Raymond Miranda is the creator of The Myhejo Method, a story expert, and a global speaker. After spending 14 years studying, researching, and teaching storytelling at some of the leading institutions in the US, he returned to Malaysia to be CEO of Enfiniti Vision Media, and then the founding Director of Multimedia University’s Faculty of Cinematic Arts, and later Head of Film Investments at Rhizophora Ventures. His passion for exploring the intersections between innovation, futures studies, and stories has taken him to diverse parts of the world, from Brunei to Berlin. Raymond was listed as one of the Top 10 Entrepreneurs to watch in 2019 by The Edge Newspaper. In 2020 was appointed by the Berlin Government as an Asia Berlin Ambassador – a global Tech Diplomacy initiative. He is a research fellow at the University of Twente’s Story Lab. He holds an MFA from New York University.
Topic: How to Turn Fears into Innovative Goals
Context
We are living in a time of unprecedented uncertainty, complexity, and change, which brings up a lot of fear in people and organizations. But fears can motivate us into action too.
The Myhejo™ Method is a step-by-step, interactive workshop that is modeled on the principles of storytelling and the psychology of feared possible selves. Feared possible selves are about themselves one fears one will become in the future if one fails to achieve important goals. This process from fear-to-goal in storytelling is referred to as The Hero’s Journey.
In this one-hour session, narrative expert Raymond Miranda demonstrated how leaders can learn to use their own fears and resistance-to-change as building blocks for innovation and transformation.
Keynotes
It’s the story that makes data memorable.
- It’s the story that moves decisions.
- We, as human beings, are hard-wired to seek cohesive stories.
- Stories bring fragmented worlds together.
The MyHejo Method
How to use your Fears to Rescript Your Future
- MyHejo is a tool and practice combined.
- It is a future-oriented strategy tool.
- And a present-future mindfulness practice.
What MyHejo Means
- MyHejo stands for the first two letters of the words “my heroic journey.”
- We all feel that we are called to take on heroic journeys in this, especially amid a lot of volatility, complexity, and change that we are going through at the moment.
The Boy in the Jungle Story
A story created to describe the seven steps of the strength of transformation. This is a story that follows the art of coming-of-age – a ritual of men, particularly in indigenous communities.
In the indigenous community of Borneo, there is a ritual when a boy comes of age. In this secret ritual, the men of the community approach the tent where the boy is sleeping with the mom, wearing masks on their faces. They almost kidnap the boy and drag him to a fireplace along with his mother. This fireplace has a huge stoked fire with all the men on one side dancing their ritual dance and all women of the village on the other side wailing and crying as if someone had died.
This is quite horrific for the young boy. He has no idea about what’s going on. The men then throw the boy to the women, who then clutch the boy. They continue the ritual for around two hours, and eventually, the men pull the boy from the women. The men drag the boy to the deepest parts of the jungle, a place forbidden for children to cross. The children are warned of a tiger who resides in the deepest of the deepest part of the jungle. Supposedly, once a tiger tastes the blood of a human, it will come back searching for humans to eat. Hence, children were not allowed to cross those parts.
The men take the boy to those forbidden parts of the jungle only to tie him up and leave him to die. The archeologists who have studied this ritual say that if the boy stays there for seven days waiting for his old world to come back and save him, he will die.
Within seven days, the boy has to realize that nobody is coming to save him. What does he fear? In these times, when he’s tied up to the tree, he only imagines and hears the tiger. The tiger is his fear instilled by the community. He finally manages to untie himself after vigorous days of struggle. Instead of running, he goes up and hides in the tree, waiting for the tiger, justifying his own mind that he’ll be safe when the tiger comes searching.
As the days pass, he increasingly becomes hungry, tired, and sleepy. He eventually falls down and climbs back. He does this several times. Eventually, he starts running. Has he met the tiger? It’s all in his imagination. He’s building up a crazy frenzy inside of him.
Eventually, weeks passed. He then arrived at a river. He looks himself into the river. Due to hunger, tiredness, and weakness, he’s unable to recognize himself. At that moment, he decides to give up. He decides to lay down and let the tiger eat him. He can’t do it anymore. He falls asleep. He suddenly wakes up and thinks about the river in his village. Maybe this river is connected to that river. He has no idea that the river can have many divisions. However, it’s sufficient enough to give him a sense of purpose. This river could be connected to the river in his home.
Slowly, he recollects his time spent around the river catching fish. The boy now wants to nourish himself. He’s catching fish in the river and losing as well. He’s figuring out how to make better nets and what he can do with the resources of the jungle. He begins to think about a raft that can move him faster in the river. So, he builds a raft, which collapses. He again thought of building a better raft and maybe even a ship. He’s now eating, sustaining, and collecting tools from the jungle. His body is now transforming due to this focus towards the river and the river taking him home.
Eventually, he’s enthusiastic about the book that he’s built. Like any good movie, this moment when he’s gaining strength, something unexpected happens. So, what could happen? The tiger comes! Did the boy run away from the tiger?
He’s become strong now. He shifted the energy of who he’s become. Indeed he goes, and battles with the tiger. He killed the tiger with the tools he had to build the ship. As he kills the tiger, he realizes that it’s slowly disappearing.
Just at that moment, he looks up and sees this village. He starts to run towards it. As he runs towards his village, a thought comes into his mind. And that thought was, “Maybe I wasn’t loved. Maybe they never wanted me there. And put me there to die.” He has three options:
- To stay in the jungle.
- Seek revenge on the people that put him there.
- Understand that he was put there to be transformed. It was a Transformation Ritual.
He goes to the community of peaceful souls. The women welcome him. In the night, the community comes together and asks the boy about the story of the jungle. In that transformation, he has a story to tell.
This is the story of the boy in the jungle. This is the hero’s journey. Some theories call it the subconscious transformation.
The Myhejo Method
The seven stages that boy goes through:
- Break the Ritual: Something needs to be broken for a story to begin. What was normal for the boy before it got broken?
- Loop of Fear: The boy saw the world in one way.
- The “What If” Moment: Seeing the river was the pivotal moment where his imagination reaches the new point of action.
- Innovation & Momentum: The experiments and failures to reimagine in different ways.
- The Battle: The battle with the tiger where the boy faces his fear.
- The Leap: After the battle, the boy decides what is meant to be.
- The Leader: By virtue of the whole journey, he comes back to the community, where they treat him like a leader and ask him to share his story.
The Speed Round – FOWO
The Speed Round is to:
- F- Identify the fear.
- O – Ask the Opposite.
- W – Ask What If.
- O – Name the Obstacles.
- If you can identify the heros’ fear that the hero is unaware of at the beginning of the story and name the opposite of that fear, you have the beginning and end of that story.
- You can execute and explore the fears very quickly with the “name the opposite.” Then you begin to see the world in a possible transformative way quickly.
MyHejo: Future Leaders
Future Leaders are:
- authentic enough to admit and use their fears as a transformational tool
- agile enough to rescript the future for themselves and others
- explorers of the old – ready to embrace the unknown
- warriors of the mind
💎 Nuggets from Raymond Miranda
- When used wisely, our fears (organizationally and personally) can be an evolutionary tool that can help us innovate fast.
- The future requires heroic action.
- The moment your capacity of thinking to see the world dies and some new capacity merges with you. That inspirational moment is missed in the talking of the “what if.”
- One part of the knowledge has to die for another truth to emerge.
- At the edge of our resources, we find something new.
- You can execute and explore the fears very quickly with the “name the opposite.” Then you begin to see the world in a possible transformative way quickly.
- We all feel that we are called to take on heroic journeys in this, especially amid a lot of volatility, complexity, and change that we are going through at the moment.
🧭 “You’re almost leaving your old world and testing a new version of yourself. You don’t know whether the new version is going to work. Being transformative is the capacity to test.”
– Raymond Miranda
🎧 If you missed or want to rewatch our webinar with Raymond Miranda on the “MyHejo Method”, catch up here: https://youtu.be/x25jjRxt3ks
❤️ A big shoutout to Raymond Miranda for sharing such a beautiful and powerful method to overcome our fears, “My Hero’s Journey”!
Don’t miss out on this one. Stay tuned for the next episode!
