This is the first clip I extracted from my talk at the Canadian Conference of Small Business & Entrepreneurship (CCSBE) 2025.
I was quite humbled to be invited to speak among researchers, professors, and ecosystem enablers within the Canadian ecosystem.
Many talks throughout the day taught me a lot about how the challenges and opportunities with entrepreneurship of a driver of both economic and holistic well-being inspired a lot of faith that I was on the right track with my work.
I’ve posted the full video here.
This clip is an introduction to narrative identity and reframing, both core to my journey of re-writing my story and something I share enthusiastically with my partners and clients.
Transcript:
Some very interesting studies around narrative identity in terms of what it means for our psychological well-being. And at its core, it’s really the idea there’s— I think a lot of us are familiar with personality tests or categories and types of people. And those can be helpful to students as they’re figuring themselves out. It’s like, hey, maybe you’re an analytical person and you’re destined to be an engineer. It makes sense. You have an engineering sense of being. For others, they are artists and they’re a little bit more creative, a little bit more comfortable with being uncomfortable.
But the idea of narrative identity is that this is malleable. At any point, any one of us can decide to change the story we tell about ourselves. Most of the time when we’re young, that story happens very unconsciously. There’s a story we’ve adopted because our parents, our teachers, our guides, our friends have said good job for some things and bad job for other things. And that’s kind of formed this identity of like, oh, I’m a person who fits into this lane.
I used to be 300 pounds. And my mom used to tell me in order to help make me feel better when I was a kid, because I was always a chubby kid, “Hey, some people are smart and some people are fit and you’re just smart.” And that did help me feel better in the moment. But that limiting belief about myself that I didn’t have the capability to be fit because I was in the category of smart people who aren’t fit stopped me from exploring what I could do to improve my health.
It wasn’t until somebody pointed out to me that when it was kind of this like biohacking, body hacking kind of trend that was going on a couple of years ago, I’m like, oh, this actually is science and there’s smart ways to do this. There are strategies to navigating injury. There are strategies to navigating what I want to eat and when I want to eat it.
And that’s what reframing is. Reframing is the ability to stand back, to take presence in where we are, to notice the environment around us, and notice the different adverse ways we’re affected by some of these stories. And that the reality that some of our failures are not signs of our own limitations, but are really the key things we’re meant to overcome. And the key things we overcome then form us into the thing that we’re supposed to be. If I hadn’t gone through this journey of figuring out who I was, I wouldn’t be here in a room talking about the journey of figuring out who you are.
Social Media Description
The first part of my clips extracted from my talk at the Canadian Conference for Small Business & Entrepreneurship (CCSBE). (Full video coming soon to Youtube).
Here I explore the idea of narrative identity - and how it comes to form our relationship to our environment.
Reframing - the ability to step back and rewrite our narrative to view as failure as the material that forms up the stuff we are here to overcome, supports in regaining our individual agency and stepping into doing what we’ve previously limited ourselves from in the past.
Curious to hear thoughts and perspectives - what limiting beliefs have held you back?
What strategies do you use to reframe your story?