The Stories Healthcare Leaders Tell Themselves — and Why They Matter
Every leader has a mental model of the people and scenarios playing out around them. The physician who always pushes back in meetings. The executive who goes quiet under pressure. The board member who asks one too many questions. You’ve watched them long enough; you know what drives them.
Or do you?
When Your Brain Won’t Wait
MEDI Coach Matthew Kodsi, MD’s new book, A Story Tale: ABCs of the Stories We Tell Ourselves, features a short story that starts with a deceptively simple premise: the human mind does not tolerate unanswered questions. When we encounter behavior we cannot immediately explain, our brains do not wait for more information. They write a story. And then — this is the critical part — they convince us that story is true.
For healthcare leaders navigating relentless complexity, that instinct runs on overdrive. Incomplete information is the operating environment. Decisions about people, strategy, and organizational direction routinely get made in the gaps between what leaders know and what they assume they know. The stories filling those gaps are steering their behavior and shaping their reality more than most leaders realize.
Matt explores this dynamic through the eyes of Joe, a software executive who considers himself a rational, self-aware professional — until a conversation with his daughter challenges nearly everything he believes about how his mind actually works. It’s a quick and easy read that’s impactful as it is relatable.
The Cost of Unexamined Narratives
What makes A Story Tale particularly relevant to healthcare leaders is its focus on the organizational cost of unexamined narratives. The stories you tell yourself about your teams, peers, and your own capabilities do not stay in your head. They shape conversations, inform decisions, and over time, define cultures. A leader who has never interrogated the source of their assumptions is, in a very real sense, operating on borrowed thinking.
A Framework — and Something More Important
Matt does offer a framework — the ABCs of the title — that gives readers a structured way to examine the stories they construct. But the real value of the book isn’t the framework itself. It’s the recognition that precedes it: the moment a reader sees their own patterns reflected back at them and understands, perhaps for the first time, where those patterns come from.
That recognition, as Joe discovers, changes things.
A Story Tale: ABCs of the Stories We Tell Ourselves is available on Amazon and Audible. I read it on a plane — it fit in my bag, and I was finished before landing. I got off the plane with a clearer sense of the narratives I’ve been carrying and a new way of thinking about them. At the price of a cup of coffee, it’s the kind of read you can finish in a single sitting — and think about for weeks afterward.
