by stories alone. They are also shaped by habits, histories, systems, incentives and constraints. But the stories running in the background still matter: they influence what people notice, what they dismiss, and what they believe is possible enough to try.

Small Shifts, Not Wholesale Reinvention

One thing that comes up again and again in performance psychology is the instinct to wait for the big moment of change — the breakthrough, the arrival, the obvious turning point. But that’s rarely how meaningful change actually works. We see this in the journeys of professionals who decide to rewrite their own paths.

Consider Dr Nikki Stamp, one of only a handful of female cardiothoracic surgeons in Australia. She achieved what the story said she should — the dream career, the prestigious fellowship, the operating theatre she had wanted since childhood. And then, after two decades, she stepped away from clinical surgery. Not because of a single turning point event but because over time, the story of who she was supposed to be inside that system had stopped fitting who she actually was. 

In her memoir Scrubbed, Dr Stamp describes a medical culture where the greatest challenge wasn’t the medicine — it was surviving the system around it. Leaving wasn’t giving up. It was the most courageous thing she could do. She went on to write, advocate, and reshape the public conversation about women’s health and the healthcare system itself. The story didn’t end. It just changed genre.

Or look at Ash Barty, who left professional tennis in 2014 — as a teenager, overwhelmed by the pressure and travel — and spent nearly two years playing cricket with the Brisbane Heat before returning to the sport. She came back, won three Grand Slams on three different surfaces, reached world number one, and then retired again at 25, this time entirely on her own terms. What strikes most people about Barty is the apparent illogic of walking away — twice. What’s more interesting is what she was actually doing each time: rewriting the story of why she played, and for whom. 

These aren’t stories just about talent. They’re stories about the relationship between a person and their own narrative and the alternative futures they could imagine for themselves.

What Futurists and Psychologists Actually Have in Common

Strategic foresight isn’t about predicting the future. It’s about expanding your capacity to hold multiple possible futures without collapsing into the most familiar or most frightening one. That requires exactly the skills that psychological flexibility training develops: the ability to sit with uncertainty, to notice when you’re fused with a particular version of events, to act from values rather than fear.

Reanna talks about helping people detect the subtle signals already unfolding at the edges of their world. In psychology, we might call this committed action in the direction of values — moving toward what matters even when the path isn’t certain. Neither field asks you to have it figured out. Both ask you to keep noticing the changes around you, self-reflecting, and adjusting your way forward

A Particular Note on Women

The limiting stories women carry — in sport, in leadership, in life — are rarely self-generated. They’re absorbed. From environments that rewarded smallness. From systems that were built around someone else’s model of success. From a culture that still tells female performers, in a hundred quiet ways, that ambition is a negotiation and confidence is a risk.

What this means in practice is that unhooking from a limiting story often isn’t just personal work. It’s also the work of recognising which stories were handed to us, and deciding — consciously, deliberately — whether to keep carrying them.

The women I work with who make the biggest shifts aren’t the ones who suddenly become fearless. They’re the ones who get very clear on what they actually value, and start letting that clarity guide them instead of the noise. That’s not an easy thing to do, but it does make for a more meaningful way of living.

The Story Isn’t Fixed

The most important thing I want to leave you with is simple: the inner narrative your mind whispers to you, particularly late at night or in a moment of vulnerability, isn’t the truth. It is just a story. And not all stories are worth believing.

We do not need to erase them—our oldest and most familiar stories are part of who we are. Instead, we can recontextualise them, hold them more lightly, and place them in service of a future that hasn’t been written yet.

That future is waiting. Whether you’re an athlete at a crossroads, a leader navigating change, or a woman who has spent too long making herself smaller, realise this: the story that’s been running isn’t the only one. It’s just the one you’ve been rehearsing.

What would you rehearse instead?

Dr Jo Mitchell is a clinical and coaching psychologist with a deep curiosity and passion for working with female leaders on sustainable performance and wellbeing. This article was inspired by a conversation at the AIS Accelerate Program with futurist Reanna Browne, founder of Work Futures.