Story Driven: You don't need to compete when you know who you are

by Bernadette Jiwa

McAdams’s theory of narrative identity. He says that we are born actors, begin to develop agency around the age of eight and become authors of our stories in our late teens onwards. McAdams proposes that a person’s identity is formed by integrating life experiences into an internalised, evolving story that provides him or her with a sense of purpose. We make sense of who we are by piecing together stories from our reconstructed past, perceived present and imagined future. As Professor McAdams explains, ‘In personality psychology, what mainly counts when it comes to the idea of a life story is the narrator’s subjective understanding of how he or she came to be the person he or she is becoming—that is, the person’s narrative identity.’