For a story to be a story, something needs to go wrong. Badly wrong. And in a new and interesting way. If the set-up is clear and strong enough we will be drawn in and curious about how the main character is going to deal with it.
As the legendary Brazilian author Arianno Suassuna said…
Ruim de passar, bom pra contar
Ariano Suassuno
In other words “Bad experience makes for a good story.”
Once we’ve set up the problem, we turn the screw. Let the audience feel the pain of the original problem and then take things from bad to worse. Then they will be hooked. The problem is real, outside our experience and we are dying to see how it pans out.
The trick is to make sure that the stakes are high, the problem is believable and without an obvious solution.
What you do with the attention of the audience depends on the purpose of your presentation and the role of the story in it.
I saw this scary little warning sign on the Wales Coastal Path in Pembrokeshire. The figure in the picture definitely has a Big Simple Problem!
If you are telling a story of how you became the person you are, your story will become a rite of passage story aka ‘and things were never the same again’ story. In this case the problem lies in the past and has been solved. You are the living embodiment of the solution the story relates and this gives you power.
If your intention is to catalyse someone or a group of people into action then the Big Simple Problem should not be solved but remain clear and present. Your presentation lays out the dangers and options ahead and the storytelling skills you use are aimed at getting authentic buy-in from the people in front of you.
If you push your own ideas or agenda you will just turn them off. You are there to make them feel the pain of the situation physically, emotionally and morally and use that momentum you’ve established to move towards a solution that uses the expertise, wisdom and creativity in the room.
You are not the hero of the story – your audience is. The story must be directed at their situation and pain, whether they are clients, your team, stakeholders or investors.
Your storytelling skills will catalyse the change you want to make. But, remember, first you need a Big Simple Problem. Without that nothing else works.
Drop me a line if you’re having difficulty identifying your big simple problem.
This photo was taken in the grounds of the Bleddfa Centre where I teach regular storytelling courses. It is rural, peaceful and full of birds. Including this gorgeous thrush which is about to tuck into the rowan berries you can see on the tree where the bird is perched.
Amazing factoid! Thrushes do not just sing because their genetics make them. They are not just pre-programmed flying meat. They are much more like us then I thought.
Each thrush has over a hundred phrases which it knits together in different patterns in forms. They have learnt theses phrases from family members and the songs of other thrushes around us. This is exactly how we learn language and tell stories.
It is very rare that a story is ever told once. Once it is out there, whether it is in a family or organisational context, the story keeps the memory of the event that inspired it as it morphs to address the needs of new situations.
Like the thrush we need to learn our stories and have a repertoire and then, once we have become fluent, we can adapt them for presentations, social chat, coaching and anywhere where word-based communication happens.
One more thrush factoid. When the supply of earth worms drops thrushes head for their second favourite food – snails. Thrushes have learnt how to crack snail shells on flat stones to get at the juicy creature inside. Once they have found a handy anvil stone they tend to come back to it and a pile of broken snail shells appears. Smaller birds come to nibble on the shells – the calcium is good for making eggs. And hawks spot the shards and hang about overhead looking for a tasty meal for themselves and their brood.
I saw a thrush crack a snail open once. I was walking through a woodland and heard a weird tapping noise. Straight away I could tell that the noise was the result of an activity done with intention and force but I had no idea what it was.
I turned the corner and saw the thrush by its anvil. I ducked down and, for the next few minutes, I watched it persistently and skilfully whack the snail against the anvil stone with a sideways swipe of its beak.
Thrush or human, the rules are the same. We need to be shown the ropes by people who know how to tell stories and our work and practice needs to be focused and regular to get that juicy story our of the shell where it is hiding.
I did a presentation for Chambers Wales last month and the zoom room was packed. It seems that people are keen to get back to doing good work and making the changes that need to be made.
I had polished up my presentation but soon discovered that, once everyone had introduced themselves, my eight minutes worth had shrunk to five minutes. So, basically half the time I had prepared for.
Once I had recovered from the shock I realised that this was a great opportunity to ask myself what really matters in my work, what its real value is and how to communicate it most effectively in a really short time.
The supportive atmosphere and unexpected adrenaline dose gave me just the focus and energy I needed to answer these questions. This is what I came up with…
This is what you need when you turn up to tell a story as part of a presentation
Turn up as your authentic self with commitment to the change that you are asking others to make
Understand the difference between story mode and information mode. You will be using both and you need to know how to signal and embody the difference to your audience or they will get lost or confused
The engine of the story is the Big Simple Problem. Even if this is a global issue like global climate change, the Big Simple Problem needs to focus on one person in order to give efficacy to someone in the story we can care about. The Big Simple Problem needs to be outside the normal experience and competence of the protagonist and the audience you are telling to.
The storytelling super-power that turns your words and presence into lived experience for the audience is the combination of gaze, words, oral grammar and direct connection with your audience. That might sound complicated but you already have all these skills because they all exist in our everyday social interactions. Your challenge is to make them conscious – that’s where a coach comes in.
Email me if you want to chat about what real storytelling skills can do for you.
You may have seen my post about the Big Lie of Storytelling. This post follows on from that one. The very short version of the previous post was that story creates a line of coherent events, often following the life of the main character. This creates the illusion that one thing happens after another.
It doesn’t. The world is much more complicated than that. Everything is happening all the time everywhere, all at once. But you can’t make a story out of that, so we weave a red thread of events through the world and call it a story for the sake of coherence.
Looking at the red thread like that makes it seem like an illusion. Which it is. It is just one thread in the massively complicated weave of the world.
When we tell a story we tighten the red thread. The act of telling it with all the learned and unconscious skills of storytelling makes it dynamic. And how do you make a thread dynamic? You stretch it. Then you twang it.
You twang the red thread by telling the story so that the events of the story appear as a felt reality for the listeners. And then the reverberations of the red thread will start to resonate with the experiences of your listeners.
So, if you tell a story about your wedding, people in the room will remember their wedding stories. And the same goes for stories of childhood, love, travel, loss and all the other experiences that make us human, storytelling beings.
Your story is always much more than what you tell. Yes, when you tell, your listeners are in your story and experiencing it for themselves. But all their parallel experiences are also coming into the room as well.
This is an opportunity to move from storytelling for presentations (where you are aiming for a clear outcome) to storytelling culture, where the richness of experience in the room is allowed to inform and guide the life of an organisation or group.
This involves listening. Listening to the words but also to the resonances that the workplace and the people within it contain.
For example, several years ago I was working with an orthopedics company. Within the organisation the teams were all highly qualified, experienced and committed. But the communication between the teams was not good and productivity, well-being and general happiness and satisfaction were suffering.
The first activity I did with the group was light and playful and I used it in order for them to name the number one thing that would annoy other people at work. It didn’t take long to find out what it was – letting other people down!
The rest of the day consisted of a number of team based creative activities and I was truly impressed with how they jumped into the work and let themselves be seen.
The creative and story work we were doing was twanging that red thread. The red thread resonated with what was going on in the room but had never been allowed to be heard – until now.
By the end of the day it was all coming out. The frustration, anger and bitterness was clearly stated and expressed and deeply and publicly felt. At last.
That big #1 no-no of letting people down was exactly what was getting in the way all along. The teams were managed on a skill basis not a project basis and were answerable to a manager in their own discipline whose top priority was to make sure that their team was doing what was required without any reference to other teams.
They couldn’t commit because they couldn’t deliver because they were in their discipline silos and the structure prevented them from seeing the bigger picture. I’m sure you’ve seen this kind of slow-motion car crash in your own environments.
Tell stories, and other creative activities, twang the red thread and get the space we’re in resonating like a big bell so that there can be no denying what is really going on and what people are really thinking and experiencing. And then we can really get to work!
My storytelling work has taken me to places I would not normally go. The training ground of the Newport Gwent Dragons rugby club is just one of them.
I’m not particularly sporty or competitive (although some will argue with the latter statement!) and I remember when I was a kid seeing the other lads getting really heated during rugby training whereas I could never forget it was a game.
I do get excited in the terraces, though. A friend of ours with rugby connections got us some tickets for the Wales vs South Africa game in the Principality Stadium in 2018. Wales won! They beat the team that would go on to win the Rugby World Cup! Now that did feel like something to jump up and down about.
I have worked extensively in education promoting storytelling, oracy and literacy. One day I was asked to work with a group of adolescent lads on sports journalism. We met at the training ground of Gwent Newport Dragons, had a fascinating chat with one of the younger players and had a guided tour round the club.
Newport Gwent Dragons beating Leinster 25-22
The big ‘A-ha’ moment for me was seeing the players practice. I was expecting a lot of extreme effort, sweating and grunting. I’m sure they do some of that but we didn’t see any and it is not the kind of thing you can do for long, in any case.
The players in the weights room worked with precision and care, paying careful attention to alignment and smoothness of effort. When they came out onto the pitch to practice passing they smiled, played and joked. They spun the ball to each other like a missile but the effort was minimal and the atmosphere was relaxed and friendly.
Their practice had a feeling of being ‘at home’. Their was no rush, their concentration was light and clear, they were lively, spontaneous and highly skilled. We can be like that too.
Sport in the media appears as the headline grabbing and record-breaking achievements of amazing athletes. But the real work is in the practice. And practice needs to be detailed, specific, communal and joyful with expert coaching and guidance.
So, what is your practice for storytelling and who is your guide?
In this post I’m going to talk about gaze. Gaze is what we do with our eyes and where we put our focus when we are telling our story.
If you’ve been looking at my posts on various platforms you will have heard me going on (and on) about how the roots of storytelling competence lie in our social storytelling skills.
That’s right. Those moments in the pub and round the kitchen table when someone tells that story (again) about how so-and-so got on the wrong train and and ended up in Katmandu instead of Kidderminster.
These storytelling interactions seem natural and just part of normal life. They are, and they follow a number of very clear and invariable rules. I’ve trained people on every continent on the planet (except Antarctica) to tell stories effectively and we are all the same and the same rules apply.
The different gazes we use in social storytelling performance, presentations and pitches are as follows…
Room gaze You observe the space you’re in and the people around you. This gaze is clear, neutral and non-judgmental. It’s also powerful. Just being present in a room and observing what is around you brings you into focus for those observing you.
Audience gaze You let your gaze rest on the people in the room. No judgement, no stress. They are just people who want to know what you have to say. Keep this gaze steady and keep the contact for a little longer than feels comfortable. Don’t flick your gaze around the room. Hold the gaze, keep it light and clear and the communication channels will begin to open up
Scene gaze You look through the ‘real’ world and into the world of the story. It could be a real scene that you experienced yourself or something from a myth, legend or tall tale. But you see it. The scene is superimposed on the ‘real’ world and because you see it – we see it. And conversely, if you don’t see it we don’t see it. So we don’t get what you are saying or why it is important. So we move on. Scene gaze frequently evokes descriptive detail and the five senses.
Character gaze You look at the scene of the story through the eyes of a character in the story. If you are telling a personal story about yourself you look through the eyes of your younger self. Character gaze can give us rich sensation detail from the point of view of the character in question. It can also be a great way to embody action so that you liminally act out what the character did (e.g. nod, run away, jump on a horse, turn round etc.), and it is essential for dialogue.
Interior gaze This is when you go inside yourself to find an insight or thought. This can often be provoked by a question. Having enough equilibrium in front of a group of strangers in a high-stakes situation to do this will give you status and integrity in the eyes of those watching
Storytelling Pro Tip: When you practice using gaze, slow right down so you can feel the gear-change between the different gazes and how they all feel different.
Write the gaze names on pieces of paper and put them face down on your desk. Then give yourselves 30 seconds on your timer. Do 30 seconds on each gaze and then, when your timer pings, pick up the next piece of paper. Once you’re done turn them over, shuffle them and do it again. And then once more.
Remember Good storytelling looks easy, fluid and compelling. Practice is lumpy, clunky and awkward. You have to go through the second in order to get to the first. Ask any musician and they will tell you that’s just how it is. Why should it be different for us?
Richard Bauman is one of the founders of the academic study of storytelling, which goes by the name of ‘narratology’. He is perhaps most well-known for his seminal study Story Performance and Event which looked at how a group of Texan dog breeders used storytelling.
One of his most useful insights for us, as people who want to make a difference using storytelling, is the the way that he sees storytelling as made up of three elements…
Story – what happens to characters in the story and the order they happen in (content)
Performance – how you tell the story (style)
Event – this is the really interesting and slippery one and is about ritual.
We tend to think of ritual as those events that mark the big life events of birth, marriage and death. However there are many mini-rituals that we do everyday that also have a ritual quality, including shopping, cooking, reading a bedtime story to young family members, practicing a musical instrument or telling a story.
Why are these things rituals? Because they follow the form of ritual…
There may be specialised clothing, time, place or tools
There is often a three stage structure – preparation, activity and a return to non-ritualised activity
Someone representing the place your are in has the job of getting the attention of attendees for your presentation, ritual or story
The process of the ritual effects some kind of meaningful change, e.g. food is on the table and it is time to eat together; it is time put the book away, cuddle up and go to sleep; once the candles are blown out you are officially a year older; when the event is over you are now officially married…
Storytelling and Ritual
Telling a story is a lot more than recounting a list of consecutive events. In order to have an effect it needs to be done with ritual awareness.
You are normally introduced by a person given that particular job from the host institution. If you don’t correctly recognise the ritual potency of this moment you can make the wrong impression.
The moment before you start is key to making your presentation resonant and compelling. It is very important that you are fully present and not thinking about what you are going to say.
Children’s play and ritual are often connected.
It is natural to feel the symptoms of nervousness but remember this is just your brain and body getting ready the deliver a great presentation – and for that you need energy. So here goes…
Gaze – look at as many people in the audience as you can. If you are in front of a panel actually meet the gaze of everyone there. If you are in a bigger space make sure your gaze goes to all parts of the room. It can feel weird and but that is just energy again, as you and the panel size each other up.
Breathe – once you’ve done that, breathe. Here is a brilliant tip given to me by the great Italian storyteller Paola Balbi – As you look at your audience, breathe them in! On a natural in-breath, breathe them in with positive intention. Yes, it does sound a bit peculiar at first but it really works. You start entering into a relationship with the people in front of you. If they like, trust and believe in you, you are much more likely to get a positive result
Space and Silence – it is so tempting to fill the space with busyness, words and endless slides but don’t! Leave gaps. Big ones. We need those gaps to process what you are saying. The reason you come out of presentations without any coherent idea of what has just happened is because there were no pauses. When you pause stay present, in the room and look at your audience. Your first big pause comes just before you speak for the first time.
Acknowledge the local authority and mini story – thank whoever has introduced you. If it feels right put in a mini-story right here. Something super simple about the last time you were in this particular town or a coincidence that connects you with the place you are in or the people you are with. This let’s the panel see you being you and acknowledges everyone’s humanity
Launch – pause first and then launch into your presentation. This can be an overview of what you are presenting, in which case you might use a connective like ‘So…’ which is a great attention-getter. If you are going to use a story launch with a connective like ‘Last year…’ or ‘When we piloted this product…’
Back to the Texan dog breeders. It turns out that the storytelling was the whole point! They were not telling tall tales in order to sell their dogs to each other and make money. In fact the buying and selling didn’t really make them any money in the long term. They were breeding dogs as an excuse to get together, hang-out and do the thing they loved most – telling stories!
I’m happy to chat with you about the storytelling event, ritual and storytelling. Drop me an email and I’ll get right back to you.
I am a storyteller. I tell stories live in front of live audiences, And then Covid happened. I put out a call for storytelling coaching and filled my available slots in 24 hours. Phew!
I had just finished the first full draft of a book (a novelised re-telling of an old Welsh myth) and had incorporated the suggestions of my generous beta-readers and was ready for the journey to self-publication.
Then I stopped to think. I was pleased with my book and happy that the coaching places were full. But if this Covid thing went on I really was going to run out of money pretty soon. But storytelling is my thing and it needs to be done face to face. I was stuck.
Then I opened an email from a company specialising in helping people make and sell online courses. I was curious, I found out more, I dithered. Finally I went for it. That was the beginning of last summer and now I am about to launch my fifth course – this time in collaboration with a company specialising in arts, healing and well-being. I had earned back my investment in the first course and felt on top of the world. Selling storytelling courses on line worked!
I attended an online conference with the same company later in the year and was intrigued by a premium offer they had. It was about turning your passion into a business. I arranged a strategy call with one of the team and by the end of a half hour conversation I had signed up. The same deal – a big investment but a guarantee that you will earn it back if you follow the programme. It was terrifying but a voice inside me knew that it was the right thing to do. So I did it.
Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash
It was all going so well. Then, about a month through the programme I felt disorientated and uncertain. Another voice from inside my head told me that I had betrayed my deepest convictions just to make rich people richer. Yet another voice (my head can be a busy place sometimes) told be to calm down. I looked through the resources the company offered on resilience and imposter syndrome, reached out to my coach and began to get some perspective.
I had been trying to work on a meaningful lead magnet for my site and had worked on a pdf about storytelling that I hoped would be interesting and relevant. But I couldn’t get it to flow or make sense or be convincing and it just didn’t sound like me. I badly misjudged the content (luckily I showed it to someone first) and felt disorientated and confused by how this lead magnet fitted into the overall plan, the social media, my offer, my lack of contacts blah blah – you get the idea.
Guess what happened next? Yes, another voice. This one was really clear and it said “I am a kinesthetic learner.” Now I knew what my problem was.
I went into an empty room and stood by the window facing the opposite wall and started to speak out loud into the room. I cheerfully and confidently filled the room with my instant success formula. I imagined my social media platforms around the room and saw how the information and images flowed. I imagined my blog posts in the middle of the room and how the copy and images made sense and meaning of my offer and its place in the world. I was finally making this work fit me rather than the other way around.
Photo by Danilo Batista on Unsplash
Then I had my Obi Wan Kenobi moment. Out of the blue I had a phone call from the ex-husband of a good friend of my wife. He is an important figure in the world of Earth and community based education and I am a big fan of his work, although I have never met him in person. And here he was on the other end of the phone! He gave me a few simple tips, affirmed my desire to make a business, we had a nice chat and then we said good-bye. Setting off into uncharted territory tends to provoke bizarre yet meaningful coincidences.
So, suddenly am I on the Hero’s Journey? No, absolutely not!
With all respect to Joseph Campbell and George Lukas, this is not always a useful way of looking at narrative, except in retrospect. Life and stories are actually much messier than this because they involve real people living real, messy and amazing lives.
The story you tell is not ‘about’ something. It ‘is’ something. Once you have practiced your innate social storytelling skills you can put them to work in creating the right experiences for the right people in order to facilitate the change you want to make in the world.
So what is the story I’ve just told you about? It’s about Wobbly Resilience.
A good wobble will shake you enough to get doable and useful solutions to the surface without doing you any permanent damage. If you are facing any challenge, like making a business or getting ready for a presentation, you will feel challenged and out of your depth. That is just part of the process. It gets you to where you need to go and manifests bizarre coincidences and opportunities.
This is not a solo adventure! You’re going to need expert help and community buddies to get you through, give you the skills and celebrate your success. And, of course, you’ll also need to practice the uncomfortable skill of wobbly resilience.
By the way, if you’re curious, the online training and business mentorship company I referred to is Mirasee
Small is not only beautiful but effective, dogged and principled.
This is the message that I am taking from Jane Davidson’s book #futuregen about the implementation and adoption of the Well-being for Future Generations (Wales) Act 2011 by the Senedd (Welsh Parliament).
Jane Davidson served as the minister for Environment, Sustainability and Housing and, with that brief, went on to foster alliances with communities, civic society and local authorities to forge and implement the Well-being for Future Generations (Wales) Act.
This meant pulling together a web of communities and stakeholders and abandoning business as usual. Instead of in-fighting, vested interests, turf wars and inertia the reality of global warming coupled with Jane Davidson’s unstoppable energy and clear-sightedness managed to provoke a deep pragmatism in the organisations, leaders and communities she talked to.
Wales is a small country that has probably pumped more carbon into the atmosphere per head of the population than any other but now it is making a practical and legally binding stand against the practices that cause global warming.
Outdoor Education, Ysgol y Dolau, Llanharan
When you try and change the climate it turns out you have to change everything. Housing, the environment, transport, infrastructure – the list goes on. I was struck by the willingness of the bodies who engaged with the process of change including local authorities, fire services, schools and community groups to deal with the stark reality of what we are doing to our planet.
It wasn’t a straightforward or easy journey. Inevitably, mistakes were made along the way and some people were hard to convince. But, by now, a critical mass of support has long-since been reached and the Act is in force and legally binding.
The blame game is alive and well in ecological discussions and after watching yet another doom-laden documentary it is easy to feel hopeless. What can I do as an individual in all this? Knowing what to put in your green bin bag doesn’t quite seem enough.
The eco-stories we get from the mainstream media show their addiction to the victim/perpetrator/bystander narrative. In this version of reality there is a big bully (the polluter) a victim (for example, a community whose water has been poisoned) and bystanders (us – looking on from a distance in our living rooms, feeling bad and utterly powerless).
Eryri/Snowdonia
This story is different. Jane Davidson acted with vision, clarity, experience and her contacts to draw the threads together like a political mycelium until the momentum overcame the inertia. And now it has become a normal way of operating. It’s just how we do things here.
Following on from the Act, Wales now has its own Future Generations Commissioner, Sophie Howe, who supports and holds to account public bodies in Wales. The dream is now a vibrant reality and begs the question ‘If Wales can do it, why can’t everyone?’
Y Fari Lwyd
A little more about the A Well-being for Future Generations (Wales) Act
The Act states that the needs of the present are met without compromising the needs of future generations.
The well-being domains include… A prosperous and low carbon future, healthier, more equal, more cohesive communities, vibrant culture and thriving Welsh language, global responsibility. (Yes! Culture is an actual core priority!)
Some of the key principles for delivery include… Ecology before Economy (looking at long-term impact) Leadership for delivery (getting things done) Public Accountability (If things go wrong we find out why and how)
Fact is series of statements. One thing at a time. There is a sequence.
Factual thinking proceeds by syllogism (e.g. Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore Socrates is mortal). Nothing new is created.
Socrates – Brains before beauty!
Fact can give you clarity but, alone, it can never tell you why you’re doing something. Logical thinking can never have more than the sum of its parts.
Verifiable facts are vital for effective action and change. The challenge is to maintain momentum, urgency and importance.
Unfortunately, we can get fact-overwhelm very quickly. We can see this in the climate change emergency where the most scientifically advanced societies ever seen on the planet have been unable to reverse climate change, even though we have had clear evidence of global warming since 1958 thanks to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography on top of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory. In fact the warming effect of burning fossil fuel on the climate was originally flagged up by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrenhuis in the 1890’s!
If fact mode works, we have a clear understanding of what is going on. But to make change in the world we have to put factual reasoning down and pick-up our stortyelling tools
photo – nicolas picard
Story Grammar
Story is more convoluted and complex. Many things are happening at once.
There is a web of gaze between the listener/s and the teller/s. As we tell we spontaneously use different modes of telling including information, description, action and dialogue.
Story uses an addative rather than logical sequence. Next time you’re watching a good storyteller step back from the story and notice how often they use the word ‘and’ and how much repetition there is.
Effective storytellers use a number of different gazes. These include the audience gaze where we look at the people in the room; scene gaze where look into the world of the story as if it were really in front of us, and character gaze where we look into the world of the story but from the point-of-view of someone in the story.
Live storytelling uses connectives in order to sequence events and signal intention or intensity. Words and phrases like ‘and then’, ‘so’, ‘the next day’, ‘eventually’, ‘suddenly’. Try telling a bit of story without them and you’ll see how essential they are.
Storytelling is an embodied way of speaking where we show what we mean so that people can feel it and get a visceral and authentic response to it.
The weird thing is that you already use these skills! All these techniques are embedded in our everyday social storytelling. Our job is to become conscious and practiced enough in order to be compelling and catalyse change.
Once you’ve got a handle on the difference between fact mode and story mode it is very important not to mix them up. I was advising on a pitch event earlier in the year and a very promising entrepreneur used a personal connection to demonstrate her authentic connection to the product she was pitching for. Unfortunately, instead of telling the story and giving us a vicarious experience of her journey, she put it in her pitch deck. The story fell flat because it was delivered in the wrong medium.
The organisational storytelling expert Annette Simmons writes and talks about how story can hold paradox, lives with ambiguity and uncertainty and gets you inside the problem. Which is right where the solution is!
stories that work 