The Invisible Story Running Your Life: Autobiographical Narratives, Identity and Behavioural Change

Conceptual paper and written companion to the TEDx talk "The Invisible Story Running Your Life", delivered by Prof. Dr. Stoyana Natseva at TEDxCNS Pune Youth, an independently organised TED event. The talk was published on the official TEDx Talks YouTube channel on 9 October 2026 (https://youtu.be/AAAARlX_g_E). The paper is not a transcript; it sets out the central idea of the talk in academic form. Drawing on research on narrative identity, autobiographical memory, introspection, decentering and story-editing interventions, the paper describes three properties of personal narratives whose influence on everyday choices may go unnoticed: they are experienced as facts, they select the evidence a person notices, and they work as forecasts that steer behaviour. It examines why insight alone may be insufficient to change such narratives and proposes three conditions that may support change. The author's Internal Autobiographical Map (IAM) is discussed as one structured way of making these narratives visible. The paper states five testable propositions. This version has not undergone peer review.