Book excerpt:

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Read the excerpt below, and don't miss Susan Spencer's interview with Nancy Colier on "CBS Sunday Morning" Oct. 4!

Legend has it that Harry Houdini failed at only one publicly performed escape attempt. As the story goes, Houdini accepted an invitation to escape a maximum-security jail cell, in order to display and prove his skills. But despite working all his lock-picking magic for hours, he simply couldn't get it to open. Defeated and exhausted, he collapsed against the cell door only to discover that it swung open on its own. Turns out, it was never locked in the first place. The only place the door was locked was inside his mind; he was a prisoner only in his story of imprisonment.

A few days later, I was eavesdropping at my local diner—my favorite laboratory for human behavior. At the next table, a couple in their midforties were chatting about a movie they'd just seen. As the waiter zoomed by without stopping, the man became visibly agitated. I heard him tell his partner that it was the third time the waiter had "ignored" him and that if he were "a somebody who people respected," then they would already be enjoying their burgers. When the server finally did arrive, sweat bubbling above his lip, I heard this man aggressively asserting that the young man should be less o

Everyone we know (including ourselves) is walking around with a personal movie playing inside their head—a movie they're fully absorbed in and believe is real. If that weren't strange enough, we're also all assuming that our movie is the same movie everyone else is watching, and the only one showing. In a nutshell, our movie is reality. Unfortunately, we're all thinking the same thing.

From the cradle to the grave, we're weaving our perceptions into a cohesive personal storyline. We create a plotline that makes sense of reality and makes the world feel knowable. Our stories help us create a consistent and cohesive self, which we need to function in the world.

Problems arise because we don't realize we're watching a personal movie inside a personal cinema, a movie that no one else is watching. We become the character in the movie and imagine that everyone else is also the character we've scripted them to be. We then respond and react with this assumption, believing that others are operating with the intentions and emotions we've designed for them. The movie playing in our head is not our reality, it's the reality; it's not just what we're seeing, it's what is. And yet, in actual reality, what we've deemed reality is just a bundle of interpretations

From "Narratives: Let Go of the Stories That Keep You Stuck" by Nancy Colier, published by New Harbinger Publications. Copyright © 2026 by Nancy Colier. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Narratives: Let Go of the Stories That Keep You Stuck" by Nancy Colier (New Harbinger Publications), in Trade Paperback and eBook formats, available Nov. 3

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