In The Help, Aibileen Clark is not Mae Mobley’s mother. She’s the maid, paid to feed her, bathe her, and get her through the day while her mother is somewhere else—emotionally if not physically. Each day, before Mae Mobley faces a house where she is mostly overlooked, Aibileen kneels down and says the same three …
In The Help, Aibileen Clark is not Mae Mobley’s mother. She’s the maid, paid to feed her, bathe her, and get her through the day while her mother is somewhere else—emotionally if not physically. Each day, before Mae Mobley faces a house where she is mostly overlooked, Aibileen kneels down and says the same three sentences: “You is kind. You is smart. You is important.” It’s a small ritual, repeated on a schedule Aibileen can control, in the middle of a home she can’t.
We usually talk about that scene as tenderness, and it is. But it’s also something more specific and more useful to leaders: Aibileen is building Mae Mobley’s future self, one repetition at a time.
Psychologist Dan McAdams, who has spent his career studying what he calls narrative identity, would recognize exactly what’s happening. His research argues that identity isn’t a fixed fact about a person; it’s a story, built out of the memories a person keeps and how those memories get told. The self you’ll be tomorrow is constructed from the memories you have today. Change the memories, and you change who someone becomes.
That idea used to sound more poetic than clinical. It doesn’t anymore. Longreads recently profiled users of OpenAI’s now-shuttered Sora video-generation app, which let people generate deepfake videos of themselves doing things they’d never done and then scroll through them like TikTok. One user, Andrew Deutsch, made a video of himself climbing Mount Rushmore. Weeks later, walking his dog, he felt what he described as “a twitch of confusion”—a faint but real sense that he remembered doing it. Deutsch coined a term for what was happening to him: propagandi, propaganda aimed at yourself. McAdams, asked about it, said he hadn’t heard the phenomenon named before, “but a moment’s reflection suggests that it is inevitable.” Manufactured experiences, viewed enough times, get filed away as “things that happened to me” and eventually as “important things that happened to me that are now part of my life story.”
If a phone app can do that by accident, in a closed loop between one person and a screen, it’s worth asking what a workplace does on purpose, in a loop between dozens of people, eight or more hours a day, year after year.
McAdams found something else worth knowing. In his research, people who narrate a hard event as something that eventually turned out well—what he calls a redemption sequence—report meaningfully higher well-being over time. People who narrate a good event as something that turned sour—a contamination sequence—report lower well-being, and the pattern shows up repeatedly in mental health outcomes. The event itself doesn’t predict the outcome nearly as well as the story attached to it does. And that story rarely gets written alone.
Researchers who study how children learn to remember call it “maternal reminiscing.” Kids learn to turn raw experience into story through conversation with a caregiver who leans in, asks questions, and helps shape what the moment meant. That process doesn’t stop at childhood. Every adult still experiences this process with whoever is present and paying attention when a memory is still being formed. The friend who reframes a bad day. The partner who remembers it differently. The leader who says something, or nothing, the day after.
We don’t often think of ourselves as co-authors of the people we lead. But that’s exactly what we are. We are with our people for a huge share of their waking hours, and that environment is not neutral. It’s where their memories are actively being made, and how we show up helps narrate their story toward redemption or contamination. Every leader is already doing this. The only question is whether we’re doing it on purpose.
The good news is this doesn’t require controlling everything. People’s recollection of an experience tends to be dominated by its peak moment and its ending, not its average. You don’t have to make every day remarkable. You have to be intentional about the moments people will still be carrying five years from now—the hard conversation, the project close-out, or the way someone’s time with you ends.
Aibileen didn’t have much power in that house either. She had an hour a day and a sentence she was willing to repeat against a much louder, much more constant counter-narrative. That’s a more realistic model for most of us than “change everything.” You don’t need to be the only voice in someone’s story. You need to be a reliable one.
What are you repeating to the people you lead? What memory is being built right now in your presence that someone will wake up believing about themselves five years from now? Great leaders don’t just manage the day. They become co-authors of who their people are becoming—the Bison Way.
