How to reframe the stories we tell ourselves

How to reframe the stories we tell ourselves

Living life through invisible scars
In 1980, participants in what became known as the Dartmouth “scar experiment” were told they were taking part in a study about how people respond to facial disfigurement. Makeup artists applied a realistic scar to their faces and showed it to them in a mirror. Afterwards, participants reported being treated differently because of the scar. They described awkwardness, averted eyes and prejudice.

What the participants didn't know is that just before their interviews began, the makeup artist made one final touch-up. Without the participants knowing, the scar was removed completely.

The interviewer was not responding to a scar, because there was no scar. The striking point of Nicola Taylor’s Revved 2026 keynote was that the story participants carried into the room shaped how they interpreted what happened inside it.

Because, as Nicola told the room: “We don’t experience the world as it is. We experience it through the stories we believe.” Stories about ourselves. About what is possible. About who belongs. About how things are supposed to be. And the trouble is, those stories rarely announce themselves as stories. They sound like sensible conclusions.

I’m not experienced enough.
We’ll never compete with the big players.
Our customers wouldn’t pay that.
Investors won’t back a founder who looks like me.
We don’t have the credibility yet.

Repeated often enough, they stop sounding like stories and start sounding like facts. We stop testing them and begin designing around them.

Building from a different story
Almost everything significant Nicola and her husband and co-founder Josh Taylor have built at Tax Traders and Taxi began by questioning a story other people had learned to treat as fact.

When they started Tax Traders, smaller businesses were effectively being told that the flexibility and funding available through tax pooling were not really for them. Nicola and Josh rejected the idea that the size of a business should determine the quality of the options available to it, and built Tax Traders, and later Taxi, from a different premise.

They have also rejected another familiar story: that workplaces must choose between being commercially successful and being deeply human.

Their businesses share profits and financial information with their team, fund ADHD and autism assessments, provide unlimited coaching, counselling and mental-health leave, run school-holiday programmes and employ an in-house nanny.

As Nicola told the room:
"I don't believe that we have a personal self and a work self. We just have self. I don't believe you can separate us from our children, from our families, from our stories, from our land, from our history. We take things personally because we are persons."

Importantly, Nicola’s argument was not that being deeply human sits apart from commercial performance. She believes it has helped create it. Tax Traders and Taxi have grown strongly, remained profitable through major economic disruptions, became market leaders and now manage more than $4 billion in tax payments.

When story and strategy conflict
Nicola distinguished between story, what we believe is possible, and strategy, what we plan to do to produce a result.

A strategy can be perfectly sound. But if the story underneath it says I’m not capable, people don’t want to hear from me, our customers won’t accept this or staying small is safer, that story begins changing how we behave.

We hesitate. Invest less. Pull back sooner. Take fewer risks.

And then the weaker result can appear to prove the original story was right.

Not because our thoughts magically create reality, but because stories change behaviour, and behaviour changes outcomes.

So how do we challenge one?

Nicola shared four steps:

Name the story.
Interrogate the story.
Test the story.
Let the evidence rewrite it.

The aim is not blind optimism. As Nicola put it, it is clearer sight. And our deepest stories rarely change through argument alone. They change when reality begins giving us evidence that the old story is incomplete.

Four steps for challenging a story

1. NAME IT
In the early days of their first business, Nicola and her team realised they had begun to accept their bank’s story that they were complicated, risky and somehow fortunate to be banked at all.

2. INTERROGATE IT
They looked at the evidence they actually had. The business was profitable, growing and backed by a solid track record. The evidence didn’t match the story they had begun carrying about themselves.

3. TEST IT
They went to other banks. Within two weeks they had several banking options in front of them and found themselves sitting in a meeting where a bank was pitching to win their business.

4. LET THE EVIDENCE REWRITE IT
The business itself had not changed in those two weeks. What changed was the story they carried into the room. They began approaching those conversations as a business choosing a banking partner, rather than one hoping to be chosen.

“We may not choose every story we inherit. But we do get to decide which story we will carry forward.”

What would change, for you, for your business and for this country, if you chose a different story?

Connect with Nicola Taylor here
Find out more about how Taxi can help your business here