Bedtime stories work forever....

My Sweet Niece Ellie. My own heart.

It's a shame you can't remember your earliest interactions with the people who loved you first.
If you could, you would remember a time in your life when you could do no wrong and everything you did was wonderful to someone.
Although you can't remember all the details from then...
You still can use the experience to gain perspective.

Let's do something...
Let's pretend.
Pretend like you can remember what it was like to be three years old.
Your imagination is just getting fired up at that age.
Making story time, one of your favorite things.
For a lot of reasons...
But mostly because you are the center of someone's universe at that age (hopefully).
The people who read to you as a child may not have known it then but they gave you an incredible power.
With their verbal guidance, you are able to live inside the stories you were being told.
When you were 3 years old you were a blank slate of possible outcomes.
That is what made it so easy to place yourself inside of the fantasy stories you were read.
Stories about people talking to dragons and fairies were possible because the realities of the world had not overpowered your imagination with the disappointment of facts yet.
More importantly, at three people were not telling you sad stories or painful stories like the ones we hear about when we are older.
The ones that separate the non-fiction from fiction.

Compare three years old to what people will permissibly allow you to tell them now.
At three, a parent or grandparent reads a bedtime story to an anxious child, leading them permissibly into a world of perfect pretend...
Now, as an adult the same methods work for connecting and working with the people.
The easier it is for people to place themselves in the stories you tell them, the easier your life will be.
Because you have importance and relevance to the agenda of the other person.
Our agendas change with age and responsibility.
What doesn't change is our basic need to be able to visualize ourselves in the possible outcomes as they are presented to us.

When we read to children our agendas are secondary.
The child understanding and enjoying the story comes first.
Everything else takes care of its self.
Adult life is not much different.

Let the stories you tell people connect with them and your agenda will get taken care of too.