This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hey, hey, how we doing, everybody? One of the most potent sources of human suffering is the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Sometimes these stories are damning and demeaning. You know, I'm a bad person. I'm gross. I'm unworthy, whatever. Sometimes they're self-aggrandizing or victim-oriented. Why does bad stuff always

happen to me? But the good news is you can learn how to revise and upgrade the stories you tell

yourself. In other words, you can change. And today we're going to talk to somebody who has a

playbook for doing this and has run this playbook many times in her own life to great success.

Melissa Fibos is a professor at the University of Iowa and a renowned memoirist who has written

several books, including bodywork and the dry season. We talk about how to audit your personal

narrative with some simple questions, her five-step method for

rewriting unhelpful stories, why community and vulnerability are required for real change.

In other words, why it's much harder to do this work alone. And we talk about Melissa's own

experiences running this playbook, as I said earlier, with regard to her relationships and her

addictions. Just a quick reminder, it's not too late to sign up for the New Year's Meditation

Challenge over on my new app, 10% with Dan Harris. The challenge is free, and it's led by the

renowned teacher Joseph Goldstein. You can sign up for the app at Dan Harris.com.

We'll get started with Melissa Fibos right after this.

Melissa Fibos, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Pleasure.

I've been reading this, as you probably know, I get a prep doc or a preparation doc before every interview.

And you and Marissa Schneiderman, who's our senior producer and she's producing this episode, put together a great document to help prepare me for this conversation.

And I read with interest that you in some ways are not a natural memoirist in that like left to your own devices.

You're not particularly introspective.

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