Is how old you are right at this moment, of course.
It’s likely you are also the wisest you’ve ever been, and the most experienced.
But what about the strongest, the most durable, the most resilient, the most courageous?
So much of how we experience today comes from the stories we tell ourselves.
Be careful not to talk yourself out of your potential
While I’m not a big believer in New Year’s resolutions, I like the idea of resolving, this year, to change the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.
One of the most relaxing parts of my winter break were the hours I spent curled up with The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss, the most-recommended fantasy fiction book by all of you.
At the end of the book, I found a pearl of wisdom spoken by a minor character named Bast:
Everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.
Bast then goes on to illustrate about how the story we tell ourselves can change (I choose to read this excerpt with the implied broad sense of “beauty,” and even so wish the example were a different one):
If you tell [a shy girl you love] she’s beautiful, she’ll think you’re sweet, but she won’t believe you. She knows that beauty lies in your beholding…But [you can] show her she is beautiful. You make mirrors of your eyes, prayers of your hands…It is hard, very hard, but when she truly believes you…Suddenly the story she tells herself in her own head changes. She transforms. She isn’t seen as beautiful. She is beautiful, seen.
So often we cling fiercely to limitations that are far past their expiration date.
We can resolve this year to start to believe the stories that the people who love us most tell us about ourselves.
Stories about being worthy of love.
Stories about being truly, deeply beautiful.
Stories about what we can accomplish: the book we can write, the new role we’re ready for, the strengths we have that come so easily to us that we ignore them.
The biggest leaps I took in 2018 were possible because I believed, even if just for a moment, the kindest, most generous stories that people who love me told me. These stories were sometimes spoken out loud and sometimes reflected powerfully in actions.
All of them helped me see myself in the kinder light reflected in the mirror of their eyes, rather than the harsh glow of self-criticism. And I’d think, “Maybe they’re right. Maybe that is in me. Maybe.” That was enough to imagine bravery. That was enough to begin.
As we look to 2019, let us remember to believe those who see in us more capability, bravery, and potential than we see in ourselves. And let’s remember that one of the greatest, easiest gifts we can give is to be positive mirrors, by reminding others of the beauty that lies within them.
Happy 2019. Here’s to a great year ahead.
Compared to you, the people you’re communicating with (customers, colleagues) don’t have the whole story. They don’t know each and every detail, they can’t see every tiny nuance.
How could they? They aren’t you.
What they have is the information they get from you, and a whole lot of blanks.
Most of these blanks get filled in by things outside of our control: their worldview, their filters, the mood they’re in that day. But some of them are filled by the story they tell themselves about our product or about us. And the last few are empty for no good reason, because we’ve not communicated the right things to them in the right way.
This means we have two jobs.
First, and always, to communicate better, with more empathy about what the world looks like from where they’re sitting and more specificity about what we want them to feel, believe and do after they hear from us.
And second, to remember that each time we communicate, we’re doing so on two levels:
On the level of what we say, we are transmitting information, content and meaning.
On the level of how we say it, we are building out the scaffolding that they’ll use to fill in future blanks about us: future expectations about who we are, our personality, our intent, and how much we can be trusted.
Think of it as two stories: the one they’ll remember today, and the one that will inform how they fill in the blanks tomorrow.
(Speaking of blanks to be filled in: welcome to all of you who just showed up thanks to Seth Godin’s blog post on Wednesday. I’m glad you’re here and thanks for subscribing! And for those of you who didn’t see that post, you might want to check out a few other blogs Seth recommended: Gabe, Fred, Bernadette and Rohan.
As Seth mentioned, this blog has a backlist of more than 1,000 posts on all sorts of topics including storytelling, generosity, fundraising and sales, social change, leadership, and a lot more. Mostly, posts are a mirror of what’s on my mind, ideas I’m working through, and ideas and advice that I’ve found (or, more often, am still finding) useful.
These days, you should expect 1-2 posts per week in your inbox, so if you’re not getting them check your spam filter.
Comments are welcome, sharing posts with friends is a gift, and if you want to reach me I’m easy to find: sashadichterblogs@gmail.com)
“I’m going to tell you a story.”
This was the first thing Acumen Fellow Aaron Kirunda said last week in a talk I heard him give at Acumen’s Partner Gathering.
Upon hearing those words, the audience leans forward a little bit, they relax, they open up. Because everyone loves a story.
Aaron’s story was about enjuba, his Ugandan organization that provides literacy training to 1.5 million Ugandan kids, anchored around hosting spelling bees. But that’s not where he begins.
He begins by telling us about two children who grew up in a Ugandan village. One of those boys dropped out of school, he never learned to read, he ended up cutting sugarcane, and he eventually struggled with alcohol abuse and parenting multiple kids out of wedlock.
The other boy, his friend, also had trouble completing primary school, but he had a mother who read the Bible to him and his brothers every night. That boy was fascinated by that ritual, of the family gathered together around a dim light and his mother’s own storytelling. He dreamed of one day being able to read that Bible, and eventually he did learn to read, as did his brothers. This reading ignited his passion for education, and he ended up being the best student in his district, which opened up doors to Uganda’s prestigious Makerere University and eventually to the London School of Economics.
This boy eventually made his way back to Uganda where he started up an organization to pass on the gift of reading to more kids like him and like his friend. This boy’s name was Aaron Kirunda. The organization he found was enjuba, which means sunshine. Seven years after he founded that organization, he came to New York to share his story, and I was lucky enough to hear it.
The reminder here is: I didn’t take any notes on this presentation, and I didn’t know Aaron’s story in this way before that night. But because he told me a story, I listened. And because it was a story, I not only stayed engaged, I remember it effortlessly a few days later. That means it stayed with me, so I can carry it around and reflect on it and contemplate its meaning.
The reminder here is: we want to listen to stories.
They keep us engaged.
They have a beginning, a middle and an end.
This makes them easy to remember – both their content and the lessons they contain.
So, it is our job as people trying to make an impact to tell stories all the time. Not just when we’re in front of a room of people doing “a presentation.” All the time.
These seven powerful words, “I’m going to tell you a story,” whether spoken or implied, can and should be used anywhere. The story can be about a challenge we once had at work, what it felt like when we heard hard feedback for the first time, the lead-up to an insight that hit us over the weekend, or a yarn about a friend we knew who also struggled for nearly a year before putting down roots in a new place.
“I’m going to tell you a story” is the beginning of a conversation that people will remember.
If they remember, it might change them.
If they forget, it definitely will not.
Whether you’re a writer, a blogger, a trainer, a facilitator, a coach, a speaker or a fundraiser, you need a story garden.
These are stories that illustrate and illuminate important concepts you want to share with your audience. These are stories they will be drawn to, understand and remember.
Like all gardens, they don’t come out fully formed. Gardens require care, cultivation, time and patience.
We begin by finding a place and a time to plant the seeds.
Most of the time, for most people, it doesn’t work to set aside big chunks of time to come up with fully-formed, engaging and useful stories. The pressure is too great, and the habit unfamiliar. High expectations and low output create frustration, so we quit.
Instead, take the pressure off and begin with a commitment to awareness, observation and capture.
Awareness of the concepts you’re carrying around that are looking for stories.
Observation of small moments—in conversations, books, memories, articles—that might become bigger stories.
And capture, so you can hang on to those moments quickly and easily, before they vanish. This might be a notebook, an email address you set up so you can send yourself ideas, the audio recording feature on your phone.
My capture process often involves just a headline and a few words. I include the moment I noticed, and a few words (max 1-3 sentences) about what it might become. I write down details about the moment that sparked the idea, so that these details, and the thoughts surrounding them, can find their way back to me.
Then you need a “going back” process: dedicated, regular time to turn those snapshots into somewhat-developed stories. The process is up to you, but dedicated, regular time plus deadlines will help a lot.
And then you need time to practice telling these stories. The sooner and more often the better.
For example, recently some members of Acumen’s Fellows team who facilitate seminars started holding hour-long Story Garden meetings. They sit around a jar filled with slips of paper, each with a core teaching point from an upcoming seminar. One team member at a time pulls out a slip and then tells a 60-second personal story to illustrate that concept. They’d give it a go, get feedback, and move on to the next person.
You could easily imagine doing the same thing with your fundraising team: pick 10 key selling points or examples about your nonprofit or social sector organization, get 5 fundraisers in the room and start picking pieces of paper out of a jar and telling your stories. Take and give feedback. Repeat.
A number of years ago I noticed that the best communicators I know speak in stories—all day long. What I’ve realized since then is that process of story capture, development, practice, refinement, selecting and discarding is both iterative and self-reinforcing. Once you start down the path and see that stories land with your audience, you’ll realize that this is something that you, too, can do. Then, one day, you’ll get to a point when you can hardly remember talking any other way.
Not long after a recent conference, I was comparing notes with an early-stage social entrepreneur about pitching to potential investors. The pitches at the conference had been heavy on dreams, lighter on reality, and we got to talking about how big the gap should be between the stories we tell on stage and what’s happening on the ground.
Specifically, in service of telling our stories, when do we push the truth so far as to reach a breaking point?
Like all good questions, the answer to this one begins with recognizing the limits of black and white thinking: there aren’t just two types of stories, one full of puffery and half-truths and the other a grim, warts-and-all picture of reality so sober and honest that no one would ever dream of funding us.
Indeed, the real truth is this: we owe it to our ideas to tell stories big enough that there’s space for others in them.
Our job is to describe a future reality that will only come into being if the listener rolls up her sleeves with us to help make it happen. This reality can be a few steps, maybe many steps, removed from today, because the question the sophisticated listener is asking isn’t “is this exactly what they’re doing today?” it is, “do I believe that this person with this team, together with my help and support, can get us from here to there?”
With this as a given, we all have our own sweet spot for how we tell stories in ways that mesh with our personalities and worldview. I’ve been persuaded both by big-picture dreamers and cranky cynics, the former because they help me see something that feels impossible but just-in-reach, the latter because if, with all their negativity, they tell me that they can make something important happen, I’m inclined to believe them.
My own version of selling builds off how I’m wired—I deeply value transparency and authenticity, and as a listener I want to understand where gaps lie and that an entrepreneur is thinking two steps ahead. So I pitch in this same way, always trying to walk the line of painting a big vision and acknowledging what doesn’t exist yet, the potential pitfalls, an how I’m going to address them. This is the balance that works for me, the space between a story I cannot tell authentically (because it feels un-grounded) and one that is thinking and playing too small.
Of course your sweet spot will be somewhere slightly different, a comfort zone with a natural set point on the spectrum between dazzle/charisma/vision and grounded, sober reality.
The non-negotiable bit is that, regardless of which style is most comfortable to you, it’s everyone’s job to share an evocative vision of an as-yet-unrealized future and help others see it.
Storytelling is just that…story-telling, and the stories you want to tell are stories about the future.
A video of Ta-Nahesi Coats has been spreading like crazy online. In it, Coates responds to a question from a white woman in the audience who asks whether white people should be able to sing along to rap lyrics that contain the N-word.
For once, the Internet has it right. Coates’ answer is a masterful example of how to use narrative to address a difficult topic and to help others understand an uncomfortable truth. At a time when, as a society, we are caught in echo chambers and building up thicker walls that separate us, and when the preferred mode of response seems to be anger, vitriol and accusation, our opportunity as change-makers is to learn from Coates to become more skillful in talking in ways that others can hear.
What I notice about Coates’ response begins at the energetic level: one can imagine him feeling frustration, or exhaustion, or even anger, at hearing this question (again) from a well-intentioned white woman, but no negative feeling comes out. His demeanor conveys thoughtfulness and reflection, and, rather than put the audience on the defensive, he draws them in with accessible, sometimes humorous stories.
And not just any stories: he is making a deliberate point that “words don’t have meaning without context,” that this context is one of relationship, and that one’s right to use a particular word with another person starts with one’s relationship to that person.
Of course, he doesn’t say it that way. Instead, he starts by talking about his wife calling him “honey” and how it would be unacceptable for another woman to call him that if they were walking down the street. The audience laughs.
He goes on to describe how, when he was young and he would go see his family in Philadelphia, his family members would call his father, William Paul Coates, “Billy.” But “no one in Baltimore calls my Dad Billy, and..
…if I had referred to my Dad as Billy that probably would have been a problem. That’s because the relationship between myself and my Dad is not the same as the relationship between my Dad and his mother and his sisters who he grew up with. We understand that.
Indeed we do. It’s easy enough, and safe enough, to understand that there are certain ways we can and cannot address our parents. With this straightforward example, Coates invites us to step in at the shallow end of the pool.
Then he ups the ante a bit, both in terms of tension and humor, by saying, in furthering the point:
My wife, with her girlfriends, will use the word ‘bitch.’ (Pause) I do not join in! I don’t do that. And more importantly, I don’t have a desire to do that. You understand?
Indeed. With the story as foundation, and with the disarming humor of Coates saying that calling his wife “bitch” would not go well for him, we start to see the broader point.
With these two stories—told with all the humor and narrative and seduction of stories—Coates helps the listener experience that language and its usage sits within the context of relationship; that, if you do not have a certain kind of relationship with a person or a group, then it is not OK for you to use that groups’ language; and that it is normal for groups to appropriate potentially offensive language and use it in an ironic way. He has shared all these points in ways that are both approachable and repeatable, so that those who are ultimately persuaded by his argument are armed to persuade the next person with these same, simple stories.
With all of this scaffolding masterfully put into place, Coates then gets to the heart of the issue, and says, in no uncertain terms, that white people are not in relation to black people in a way that allows them to use the N-word. And he goes a step further to say, essentially (my paraphrase): and I think this is an instructive thing for white people to experience, because American society has taught white people that they can, essentially, say and do anything, and that it is the job of those around them to shift to accommodate that sense of entitlement and privilege. And, experiencing a time when you cannot, as a white person, use a particular word, is a great chance to feel what the everyday reality of everyone else feels like in this country.
No punches pulled here, but if you’re going to disagree with this hard-hitting truth, then you have to find your way to explain why Coates should be able to call his father Billy and his wife “bitch,” and that’s a heck of a hard argument to have make in any sort of objective way.
I hope you enjoy and share the video, and that you find space to work this sort of narrative dexterity into your own practice. To change minds, we need to meet people where they are, we need to ensure that they feel heard and respected, and we need arm them with the tools to see a different set of first principles in a way that doesn’t cause shame or separation. This is the opposite of creating a win/lose setup where to acknowledge my point of view, you need to discard your views and values, and essentially admit your own stupidity.
Much easier to accept is: “thank you. I’d never thought of it that way.”
Enjoy the video.
Yes, your job is to learn from the masters.
This means that, to start to tell better stories, you’re well-advised to study the storytelling techniques of great storytellers – whether Martin Luther King, or Ken Robinson, or Hans Rosling, or Bryan Stevenson.
And, to make sense of all of that, you’ll want to unpack how to give a great TED talk by learning from speaker coach Nancy Duarte or from TED Curator Chris Anderson (special for blog readers: use the REFERAFRIEND discount code to save 80% on Chris’ course).
You may even take things a step further when you realize that it’s not just storytelling that interests you, it’s really about creating a broader framing of an authentic narrative, in which case you’ll bridge to the work of Marshall Ganz and unpack the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now.
Or perhaps you are more of a writer than a speaker, in which case you’ll want to start with Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and Stephen King’s On Writing, and Ann Patchett’s The Getaway Car, and grow from there.
(And no matter what you do, you’ll want to get your hands on Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist)
But at the end of the day, technique will only take you so far.
At the end of the day, what the world needs from you is not a dim reflection of one of your mentors, not the echoes of someone who inspires you, not the loose parroting of someone else’s words, approach or demeanor.
What the world needs from you is your voice, your truth (here, now, at this moment), your honest language.
Because what we crave most of all are glimpses of humanity. What we long for are glimmers of the unique perspective that only you bring because of the combination of experiences and attitude and character that come together in you, right now, on a stage or in the written word.
To begin this exploration, ask:
Who are you when you are speaking to a close friend?
How do you sound when you give advice from the heart to your child after an argument with her best friend?
How do you show up when an old colleague asks for advice?
How do people say they experience you when you are at your best?
This real, true, honest you – the one who is brave or humble or funny or grounded or clever or bold or quirky – that’s the you we want to see most of all.
These days, it’s easier than ever to see the power of story and narrative to define a moment – and, just possibly, to shift the course of history. Yet so often I see people in the business of social change hiding their own stories and, worse, putting off learning how to tell stories that speak truth and move others.
For a big shot of motivation and meaning-making, check out Marshall Ganz’s Why Stories Matter, a hyper-distillation of the “why” of storytelling. Ganz connects the dots between public and private narrative, and situates storytelling at the heart of all social change work. Storytelling must reside at the center because we do not do this work alone: “change” has a before and an after, and our starting point when interacting with others is helping them see both of those states and motivating them to act, often in risky ways, in support of an as-yet-unrealized vision.
This starts by giving people reason to hope, which, in Ganz’s words, happens through the stories we tell:
Hope is not only audacious, it is substantial. Hope is what allows us to deal with problems creatively. In order to deal with fear, we have to mobilize hope. Hope is one of the most precious gifts we can give each other and the people we work with to make change.
The way we talk about this is not just to go up to someone and say, “Be hopeful.” We don’t just talk about hope and other values in abstractions. We talk about them in the language of stories because stories are what enable us to communicate these values to one another.
Storytelling, then, is not simply narrative. It is an opportunity to communicate values in a way that is resonant and memorable, allowing the listener to position herself in the story, see its relevance to her current situation, and then play forward a narrative about her role in the story of now.
How does this happen? It happens through stories in which a human protagonist is presented with an unknown and has to make a choice. At this moment of choice, the listener feels the tension of what might go right and wrong, projects herself into that situation and, in so doing, experiences the values with which the protagonist wrestles. Ganz continues:
In a story, a challenge presents itself to the protagonist who then has a choice, and an outcome occurs. The outcome teaches a moral, but because the protagonist is a humanlike character, we are able to identify empathetically, and therefore we are able to feel, not just understand, what is going on.
A story communicates fear, hope, and anxiety, and because we can feel it, we get the moral not just as a concept, but as a teaching of our hearts. That’s the power of story. That’s why most of our faith traditions interpret themselves as stories, because they are teaching our hearts how to live as choiceful human beings capable of embracing hope over fear, self-worth and self-love over self-doubt, and love over isolation and alienation.
While this is all powerful and inspiring, it can also feel far away. This kind of storytelling sounds like it’s for Leaders with a capital “L,” and while we can listen to and admire their skills as storytellers, that has little to do with Us, right?
Wrong.
The moment we conclude that “this is for someone else” is the moment we let fall from our hands the power of storytelling as a tool to connect and move those around us. In so doing, we abdicate our seat at the meaning-making table at exactly moment when our voice is most needed. And here is where Ganz’s words strike closest to home:
A leadership story is first a story of self, a story of why I’ve been called. Some people say, “I don’t want to talk about myself,” but if you don’t interpret to others your calling and your reason for doing what you’re doing, do you think it will just stay uninterpreted? No. Other people will interpret it for you. You don’t have any choice if you want to be a leader. You have to claim authorship of your story and learn to tell it to others so they can understand the values that move you to act, because it might move them to act as well.
It’s the ‘I don’t want to talk about myself’ phrase that really hit me, because it is one that I’ve heard so often. It’s often said with a healthy dollop of humility, a “this isn’t about me it’s about the work” utterance. This can sound right until we grapple with the assertion that leaders have no choice but to be storytellers because either we will interpret our calling or others will interpret it for us.
This is why there is s no neutral, story-free space. There are just the stories that we supply or the stories that others supply for us. There is either the meaning we make of the world – including the articulation of our purpose, values and the “why” behind our actions – or the meaning that others make in our stead.
This is why it our job to find our own stories, to explore the values that move us to act, and to practice uttering words that help others see and feel what we see and feel. This is the work of finding the language to describe the choices we have made and are making in service of our work, so that others can feel the hope that we feel, and so that they can learn to use this hope to deal with their fears, including fear of acting on our behalf.
Once we begin to find our voice we begin to narrate the world around us, we begin to practice the art of meaning-making to ourselves and to others. It is at this moment that we truly start the dialogue with ourselves and those around us about the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now.
This is the moment when change begins.
If you’ve made the decision to put your own stories – blogs, videos, articles, poetry, spoken word, email campaigns, multimedia, whatever – into the world, there are two different kinds of gaps you can fill.
You can be on the lookout for untold stories and uncover them, becoming, over time, great at picking stories worth telling, the kind of information you’re able to uncover and the narrative that brings us along, engages us, and, hopefully, pushes us to act. This is what Serial was all about (except for the action bit).
Or, you can decide that the project you’re actually engaged in is to share your own point of view. In this kind of project, you still tell stories but these stories serve as springboards to explore, elaborate upon and illustrate your point of view.
In both cases your job is to engage us, to connect with us, and, yes, to seduce us just a little bit. In both cases, we expect you to hone your craft. In both cases, you have the power to change us.
But because it’s so easy to underestimate ourselves, because we so often convince ourselves we have nothing to say, because we imagine that someday (someday!) we will have wisdom to share…we wait.
Because the act of deciding we have something to say feels a little too proud (“who am I to think that I can….?”), a little too exposed (“what if try and it turns out I don’t actually have anything worth saying?!”), a little too much like it’s the kind of things other people do (“they’re just good at that sort of thing…”), we put off starting. And we put it off some more. And some more. Until we prove to ourselves that we were right all along – we really don’t have a point of view worth sharing.
But that’s just not true. The dirty little secret is that the only way to become, tomorrow or the next day or maybe 10 years from now, someone who has something to say is to start to share our truth today.
