Last week, my husband, daughter, and I watched The Super Mario Bros Movie. As we were getting our six year old daughter ready for bed that night, she said “all movies are really the same. The character always loses two times, and then they win. They’re all the same!” We said “yes! You’re on to something, girl! You are describing The Hero’s Journey.”
According to Wikipedia, the hero’s journey is the "common template of stories that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed.” The Hero’s Journey has been broken down into as many as 17 steps. The steps typically involve the main character being called to action, being hesitant to and initially refusing to answer the call, venturing into the unknown, encountering multiple obstacles, failing, then overcoming a significant challenge, and finally returning home victorious and re-acclimating to a new normal life.
All genres of books and movies have examples that follow this template. Classic ones include The Wizard of Oz, Home Alone, Harry Potter, The Hobbit, The Alchemist, The Lion King, and When Harry Met Sally.
The hero’s journey is an excellent metaphor for each of our own lives and adventures. You can think of the arc of your life as your hero’s journey. You also can think of each new stage of life or new adventure as a separate identifiable hero’s journey.
Here are some ways you can put the concept of the hero’s journey to practical use in your own life:
1. Recognize the call to action. What do you keep considering, pondering, coming back to? What does your gut lead you to? What is your heart’s desire? Recognize the call.
2. Answer the call. Recognize your reluctance or resistance. Typically we resist what we truly desire because of fear. If we answer the call to make a career change, buy a ranch, adopt a child, or take a sabbatical, we must disrupt the status quo. Fear of what other people might think, fear of the financial ramifications, and fear for our personal and emotional safety all keep us back. However, if the call of the essential self is persistent, by all means, answer it.
3. Normalize obstacles and failures. Obstacles and failures are part of the deal! They are a guaranteed part of life, and a necessary part of the hero’s journey. The greater the obstacle, the more devastating the failure, the more epic the hero’s journey. Embrace this. It is human nature to crawl into a fetal position and feel that each of our failures is unique and only happens to us. Obstacles and failure are part of life for every being on this planet.
4. Celebrate your victories. In real life our epic wins are sadly not accompanied by a wall-of-sound album track or a passionate throat kiss. They may look like you walking to your car on a Tuesday after making your last mortgage payment. You sitting all alone in a tiny apartment after finally leaving the jerk. Or standing up from a piano bench doing a happy dance after finally nailing that technical run. Recognize these moments for the great victories they are. Mark them as milestones. Write them down. Reward yourself. Celebrate their anniversaries.
5. Assimilate the new badass version of yourself into your life. It can be tempting to go through a major battle, come out victorious, then fall backwards into a heap and never want to work on those things again. How common is it to hear of someone losing a milestone amount of weight, then a year later gaining a significant amount back? Or to be super disciplined training for a marathon, then never pick up the sneakers again? A longer term, more fulfilling challenge is working to maintain your new fiscally responsible or physically active or patiently loving identity in a sustainable way.
Be the most fabulous protagonist of your own life. Recognize that heroes are only made after responding to the call, enduring significant challenges and epic failures, glorying in definitive victories, then working to maintain a more elevated life.
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