Someone at a party asks what you do. In the half-second before you answer, a whole worldview leaks out — and most people, past a certain age, answer in the past tense. “I used to run a department.” “I was in finance.” The sentence is grammatically small and quietly enormous.
This final workshop is about that sentence. Not as spin or positive thinking, but because the story you rehearse about yourself shapes what you then do. Change the tense, and surprisingly much follows.
Four steps, about fifteen minutes.
The tell
Listen to how people this side of sixty introduce themselves and you'll hear the tense do the work. “I was a head teacher.” “I used to be in law.” The achievement is real, but it's been filed under finished. The sentence points backwards, and so, subtly, does the person saying it.
It's understandable — a title was your identity for decades. But a story told entirely in the past tense is a story that's decided the interesting part is over. Your listener believes you. More importantly, so do you.
How did you answer “what do you do?” the last time? Was it a job you no longer hold, in a tense that had already closed? Most of us don't notice we're doing it.
Not just positive thinking
This is where it stops being a nice idea. The psychologist Becca Levy tracked people for decades and found that those with more positive beliefs about their own ageing lived, on average, 7.5 years longer than those with negative ones — an effect larger than you'd get from not smoking. The story you hold about this stage of life is not decoration. It's load-bearing.
The story is load-bearing
Longer life for people with positive age beliefs versus negative ones — a bigger gap than many standard health interventions produce. How you narrate ageing measurably shapes how you age.
And there's a shape to these stories, not just a mood. The narrative psychologist Dan McAdams found that the life stories we tell tend toward one of two arcs — and which one we rehearse changes what we do next.
Which story are you rehearsing?
“It was good, then it ended.”
The best was before. Now is a lesser coda. Nothing much is expected of what's left.
“That led me here, and here is interesting.”
The past feeds the present. The arc still rises. The next chapter is live.
The one-sentence rewrite
Here's the move, and it's small enough to do today. Take your past-tense, title-based answer and rewrite it as a present-tense sentence about something you actually do — however modest, however new. Not the position you held. The verb you're living now.
From a title held to a thing you do
Why it feels fake
The first few times you say the new sentence, it will feel like a borrowed coat — too new, not quite yours, faintly presumptuous. Good. That discomfort is just the gap between the story you've rehearsed for years and the one you've only said out loud a handful of times. Say it anyway. The coat fits by being worn, not by waiting until it feels earned.
A man six months out of a long corporate career still opened every conversation with “I was a regional director.” It was accurate, and it closed every exchange like a door. We rewrote it to the thing he'd quietly started doing: mentoring two younger founders.
“I coach people starting their first business.” He said it felt like a lie for a fortnight — then it just became true.
The story you keep telling about yourself is the one you end up living. So tell it in the present tense.The through-line of this workshop
The tense you answer in reveals — and shapes — whether you think the interesting part is over.
Positive age beliefs are load-bearing: Levy found a 7.5-year difference in lifespan.
Rewrite your line from a past-tense title into a present-tense verb.
It will feel fake at first. Say it anyway — the coat fits by being worn.
Rewrite your line.
Write your current past-tense answer, then rewrite it in the present tense as a thing you do — and say it out loud three times.
Rewrite Your Line
You've completed “The Story You Tell” — and the whole series. Want to go deeper? Read the deeper dive →