The Name You Give Yourself

What's possible in your life shifts the moment you give yourself a new name.

For years, I wore the badge of filmmaker—a film director, to be exact. And yes, literally it WAS a badge. Many of them at many film festivals. And those festivals, those screenings—my temples. Scripts—my gospel. The title was my prison, whispering into my ear, drawing invisible walls around my creativity. It carved a neat little box, a shelf for my ambitions, my dreams, and my stifled desires. "Stay here," it said, "this is where the magic happens." And anything that fell outside that cage I wasn’t authorized to pursue because it didn’t fit the “job description;” my sense of self identity. 

Then one day—after seventeen years of doing the work as film director—something cracked. I walked out of Tony Robbins' Date With Destiny, a five-day circus of brutal introspection. And like a brick slamming through glass, it shattered my view of myself.

And I realized: I wasn’t only a film director anymore. I could be something more. Something that wasn’t only a doing, but a being too. And that word was “Storybreaker.”

Yup. Just about now I can hear you loud and clear. “The hell is a Storybreaker?”

I mean, think about it. We're all storytellers. We tell ourselves who we are, what we can do, what we can't. We write the script and follow it blindly, unaware that we’re just repeating a loop, day in, day out. But somewhere—somewhere between the noise, an interruption happens. A crack. A fracture. A flash of possibility where we least expect it. That moment? That’s the moment you break your story. You don’t let it break you. 

It could be a film, it could be a conversation, it could be running into the love of your life, or walking in on your partner sleeping with the neighbor. It could be getting hit by a car breaking your leg, or finding out you just won the lottery. Something happens that shatters your current story and requires you to build a new story. I wanted to provide people experiences that broke one story that thus enabled them to build another hopefully more empowering one. 

Calling myself a Storybreaker gave me permission. Permission to do whatever the f&%$ I wanted. Not just make movies—but create card games, design experiences, build retreats, and rip open the walls of the stories others are too terrified to face. It was and is about finding and breaking the patterns we don’t even realize that are trapping us keeping us away from ourselves. Peeling away at that invariable onion you hear a lot about in self help books. 

So yeah, I took a page from some radical named Jesus—you can't pour new wine into old wineskins. I changed the name I gave myself, and with that, the entire landscape of possibilities cracked open. No more boxes. No more walls. The horizon was mine to redesign.

The point of all this story? Is that the name you give yourself is a tool in creating possibilities as much as it is a tool in creating guidelines and structure. By changing the name I called myself to myself, I changed the possibilities of what my actions could be, of the expressions I wanted to make but feared to. 

And you? What are you still calling yourself? What name have you been suffocating under? Who told you that this was the role you were meant to play? Maybe that name has expired. Maybe it never fit. Maybe it’s served you great up until now but there’s an even better one out there that could serve you better. 

So change it. 

You can stay within the lines. Or you can let your name be the very thing that draws new ones.