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part 2
and the four essential stories that businesses
need in order to thrive. In
part 3
, we’ll take a step-by-step look at how you can
do three very specific things:
• Find the potential stories within your business by choosing what story type
serves you best and then collecting possible stories to tell.
• Craft the best ideas into great stories using the Steller storytelling
framework and some tried-and-true techniques to make the job as easy as
possible.
• Tell your own essential business stories in an authentic way that will help
you bridge the gap to audiences of all types and make your stories stick.
As storytellers like to say, “And now the plot thickens!” Let’s get to it.
PART THREE
Create Your Story
Finding, Crafting, and Telling Your Story
CHAPTER EIGHT
Finding Your Story
How to Find Stories Anywhere
To be a person is to have a story to tell.
—ISAK DINESEN
I
n October 2006, I was invited to speak at the Mesa Storytelling Festival in
Mesa, Arizona. The festival was known for bringing in the best tellers of the
time, and I was excited beyond description, not only for the opportunity to tell a
story to an eager and engaged audience, but also because I would have the honor
of introducing the star performer of the whole event. My mentor. My idol.
Donald Davis.
I sat next to him, right before his set, as another teller performed on stage. I
shifted in my seat, fiddled my fingers, shook my leg violently, all to release the
nerves I felt about introducing the most important man in my life besides my
father (Michael and I were newly dating at the time and he was definitely behind
Donald).
In perfect contrast to my demeanor, Donald was calm, cool, and loosely
holding a worn piece of paper. I wondered if that paper detailed stage-fright
strategies, so I strained to read what was on it. From over his shoulder I saw a
list of words written in handwriting I knew to be his. Names of people. Notations
of situations or happenings or moments. Four or five columns of them, each with
at least twenty words. I remember thinking the words on the paper slightly
resembled the way the episodes were listed on my collection of
Friends
DVDs:
“The One with Joey’s New Brain” or “The One Where Chandler Doesn’t Like
Dogs.”
And then I recognized them for what they really were: possible stories. In his
hand Donald was holding a list of hundreds of possible stories he could tell in
his set. I leaned in slightly, visually eavesdropping on the list. So many stories.
My spying was cut short by the sound of applause. The teller on the stage
had finished, and I was up. I took the stage, grabbed the microphone, and I did
my best to do him justice. As I said his name, I watched Donald decisively fold
up the list of story options, place it in his pocket, straighten his bowtie, and walk
to the stage. I spent the next ninety minutes listening, in awe, to the stories he
decided to tell. I couldn’t help but wonder when I would get to hear the rest of
the stories he didn’t tell from that list.
The single biggest barrier to not telling your story isn’t procrastination or
being afraid of sharing or stage fright; it’s assuming you don’t have a story in the
first place.
This is originally what kept me from telling my stories. It was the early 2000s
when I first felt the desire to tell stories from my own life. But I hesitated. What
right did I have—a young twentysomething from a loving, middle-class home—
to share my stories? They weren’t painful enough. They weren’t dark enough. I
should keep them to myself. It wasn’t until I took a chance at an open mic night
in Oklahoma City, where I shared a story of your run-of-the-mill heartbreak, that
I realized people connect with stories no matter how big or tragic or small and
sweet they are, as long as they are real.
Even if your stories are small, you have them, and they are worth telling.
That being said, no one is immune to this fear of storylessness. Even people
with big stories think they don’t have them. I’ll never forget when I took a seat
on an airplane and glanced at the gentleman seated next to me. He was a
smallish, unassuming man, mousy brown hair, glasses, and in his midfifties. As I
sat down, he barely looked up. He was engrossed in a phone conversation and
staring at a tablet device with a very, very furrowed brow. As I slid into my seat
I overheard pieces of his conversation, which prompted me to, not unlike at that
storytelling festival with Donald Davis, glimpse at his screen and the photo of a
massive fire that, if my eyes weren’t deceiving me, was coming out of the
ground.
The man zoomed in and out of the image of the fire, an image that—once I
realized my seatmate was far too wrapped up in his conversation to pay any
attention to whether or not I was looking—showed a man with a shield trying to
approach the fire.
My seatmate mumbled something about concrete shrapnel on the ground,
that the rig had been compromised, and that, yes, he was going to have to turn
around and head back to the Middle East. He ended the call, then immediately
called someone else and told them to pack for seven weeks and catch the earliest
flight to the Middle East.
He ended that call and sighed.
Uncomfortable with the sudden silence, I decided to fill the space with some
awkward airplane talk and nervously laughed about overhead bin space. We
exchanged the standard airplane platitudes until he revealed he was supposed to
be visiting his mother for her ninetieth birthday.
“But it sounds like I’m going to have to turn around and head back to the
Middle East.”
I responded with my best feign of innocence, “Oh?”
He revealed he was an international expert in fighting oil-rig fires once
they’ve been attacked by terrorists. He was quiet and reserved as he told me
about his work, about his best friend who died in the oil field when he inhaled a
deadly gas, and how, although his grown children and wife wished he would
retire, he still felt compelled to train others to fight these fires.
I was totally captivated by his story for the entire flight. As we began our
descent, I asked him if he ever shared these stories.
He looked at me in disbelief.
“Stories? I don’t have any stories,” he said, seriously.
And though his stories were riveting without effort, what struck me more—
what always strikes me—was that he didn’t see them as stories. Or at least not
stories worth telling.
If you’ve ever let the belief you don’t have a story stop you from telling one,
let me assure you, you are profoundly wrong. Yes, stories come in all shapes and
sizes, but each of us has them and there is a place for all of them.
The problem isn’t that you don’t have them.
It’s that you don’t know how to find them.
Fortunately, that is a problem we can fix.
Finding Stories in Two Steps
By this point, you should be convinced of the power of story. You know why
story is so important, how it works, and the four essential story types for
business. But the doubt may still linger.
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