143 "How do I become the hero of my story?" with Ally Fallon

Have you ever felt like the sidekick in your own story? Wonder what it would take to regain the agency you desire in the narrative of your life? 

Today, we're joined by Ally Fallon. Ally is an award-winning author, book coach, ghostwriter, and Onsite alum. Chatting with Mickenzie and Lindsey, Ally shares the process she developed to help people transform their relationship with themselves by rewriting their lives and becoming the heroes of their own stories. 

Get Ally's new book, Write Your Story, out now! 

In this episode:
4:43 - How Ally surrenders to the realities of her current season 

11:13 - Writing as a vehicle for personal reflection 

17:00 - Tools to access our unconscious brain 

18:31 - Writing for personal reflection vs. public consumption 

24:24 - Making meaning of our lives through story 

29:26 - Why we don't like being the hero of the story 

36:14 - Writing the story of your life 

47:04 - Ally's emotional health practices that keep her centered

Onsite Experience mentioned in this episode:
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Creators and Guests

Host

Hannah Warren

Creative Marketing Director at Onsite

Host

Lindsey Nobles

Vice President of Marketing at Onsite

Host

Mickenzie Vought

Editorial and Community Director at Onsite

Editor

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What is Living Centered Podcast?

So many of us go through life feeling out of touch with ourselves, others, and the world around us. We feel disconnected, overwhelmed, distracted, and uncertain of how to find the clarity, purpose, and direction we so deeply, so authentically, desire. The Living Centered Podcast in an invitation to another way of living.

Every episode, we sit down with mental health experts, artists, and friends for a practical and honest conversation about how to pursue a more centered life—rediscovering, reclaiming, and rooting in who we truly are.

Ally Fallon: 00:06

People live the most miraculous experiences, and they have no idea what they've come through, and they have no idea what a beautiful, remarkable, interesting person they are. And I just thought, like, if people could write that down and see it for themselves, it would change the way they move through the world. It would change the way they interact with the people around them.

Mickenzie Vought: 00:26

Welcome to the Living Center Podcast, a show from the humans at On-site. If you're new to this space and just beginning this journey, we hope these episodes are an encouragement, a resource, and an introduction to a new way of being. If you're well into your journey and perhaps even made a pit stop at On-site's living center program or one of our other experiences, we hope these episodes are a nudge back toward the depth, connection, and authenticity you found. In this series, we sat down with some of our favorite experts and emotional health sojourners to explore the relationships that make up our lives. From our friendships to our families or families of choice to our relationship with ourselves, Part practical resource and part honest storytelling that will have you silently nodding me too.

Mickenzie Vought: 01:12

This podcast was curated with you in mind. Let's dive in. Hello, friends. Welcome to another episode of the Living Centered podcast. Today, we are joined by friend and on-site alum, Ally Fallon, and I absolutely love Ally.

Mickenzie Vought: 01:30

I love this interview. As I shared, I felt like I already knew her. And we just had a really beautiful conversation about the value and the healing practice of writing your story. And I think as we think about it in context to this series we're doing on relationships, I think starting here and getting really intentional about our relationship with ourselves and using writing as a tool to do that and get familiar and really meet and be in relationship with ourselves. I thought it was so beautiful and so timely.

Mickenzie Vought: 01:59

And I absolutely loved getting to chat with Ally.

Lindsey Nobles: 02:01

Yeah. I felt like Ally did a great job of just putting words to her experience.

Ally Fallon: 02:07

Yeah.

Lindsey Nobles: 02:07

And it was an opportunity for both of us to say, yes. Me too. I feel that. I see that. I know that.

Lindsey Nobles: 02:14

And I think even in just the conversation, I started to really grasp the power of putting words with experience and, how it can be a great connector both internally and also externally. So I think everyone will love this conversation with Ally.

Mickenzie Vought: 02:37

Well, Ally, we are so excited to be sitting down with you. Thank you for joining us.

Ally Fallon: 02:42

Yeah. Thanks for having me. This is fun.

Mickenzie Vought: 02:44

Absolutely. So for people who aren't familiar with you or are just kind of like, I I dropped on this call and said, I feel like I know you because I've been following you in Internet for a while. But would you kinda kind of give us a glimpse of what this season of your life looks like?

Ally Fallon: 02:59

Yes. Oh, that's a great question. I'm the mother to 2 toddlers. So I have a 2 and a half year old and a 3 and a half year old. So that pretty much is the orientation of my life.

Ally Fallon: 03:09

There are a lot of other hats that I wear and other things that I do, but, but man, yeah, Charlie and Nella are my 2 little ones and they take up a good portion of my, like, energy, my mental capacity. You know, they're now my 3 and a half year old goes to a little 3 day a week preschool. Mhmm. And Charlie goes to a camp when she's at preschool. So I do, like, pick ups and drop offs and I get, like, little windows of time to do stuff like this without the kids in tow.

Ally Fallon: 03:35

But otherwise, it's a lot of, like, you know, prepping food, cleaning up the food messes, navigating like a lot of chaos with the little ones, and just, you know, like trying to carve out little bits of time for myself. So it's a really wonderful life. It's very, very different than my life was before they were here. But in, you know, 95% really great ways and then 5% kind of frustrating sometimes. Yeah.

Ally Fallon: 04:00

Yes. Yeah.

Lindsey Nobles: 04:01

I think we're we're all kinda in that season.

Ally Fallon: 04:04

Yeah. Just,

Lindsey Nobles: 04:05

like, reconciling the the day to day of life and, like, what we're doing is so different, and then also, like, who we are is so different. Yeah. I feel like on Instagram, you've done it, like, good job of sort of, like, starting to process that some and be honest around the difficulty of it, the beauty Yeah. And the difficulty of it and how you hold it together. What in the season, like, what are you learning about, like, how to hold that?

Lindsey Nobles: 04:36

And then also, like, how has like writing been a tool for you in unearthing it?

Ally Fallon: 04:43

Yeah. I would say the biggest lesson I'm learning is about surrender. Like, the way that I would describe it is, like, surrendering to the season that I'm in because my kids came into the world back to back really close together. And so it was like this tidal wave of change. Like, I literally got married in November of 2019, immediately got pregnant.

Ally Fallon: 05:05

My husband and I The pandemic happened. The shutdown happened in March of 2020. We had my daughter in July. We moved across the country in September, October, then got pregnant pregnant again immediately with Charlie. Then he came and started.

Ally Fallon: 05:18

So it's been this tidal wave of just massive change and evolution. And now where I'm standing 5 years later, I can look back and go like, oh, like, what a beautiful thing that's taken place. But as I've been living it, it has felt like loss in a lot of ways, which I think surprised me because becoming a mother was something that I looked forward to my whole life. And I I became a mother a bit later in life. My daughter was born when I was 37.

Ally Fallon: 05:43

And so, like, I don't know, 10 years later than when a lot of my friends had kids. And so it was like something that I longed for and wanted for so long. And then also my partnership with Matt was something that I waited for for so long. And it's such a sweet and good, sturdy, stable thing. But to have all that change come at me at once felt like loss.

Ally Fallon: 06:03

I mean, it felt I did I didn't expect to feel that way about it. And it it you know, it was the loss of my independence, the loss of autonomy, like a feeling of even just like owning my own brain space, which has a the personality that I am, an introvert, a writer, someone who spent like 90% of my time alone before being married and having kids, it's been an adjustment to be like, oh, I don't even own my own atmosphere in my home. Like, you know, I definitely have a say in what it feels like to be here, but there are all these other little beings who also have a say in what it feels like to be here. And so that's been a huge adjustment. So it's been, for me, the biggest lesson has been about surrendering what was so that I can appreciate what is and not sort of grasping onto the past in a way where I was like, oh, so much better back then because it really wasn't better.

Ally Fallon: 06:54

It was just more comfortable or I had acclimated to it. And and also not reaching toward the future going like, oh, it's gonna be better when the kids are bigger because so while certain logistical things make it easier when the kids are bigger, it's also like, you know, I'm I'm hyper aware that, like, this really tender season is passing away. And so how can I hold both, like, the overwhelm that I do genuinely feel having 2 little ones running around all the time and also go, like, this isn't gonna last forever, so how can I also enjoy it? And I don't have that mastered. I definitely don't have it down.

Ally Fallon: 07:30

But it's been helpful to think of it like this is a surrendering of what was so that I can be present and appreciate what is. And, the more that I've been able to do that and really let go of all the the things that I thought about myself that were 100% true, the more present I've been able to be in the moment. Like, things like, you know, I'm just the kind of person who needs a lot of silence, which may in one way be true about me, but it's not true of the life that I'm living right now. So it's like how can I totally surrender into this the reality of the present moment?

Lindsey Nobles: 08:04

Yeah. I also was realizing, I know that we're both like Enneagram Fours, Ally. We've connected on that before. And Yeah. I think I like this morning, Ben, my 2 year old was having just a lot of feelings because I was gone.

Lindsey Nobles: 08:20

I realized that my tendency to withdraw kind of from my feelings I don't want to engage with. And when you're raising a toddler, and especially for me, like, there's no one else in the house with us, it's like I can't walk away. You know?

Ally Fallon: 08:36

So it's like I have to get

Lindsey Nobles: 08:37

engaging it. And it is just hard to, like, hold the the the space and the feeling, and it's Yes. Nonsensical and, like, I can't reason it away for him or for me, and I have to stay in it. And so that's been a challenge. How have you has that been a challenge for you too?

Lindsey Nobles: 08:56

Like

Ally Fallon: 08:57

Oh, yeah. I think it you you just put words to it that I've not put to it before. But as a 4, the most interesting place in the world to me is my own inner environment. Like and that's what makes me good as a writer, I think, is that, like, I could all day be alone, think my own thoughts, explore my own inner world, and process that and put it on the page for someone else to go like, oh, yeah. I kinda feel that way too, or I think that too.

Ally Fallon: 09:22

Well, like, as a mom of 2 toddlers, I don't have any of that psychic space anymore. If I if I get it, it's because I really intentionally carved it out. And when I do carve it out, it's still a it's still a practice to go like I'm setting my children aside for a minute and like I'm setting them to the side so that I can focus on myself. So yeah. Like the white space and that psychic space that I used to have so much of before, I don't have a lot of it now.

Ally Fallon: 09:46

And so even creativity like, I've talked to a friend of mine who's a songwriter about this because he was he has 2 kids, almost my same my kids, same ages. And I was like, how do you create, you know, with young kids? And he was like, oh, it's totally different. Like, I don't he's like, my strategy used to be and I would have said the same thing. He's like, I used to just be like, put nothing on the calendar, just kind of wander around, see what inspires you, see what catches your attention, do what feels good and then, you know, you hope by the end of the day that a song kind of comes out of that.

Ally Fallon: 10:18

But it's like so hard with 2 little kids to be like, I'm gonna schedule childcare for all day for 10 hours to just wander around and hope that, you know, my creativity comes out of it. I haven't I haven't landed perfectly on that yet. My, like, creative space is much more narrow now than it used to be. So I get hours here and there. I don't mean to make it sound like I don't get any time alone.

Ally Fallon: 10:40

But it's just not the same.

Mickenzie Vought: 10:42

I think even that process you described with your friend who's a songwriter, it reminded me in your book, you talk about the first the way you wrote your first book versus ways you've written other books, like the wandering, the waiting for it to show up in front of you, but then also, like, putting a framework or structure around it. I wonder, in the process of writing how that has helped you in different seasons to process the highs and lows and like, how is that? How do you utilize that tool? And how has that changed even in this season? Yeah.

Mickenzie Vought: 11:09

So I'm just wondering, how has writing been a vehicle for you and where did that start?

Ally Fallon: 11:14

Writing has been a vehicle for me for as long as I can remember. So I remember being as young as like 10. Like I remember being in 4th grade and and just enjoying the process of of taking a story and thinking it up and putting it on paper. And then through middle school and high school which were really hard heavy times for me, there was a lot of trauma from my past that I didn't I wasn't aware that it I I wouldn't have used that word ever until I was like probably 25. I just felt like I was a sad person.

Ally Fallon: 11:44

It's really how I felt. And so and I didn't really feel like a lot of other people understood me. And so I would turn to writing as a way to feel like I was understood somewhere. Like, I was understood on the page because I would write my about my experiences and I would be like, I get that and it just had this sort of feeling of being like, at least I'm seen somewhere. And so I used that as a tool through middle school and high school and college.

Ally Fallon: 12:11

And then when I started going to therapy in college, for the first time, I realized like, oh, well, maybe this is why I'm sad. There are these really hard things that happened to me that I've never talked about before. I hadn't even talked about them in the writing because I don't think they were totally accessible to me in my conscious mind. Yeah. Then I started using writing as a tool in my therapy because my therapist would ask me a question in the session.

Ally Fallon: 12:31

And I think of myself like a little bit of a slow processor where she would ask me a question and I would be like, I don't know. But then I would go home and I would be like writing about it and suddenly I would know the answer to her question. So I would come back to therapy and show her what I had written and be like here's here's you asked me and here's your answer and it'd be like 10 pages. So she's like you do know but this is just one of the ways that you access what you do know. That was like really before I even I was using writing in my career, that was like one of the early earliest access points.

Ally Fallon: 13:04

The the point when I started using writing as a tool to know what I know. Mhmm. And that's a lot of what I teach people now. And through this book, this is what I'm hoping people get out of Write Your Story is that the process of using a framework, having someone else ask you questions and you sit down to the page to answer them will help you know what you already know. It helps you pull up memories or beliefs or patterns that live in your unconscious mind, pull them into your conscious mind so that you can actively view them and assess them and say, like, is this something that I wanna stand by?

Ally Fallon: 13:36

Like, is this this moral that I made of the story, like, the moral of my childhood is like, I'm a bad person. I messed up. I did this. It's like, is that a moral that I wanna stand by? Or do I wanna upgrade that moral?

Ally Fallon: 13:49

And then when you upgrade the moral consciously, I'm not saying it fixes all of your problems immediately, but you really do begin to see tangible shifts. Like when you pull the belief from the unconscious into the conscious and consciously shift it and say, like, sometimes bad things happen to good people. Like, that's an upgrade of the moral. Yeah. Then you start to see tangible shifts in your life that reflect the new definition that you've given to the story.

Ally Fallon: 14:16

So I don't know if that fully answers the question, but I've been using writing for as long as I can remember. And I really started to bring this into my career, like, in 20 when I was I was going through a divorce in 2015 and that was the first time that I really started to, like, go, like, oh, this could be powerful for other people to use this as a tool too.

Mickenzie Vought: 14:35

Mhmm. You're kinda using it yourself. I think that's such a kind framework that your therapist gave you because I think a lot of us who are familiar with therapy but in a really traditional setting, if you're not a verbal processor I mean, I'm someone who has to talk it out before I can realize, I'm such an extrovert. I have to have another person, like, mirroring it, reflecting it to me. That traditional therapy has been good for me in different seasons, but there's something about experiential therapy that allowed for me to pull things that I was like unconscious.

Mickenzie Vought: 17:14

But I think that's a really kind way for your therapist to acknowledge like, hey, you you know what you know, and let's figure out a way for you to access that where I don't think people always know how to access that. And you might have left that therapy session and been like, I don't know what's going on with me if you hadn't had that tool already to write. That's fascinating.

Ally Fallon: 17:34

Yeah. Totally. And there are so many different tools for people to use. Like, I find writing to be a really powerful tool because it is the data shows that when you're putting pen to paper, that is helping you access your unconscious brain, But other tools like yoga has been a really powerful tool for me too to access the unconscious brain and experiential therapy. I've been to a living center program a couple of times and the psychodrama, the act of, like, moving your physical body in a way to represent what you're feeling, it it, like, unlocked, you know, other aspects of my story that I wouldn't have been able to unlock without it.

Ally Fallon: 18:06

So I think what's great about writing is that it's a way to take all of the different tools that are available to you and process everything that's coming up. Because it's like a mirror. When you put the words on the page, you're seeing yourself in in a way that you can't there's no other way to act to get to get that. Like if you think of the act of looking at yourself in the mirror, it'd be like the difference between someone describing you to yourself versus you seeing yourself in the mirror. And writing does that.

Ally Fallon: 18:32

It gives you a way to see your own self in the mirror.

Mickenzie Vought: 18:37

Knowing that Ally's new book is all about equipping people with the tools to write their story, we got in to a really interesting conversation about the idea of writing our stories for ourselves versus writing our stories for public consumption. Maybe you've heard the old adage, you should never speak or write from a wound, but rather from a scar. So it begs the question, at what point do we move beyond writing to process our experience for ourselves to creating something to help others through a similar process? Here's what Ally had to say.

Ally Fallon: 19:10

So the writing for processing, in my opinion, always comes first. In other words, I've worked with people all over the spectrum. Some people who are very successful in the in the realm of in the marketplace. So they're selling a bunch of books that are on the best sellers list. There are authors whose names you would recognize and know and whose books probably sit on your bookshelf.

Ally Fallon: 19:28

And I've also worked with people who are unknown names who also have absolutely miraculous, unbelievable, incredible stories that you would be like you you wouldn't even be able to believe them, but you've probably never heard of these people because they're not household names. So all across that spectrum, what I find is no matter what you're working on, the writing for yourself has to come first because where else would your material come from that you're going to share? Even if you're sharing a business leadership book, how do you know what you know about business or about leadership unless you explore your own experience? You're either exploring your own experience or you're maybe exploring in part the experience of other people but you still do that through the act of writing about it and that's how you decipher what you even want to share. So no matter who you are on that spectrum, the writing for yourself has to come first and that's where the writing to share is born.

Ally Fallon: 20:17

That's where it's birthed. And I know like I've heard Brene Brown say before like she, the rule for her is that she doesn't share about, like a story when she's in it still. Like she doesn't share about it until it's resolved. I don't think that's necessarily like a hard and fast rule. I think that's a rule that works for some people.

Ally Fallon: 20:36

I do think there's power in sharing about something while you're still in it in certain circumstances, if that feels comfortable to you. I just recently shared an Instagram post, about some stuff that I'm still in the middle of, still trying to work out. And the response to that post has been, like, I was nervous to share it because it was really vulnerable, but I the response has been unbelievable. Like, even, like you're not alone. I'm going through the same kind of stuff that you talked about in that post.

Ally Fallon: 21:10

So I think there's value at certain points in sharing your story from the middle of the story. I don't follow a hard and fast rule like that, but I do think about those 2 things differently like writing for personal healing versus writing for consumption or writing for sharing And I think before you share your writing, you have to really understand what it means. It's almost like when you share your writing publicly, you lose control of the narrative. Like, you you give it up for however everybody else wants to. They can put whatever meaning they want onto the narrative and it no longer belongs to you.

Ally Fallon: 21:47

So people can have people can and will, if it's good writing, will have very strong feelings about what you share. They may be positive feelings and they may be negative feelings but, you know, any author will tell you, like, go read your Amazon reviews and you're gonna have lots of 5 star reviews, people saying really nice things about you, and a handful of 1 star reviews of people saying really, really mean, terrible things about you. And that's just kind of the name of the game is that you lose control of the narrative when you decide to share. Like, I thought about this a lot when Prince Harry came out with his memoir because there was such a firestorm of controversy around how much else to tell the story and whatever else. I was thinking, man, it must be tough that I believe every human being deserves the right to tell their story in their own words, in their own way.

Ally Fallon: 22:31

But when you publish your story publicly, you really give up the right to you you allow other people to have an opinion about it that they otherwise wouldn't have the right to have. Like, if I'm a if I'm not a public figure and I'm just writing for healing, I can write the story however I want to write it and I don't ever have to give it up for public consumption. But the minute you give it up for public consumption, you allow people to now have opinions about you and about your life and about your choices and about the way you chose to tell the story. So it just kind of changes form a little bit.

Lindsey Nobles: 23:01

Yeah. It's interesting. I hadn't really thought about it that way, but it's like your your book can end up in places that you won't. And so Yes. You know, dinner table conversation Yep.

Lindsey Nobles: 23:11

Is a catalyst, which is sort of like what you want, but then you realize, like, oh, I'm not there to defend myself. I can't explain the nuance of this. So, yeah, that's a great way of thinking about it.

Ally Fallon: 23:23

You give up the right to defend yourself when you publish your work like that. And I think you're you hit the nail on the head, Lindsay, when you said people think they want that, but they don't actually understand what that means. And I don't even mean to say it. Like, I think publication is a wonderful thing and sharing stories broadly and, you know, I have aspirations too of my book hitting a bestsellers list or, you know, being widely read and recognized. And I think we just like and this could be related to to personal relationships too, we want to be seen.

Ally Fallon: 23:54

We say we want to be seen, but it's also really, really vulnerable to be seen. And so we also protect ourselves and we block that and we, we want it but we don't want it. There's a push pull. And so I think what happens when you, when you start with writing for personal healing is you grow as a person enough to be vulnerable first with yourself. And when you've done that, you know who you are and you stand in such alignment with yourself that you're like, whatever anyone else is gonna say about this in the one star reviews, doesn't touch me.

Ally Fallon: 24:29

Yeah. Because I know what I'm about. I know who I am. I know what my purpose is. I know what I'm here to say.

Ally Fallon: 24:34

And, you know, if I went and read my one star Amazon reviews right now I I would I would feel real bummed for, like, probably an hour or 2. So it's not like you're not human and it doesn't touch you. It's not like I've heard people say, like, you have to get really thick skin. And I don't I don't align with that. Like, I'm not trying to get thick skin so that it doesn't touch me.

Ally Fallon: 24:55

But there is a part of me that knows the person they're talking about is not me. The person they're talking about is themselves.

Mickenzie Vought: 25:02

Yeah. Oh, that's good. That idea of making meaning, I think you talked about that in your book, and I I just kinda wanted to stick there of, like, if we make meaning of this story for ourselves, then when other people interpret it, we can stand strong and, like, the meaning that we found from it. Mhmm. Can you talk about that concept a little bit more?

Mickenzie Vought: 25:19

Because I was kinda fascinated by how writing can help us kinda find some control of situations that feel uncontrollable.

Ally Fallon: 25:26

Yeah. The biggest example from my own life is when I wrote about my divorce.

Mickenzie Vought: 25:31

Mhmm.

Ally Fallon: 25:31

So I went through a divorce in 2015 that at the time, this sounds so stupid to say now, but at the time it felt really public because I had already published a book, and I it was a small community of people, but like a community of engaged people who were kind of tracking our story together. And I was actually working on a book that was supposed to be it was about marriage. And that was the next book for publication. I was working with an agent and publisher. And that book never ever became a thing for obvious reasons.

Ally Fallon: 25:59

But so like as our marriage was falling apart, I was working on this book. And when we split up, I I just, for my own survival, started writing about what was happening with us. And just the things that I was going through and what was taking place, it was like my own way of trying to understand like how did I get here? And what I realized through that experience is that I there were a lot of things I didn't have agency over. Like, I didn't have agency over him and what he was gonna choose to do.

Ally Fallon: 26:27

I didn't have agency over what he was gonna say to other people, to our friends, on social media, whatever. I didn't have agency over, you know, like I lost my dog in that process. That was really heartbreaking. There were just things that happened that were so heartbreaking, but I had agency over how I was gonna tell the story. Mhmm.

Ally Fallon: 26:42

And what I found is that if I could tell the story the way I wanted to tell it where I was the hero of the story, where I hero story always has a transformation. So it was like, this is the woman that I'm becoming through this experience. I'm gonna own this experience and make it what I I want it and need it to be. When I could do that, the I didn't think I was gonna publish the that writing at the time I was doing it, but I was later able to publish it. And the book is called Indestructible because what I realized is that the the part of me who has agency over that is indestructible.

Ally Fallon: 27:16

Nothing can touch her. Like, she's she's above it or, like, outside of it or something. And so you could, like, defame my character. You could say, you know, you could lie about me. You could betray me.

Ally Fallon: 27:26

You could do whatever. But this part of me who knows what I know is indestructible. And that experience was so transformative for me. That was like the the first time that I thought like, oh, I could really take this content beyond the publishing world to people, to anybody who feels like they have an interesting story to tell and help them tell it in a way that they feel really proud of. So they could share it with whoever they want to share it with.

Ally Fallon: 27:50

Their therapist, their kids, their spouse, their church, their Bible study, whatever. Like, whoever you want to share it with, you can share it and feel like I'm aligned with this. I stand by this. Like I'm really proud of how I navigated my way through this story. Yeah.

Ally Fallon: 28:05

That's that really changed my life. I don't think I would be here living the life that I'm living today if I hadn't written about what was happening to me back then.

Lindsey Nobles: 28:13

Yeah. Having observed some of that season with you, like, in proximity, it seemed like that indestructible word was discovered, like, through your writing and through that process and not a word that you would have, like, felt and fully owned in your marriage? No. Yeah. Yeah.

Lindsey Nobles: 28:35

Which is, like, so amazing to, you know, that the that the writing was the birth of that in you that now I feel like is, like, such a foundational part of who you are.

Ally Fallon: 28:48

Yeah. It's amazing to me because I think I would have said before that experience, like, people don't change all that much. Like, most people are pretty much the same when they're when they die is when they were born. And that experience really changed my view on that because I think people change really dramatically. I I'm a different person today than I was back then, and a different person than I was, you know, in my twenties.

Ally Fallon: 29:11

And I and I credit a lot of that to the writing process which is why I wanted to write this book and it's why I wanted to bring this message beyond the world of publishing because I started to see the amount of transformation that was happening for the authors I was working with and just thought like, what if my sister could write her story? What if my mom could write her story? What if my neighbor could write her story? Like and then I would meet people on airplanes or at cocktail parties or at dinner parties or just, you know, acquaintances here and there who would tell me these stories, and I would just be like, oh my gosh. You need to record this story because like people live the most miraculous experiences and they have no idea what they've come through and they have no idea what a beautiful, remarkable, interesting person they are.

Ally Fallon: 29:57

And I just thought, like, if people could write that down and see it for themselves, it would change the way they move through the world. It would change the way they interact with the people around them.

Lindsey Nobles: 30:05

The other thing that I was reminded of when you were talking is just like the idea that the heroin, or the hero is in a transformation? Because, like, when you first said that word, I realized that I thought about that as, like, the overcomer, but also the person that's, like, the good person?

Ally Fallon: 30:23

Sure. Yeah. People have a lot of resistance to thinking of themselves as the hero of their own story for that reason because the way we use the word culturally, hero, means someone usually it means someone who, like, sacrifices their lives to save the life of someone else. So it's like a really altruistic, you know, over the top amazing person. And a lot of us don't self identify that way.

Ally Fallon: 30:44

But the word hero in a literary sense just means the person who who drives the plot forward. So it's the person you're following inside of the story. The person who you're wondering, what are they gonna do next? How are they gonna respond to this? How are they gonna react?

Ally Fallon: 30:59

Like and you're also witnessing and watching them change. The the way that narrative structure works is when we're watching a story, we intuitively understand that the hero has to change. And so we're like anticipating with like bated breath, the transformation. We're like, how is this person gonna grow? How are they gonna change?

Ally Fallon: 31:16

And so if you can think of the hero like that in a story, then the way that you map out your narrative arc is just by saying, okay, if I'm the hero of the story, if I'm the person that the viewer is following, what would I have to do to move the story forward? That's one question. And also, how would I have to change in order to resolve this story? So like in the divorce example, for example, a lot of the time that I was going through the divorce, I just was like, I didn't wanna be a divorced person. So in my smaller self, I was like, the only resolution to this story is just that none of this ever happened, which is obviously impossible.

Ally Fallon: 31:52

So, yeah, so I guess I'm just screwed. But as I wrote the story, I realized if I'm a viewer watching a woman in an abusive relationship go through a divorce, I'm going like, yes. Yes. Go. Get out of there.

Ally Fallon: 32:03

Like, own your life. You know? Go go, like, do what you love. Like, create a life that's beautiful that you love. And so the transformation for my hero wasn't about deleting the divorce at all.

Ally Fallon: 32:16

It was about, overcoming the ideas about herself that had brought her to this place in the first place. And so when you think of the hero that way, it opens up like all these ways for the story to resolve that don't have anything to do with the hero getting exactly what she thought she wanted. The story can resolve in a 1,000 different ways.

Mickenzie Vought: 32:39

Perhaps you've been hearing Ally talk about positioning yourself as the hero in the narrative of your story, and you're getting a little squirmy. Perhaps the idea of bestowing the title of hero or heroine is uncomfortable for you. To that, I give you the same advice that Arthur from the movie The Holiday gives to Iris. Go with me if you're not really a rom com fan. He says, in the movies, we have leading ladies and we have the best friend.

Mickenzie Vought: 33:08

You are a leading lady. But for some reason, you're behaving like the best friend. I love this quote. I asked Ally how she helps people she works with when they start to feel these uncomfortable feelings, When they're acting like the best friend and not the hero of their own story, and feel uncomfortable positioning themselves as the hero of that story. Here's what she had to say.

Ally Fallon: 33:33

A lot of people I think are are acting like the best friend or the sidekick in a story. We're doing it unconsciously. And I think if you asked them why they were doing it, the reason they would give you, I know this because they've told me, is that it feels selfish to put themselves in the position of the hero. It's like we've been cultured and trained to be of service and to not make it about us and to not be the center of attention and especially women. Women.

Ally Fallon: 33:57

I was

Mickenzie Vought: 33:58

gonna say women. Yeah.

Ally Fallon: 33:58

But not just women. Yeah. But especially women have been trained not to put themselves in the center of attention. So a lot of women I work with are are acting like the best friend or the sidekick in their story because they just don't realize, they don't realize they're doing it. I think the deeper thing that's happening under the surface beyond just feeling like it's selfish is people are afraid of the kind of agency it would require of them to move in to the hero of the story because when you're the sidekick in the story, stuff's just sort of happening and you're just like the comic relief.

Ally Fallon: 34:28

You know what I mean? Like you're just kind of bopping around like, yeah. When you're the hero of the story, you're responsible for moving the plot forward. So when you don't move, the plot doesn't move. And to step into the hero of the story requires taking that kind of agency.

Ally Fallon: 34:43

It's like, if if this story is going to resolve, it's because I'm resolving it. And that kind of agency terrifies us, I think, because in part, there's a part of us that feels selfish doing it or feels like it's too self centered, but I actually think the bigger part of us that we we don't always can't always admit is that we're terrified that we don't have what it takes to resolve the story And I just yeah. When I watch people put themselves in the position of the hero, it's like they have this light bulb come on that it's like, oh, I get to decide how I want this story to wrap up. I have to decide, and I get to decide.

Lindsey Nobles: 35:18

Yeah. I I definitely, like, resonate with this conversation and feel like it's, like, the life I have lived. You know? I definitely was, like, playing the sidekick for a lot of my life. And I realized that part of what I had to do in overcoming that was like acknowledging my own reality and like grieving some dreams.

Mickenzie Vought: 35:41

That then

Lindsey Nobles: 35:41

I could be honest and, like, begin to take ownership and agency and live more, of my own story than just in the support role of somebody else's. But it was such a mind shift, And I feel like having, like, change seats. It feels like, gosh, what if I had been able to do this earlier? Yeah. I

Ally Fallon: 36:09

was gonna say that. I was gonna say a lot of people, especially people who are in the second half of life.

Lindsey Nobles: 36:13

Are you saying I'm in the second half of life?

Ally Fallon: 36:15

I'm just kidding. I'm not. I mean, I am in

Lindsey Nobles: 36:17

the I don't know. 47.

Ally Fallon: 36:19

For sure. Same age. Yeah. Okay. So like 40 and later, I think a lot of people struggle with that feeling of if I take agency now, it forces me to confront the fact that I haven't taken agency until now Yeah.

Ally Fallon: 36:31

And just think about what could have been if they would have taken that kind of control sooner. So yeah. I mean, it's another one of those ways that writing our story forces us to confront our own selves and to grieve the loss of something that is, you know, in the past.

Mickenzie Vought: 36:52

Throughout this conversation, I was curious how Ally helps people determine what story to write. In her new book, Write Your Story, she recommends that people start with writing a 3 to 5 page finished product to ease into this process and get familiar with the framework. When it comes to our lives, we're all complex and it can feel daunting to narrow down the story our life is telling. Here was her encouragement.

Ally Fallon: 37:20

You have a 1,000 stories you could tell from your life. You kinda infinite stories, because stories are still happening all the time. So you have all these stories you could tell. There is an overarching story, like, if you were gonna sit down and write a memoir, I could have you write 10 or 15 stories from your life and we'd start to see the themes and threads that were present in those stories Yeah. And then we could string them together into into a memoir.

Ally Fallon: 37:41

That's a really big task. It's overwhelming. Yeah. It's totally overwhelming. It's overwhelming even for someone who's like dead set on writing a book, let alone someone who's like, I've never even really tried before.

Ally Fallon: 37:52

So, so that's why I wanted to start small and teach people how to take one story from their life and turn it into 3 to 5 pages of writing. You could replicate that a 100 times and make and write a book from it, but you also don't have to. So I I walk readers through the process of choosing a story to tell from their life by noticing which stories have charge for you. And by charge, I just mean like they have some example that I use in the book is the story of giving birth to my daughter who was born in July of 2020 in the height of the pandemic in Los Angeles, California. And literally, like, while I was laboring upstairs in the hospital room, my husband was waiting outside.

Ally Fallon: 38:34

They wouldn't even let him in the waiting room until he, like, passed the health inspection. And, yeah, that whole story, and I could go on for an hour telling the whole story, but that story has a lot of charge for me, even still, even though I've written about it a bunch and I talk about it in the book, there's still some charge for me around that story. And so, and I noticed the charge because I feel like a heaviness in my chest when I talk about it. Sometimes I'll feel like my voice shakes or, you know, I have a hard time like finding the through line in the story because my brain kind of wanders a little bit. Yeah.

Ally Fallon: 39:02

And so that's, that's the way that you can tell that a story has some charge for you. And I tell people to to think about this on a scale from 1 to 10. A story could have a charge of a 2 which means like it's not totally resolved or settled in your system, but it's not gonna, you know, it's not gonna send you into a spiral or it might be a 10, a story that you feel like you can't even really say words about it without tears streaming or something like that. And you get to decide where you wanna start. You know, you may wanna dive in the deep end and be like, I'm gonna start with the most difficult story because this is something that I really know needs processing, and so I wanna dive into it and better understand it.

Ally Fallon: 39:40

Or you might be like, let me start with a story that doesn't have as much charge so that I can practice with the framework. And the framework I teach has 8 parts. It's born out of, I mean, it's Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey really is where this is from. It's like the primary way that we understand stories in the west and I also worked for a long time with Donald Miller who wrote the foreword for the book. I learned the StoryBrand framework from him which he he teaches a narrative framework to businesses to help them talk about what they sell.

Ally Fallon: 40:09

And so I worked for a long time with StoryBrand. I learned that framework. I learned Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. And then when I was going through my divorce is when I started to apply this to personal stories. And so the 8 parts of the framework are born out of the pieces of story framework that I knew and and the way that they applied to personal stories.

Ally Fallon: 40:28

And I wanted to make it really simple, like such a no brainer for anybody who wanted to sit down and write their story to to have an access point so that someone who's just like, I I didn't go to college. I've never taken a writing class. You know, I I'm not a good writer. People a lot of people say that about themselves. I wanted that person to still be like, oh, I think I could try this.

Ally Fallon: 40:49

Yeah. You know, I could just, like, follow the framework and respond to the prompts and still write my story. So, and the other thing I talk about in the book too is that just how resistant I was to a framework in the beginning of my writing journey because as an Enneagram four and as a creative person, I was just like it needs to be totally unique. Nothing anyone's ever done before. And what I've been so shocked to find is that even for me not like even for me.

Ally Fallon: 41:17

Like, for me and for everybody, having a framework and a formula to follow actually inspires your creativity and gives so much room for it to grow. So, like, your story will be totally unique even if you follow the formula exactly. You you can you don't have to make it so complicated. Like you can just keep it really simple and your story will still be very miraculous and inspiring. So, anyways, so that's how I replicate it is by using the formula and just making it as simple as possible and really accessible for anyone who wants to use it.

Lindsey Nobles: 41:44

I love it. I can imagine how helpful it is for people just, like, to begin to put words to paper and, like, have their life unfold there. Yeah, I'm curious your advice, having worked like with publishers and publishing your book, and then working with authors, and trying to help them really uncover their purpose and meaning and their story. I feel like sometimes those two things are in opposition of each other. Like Yeah.

Lindsey Nobles: 42:12

Having worked in publishing, I feel like a lot of times, like, the answer of how to get started is, like, to write a book report, like, think about your customer and write a book proposal and sell it and make sure that, you know, like, that's what people want to read before you, like, get too far into it. And then your your narrative that we're talking about is like so much more appealing in terms of like, just like begin to like piece together your story and follow this framework. Yes. How do you how would you reconcile sort of holding those two things together? Or maybe you don't, in terms of, like, getting started if you maybe have been approached by an agent or, you know, like, you know you wanna publish traditionally?

Ally Fallon: 43:01

Yes. So, here's the way that I talk about it. They're 2 different activities. Publishers are a business. They're running a business.

Ally Fallon: 43:08

They're selling a product, a $20 product, and they're splitting the revenue with you. So it's it's just it comes down to the numbers. And publishers do their best to predict what's gonna sell, to know who like, where the distribution channels are. So they're this is why they're looking for people who have online followings, who who are recognizable face, who, you know, customers are already engaged with these people. That's why a lot of new authors will get the advice, like, go grow your following and and then come back to us when you've got 50,000 followers on Instagram and we'll talk about if you can write a book.

Ally Fallon: 43:39

So I that's a business and it makes total sense why the numbers would come first and why they're doing what they're doing because they're doing their best to keep the lights on, to keep everyone paid, like, that all makes sense, but it's this in my mind, like, this one activity that's over here and then writing as a way to heal is this other activity that's over on this other side. I don't think that they're mutually exclusive. There's a Venn diagram where they overlap because I've watched them overlap a bunch of times and in fact, an author who I interviewed on my podcast, William Paul Young, wrote wrote a book called The Shack Yeah. That he wrote for his own personal healing. He told me his audience for that book was 12 people.

Ally Fallon: 44:14

It was his immediate his 6 kids, his wife, and a couple of really close friends. That's who he wrote that book for. And that book has sold 26,000,000 copies, I think, at my last the last time that I checked. And that made him to a major motion picture. So there is a Venn diagram where these things overlap and it's one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to him because I just was like, what were you thinking when you were writing this book?

Ally Fallon: 44:34

Did you have any idea that this was gonna be such a sensation? And he was just like, no. I wrote it for 12 people. And in my opinion, if you're asking my opinion through my lens, I think every author, every single author, regardless of what books they've written before, regardless of what their aspirations are, anybody who wants to write for the marketplace should start with writing for 12 people, in my opinion. Because I think of this like an iceberg, like there's the 10% of the iceberg that you can see above the water, and that's New York Times bestsellers list.

Ally Fallon: 45:04

That's, you know, I sold 200,000 copies. That's all those things, the numbers. You made x amount of dollars from the book. That's the 10% above the surface. Then there's the 90% below the surface.

Ally Fallon: 45:15

That's the power that writing has to connect you to yourself, to connect you to others, and to connect you to the divine force that's guiding us all. And when you can connect to the 90%, when you use writing as a tool to connect to the 90%, the 10% takes care of itself, you know? I mean, maybe your book maybe you're William Paul Young and you write a book and you have no idea, but it sells 26,000,000 copies and maybe you're like my client, Justin, who I write about in my book, who wrote a book wrote a whole book for publication, realized through the writing of the book that he didn't wanna do what he was doing anymore, quit the book, quit his business, is doing something totally different now, completely reoriented his life and and, you know, nobody will that book will never see the light of day And yet he told me I would pay you your fee 10 times over to get the insights that I got from writing that book. And so whichever side you land on, starting with the healing, in my opinion, is the most valuable. It's like you get the 90% of the iceberg even if you don't get the the 10, the icing on the cake.

Ally Fallon: 46:15

And maybe the icing comes in a different kind of a way too. I think so often we orient ourselves in the modern world, in the physical world, we orient ourselves to those physical manifestations of success thinking, like, that's gonna make me happy. That's gonna make me feel good about myself. When in reality, you know, Indestructible, I've written 4 books including Write Your Story. Indestructible has sold the fewest number of copies of any of the books that I've written and it is the book I'm most proud of and it is the book that has allowed me and afforded me the life that I have today.

Ally Fallon: 46:46

I would go back and write every word of that book all over again if nobody ever read it because of how clearly it helped me to see myself and so not everybody resonates with that. I think that there are some people who are like, listen, can I just hire someone who can write a book for me and I can get on the New York Times list and whatever? And if that is what you're looking for then this book and my work is probably not, like, up your alley. But if you're someone who's just like, I don't even know, like, I wouldn't have the first idea how to get my book on the New York Times list, even though I think that would be cool. But I know I have a story to tell.

Ally Fallon: 47:20

I know it could inspire other people. I know I don't fully understand it yet and I really want to better understand it, then I think my work will really resonate with you. And and I hope that it will help to illuminate the miracles that are constantly taking place in your life and help you to really feel more secure in your own skin.

Mickenzie Vought: 47:41

Oh, that's so good, Ally.

Lindsey Nobles: 47:42

Ally I'd love to hear a little bit about, like, how you think about emotional health now and like practices that you have, beyond writing that helped keep you centered and grounded and the chaotic season that you're kind of living?

Ally Fallon: 47:57

Yes. So emotional I think of emotional health like a commitment to truth at all costs. And it's one of the reasons why writing is so powerful because you cannot write and ignore the truth at the same time. You as you write, what is true for you is what will come out on the page and sometimes it can be really hard to face even if it's something simple like I'm overwhelmed. You know, sometimes I feel like when we're overwhelmed, we're like, no, no, no.

Ally Fallon: 48:22

It's good. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm totally fine. And the idea of admitting that we're overwhelmed would sort of break the facade that's keeping the the cogs moving.

Ally Fallon: 48:30

So it's like even something simple like that, just admitting like I'm overwhelmed. I cannot do all that is on my plate. Like, admitting that, can break the protective mechanisms but gets us to the to the truth of what's going on. So that's the way that I think about emotional health. And the last 5 years for me have been a journey in playing that out in my real life.

Ally Fallon: 48:54

Because, like, when you have little kids, you're just like, I'm the mom. I'm in charge. I have to keep everything together. I'm fine. I'm fine.

Ally Fallon: 49:00

It's fine. Everything's fine. No. It's all good. You know?

Ally Fallon: 49:02

When really, like, below the surface and that was what that that Instagram post I talked about was, like, admitting the truth of the last 5 years. It's been really challenging. Yeah. So that's how I think about emotional health. And I I think yeah.

Ally Fallon: 49:14

I think that's why writing is such an important tool for emotional health because it helps us remain committed to the cause of truth. And other tools that I use, the main tool that I use in this season is meditation. I before my kids were born, I was in a really good habit of meditating every morning before my day began. I would meditate for anywhere from 20 minutes to, like, an hour and 20 minutes.

Lindsey Nobles: 49:38

Oh, wow.

Ally Fallon: 49:38

And I do not do do that anymore. I I now, like my meditation has had to morph to fit inside. Like, first of all, I wake up in the morning when my kids wake up because they're usually up by like 6. So they, they wake me up in the morning. So I'm not like meditating before my day begins.

Ally Fallon: 49:54

But like immediately after drop off, I'll meditate for 20 minutes or sometimes when I'm putting them to bed at night because I did, I'm like, I don't know. I don't want to get into the whole like, when I, when my kids were little, I did like a very mild sleep training where like they would fall asleep on their own. Now that they're toddlers, they've gone through nightmares and different things where like they don't want to fall asleep on their own. So I'm in their room until they fall asleep, which is not how I plan things, but but that's just how it has gone. And so for a while, I was just like, Oh, this is such a waste of time.

Ally Fallon: 50:25

Like, you know, I mean, that sounds terrible to say because I do love my kids but like you're just waiting there for an hour while they fall asleep. And so I was really struggling with that time and then suddenly I was like, epiphany. I'm like, this is my meditation time. So this is how, like, I set the boundary for my kids too. I'm like, I will stay in here if you lay your head still and you're quiet.

Ally Fallon: 50:44

As long as you do those things, I'll stay in here with you until you're asleep. So it's their quiet time. Even if they're not asleep, they're laying still and they're quiet and I will meditate while I lay there. And I was just telling Matt the other day, my husband, I'm like, I am getting, like, ins like, this is my new creative white space time. Like, I'm getting, like, insights and inspiration and just all kinds of downloads while I'm up in the kids' room and he's like, Oh, it's your thin space.

Ally Fallon: 51:08

Yeah. It's like that's like your time to connect. And I'm like, Yeah. It's it's honestly kind of worked out perfectly. So I say all that to say meditation is probably the number one tool that I'm using to stay aligned and centered.

Ally Fallon: 51:20

And I just kinda like fit it into my life where it where it goes, where it fits.

Mickenzie Vought: 51:25

I love that. That's such good timing. Well, Ally, this has been so good. And what I just continue to take away is we often say it on-site is that the best thing we can bring to our relationships is a healthy and whole self. And I think when we have a clear view of who we are, and have done that work that I loved hearing about all the work that you've done, Maybe just show up better in relationships.

Mickenzie Vought: 51:44

And so I'm just so, so grateful for you walking us through this process, and I'm so grateful for your new book. And I know that it's gonna be such an asset for people. I just continually, as you were talking, like, this is such a powerful tool for our mental and emotional health to get really clear about who we are and how we live. So, thank you.

Ally Fallon: 52:03

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Mickenzie Vought: 52:06

Thanks for listening to the Living Center podcast. If you're enjoying the show, we'd love for you to consider leaving us a review or rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you listen. It only takes a few seconds to navigate to the show in your app and select the stars to begin your rating. It helps more people find the show and we really appreciate it. Thanks so much.