Ranjay Gulati

Others are not tuned into it.

And it turns out this self-narrative that is in our head really shapes how we think about ourselves, how we look at situations.

My mother had a self-narrative.

I'm a self-made woman and no one is going to push me around.

I've worked really incredibly hard to get to where I am and I am not going to let anybody take it away from me.

So what is our self-narrative?

What is important to us?

You know, Suma Jain, the physician down in New Orleans saying, I trained to be a physician to help people.

And now when people need my help in the most critical of moments, I'm going to stay home because I'm too scared.

So, you know, she had to really resource herself with that kind of self-narrative.

Other times, other people give us the narrative, you know, Francis Haugen's parents saying, if not you, then who?

And so you look at some of these people.

They have a narrative about themselves.

Like I am, this is who I am.

This is what I believe in.

They have convictions about some things that they hold dear.

So how do we create a belief system in which there are some fundamental beliefs that we hold dear?

And then we can remind ourselves of them when we have situations of uncertainty.

And people call them values.

They are values.