Storytelling is built into human DNA. We like to tell stories and to listen to them. Children learn through story structure, and adults do too. Even when I worked as an account and was presenting monthly financial results, I would look for what story the numbers were telling. This made conveying the relevant messages to others easier. In coaching, training, leadership, and presenting storytelling is essential. This week is National Storytelling week, so use this as a prompt to learn more about stories and storytelling.
Stories are about change. I went into the garden and watched a snail move for 15 minutes, is an event. But I went into the garden, watched a snail move for 15 minutes, and then realised that steady persistent work on my goals gets results, is the beginning of a story. Maybe not the world’s most exciting story, but it is a start. Here the snail’s effort also acts as a metaphor. A symbol that I can apply to my own life situation. The basic structure of a metaphor is an assertion of equivalence between two things. Such as, a skyscraper is a boast. Symbols represent the thing alluded to without being that thing. And a story can be a metaphor too. We use stories to entertain, teach, share cultural information, build trust, and to sell.
When I was young, all I wanted to do with my life was to join the army. Maybe it was because I thought that the world was a dangerous place, or it was the idea of doing something with purpose, I still don’t know what the drive was based on. I was so convinced that I wanted to join the army that I went to the careers office to see if I could get sponsorship from the army to go through university. Based on the career officer’s recommendation I decided to do Civil Engineering at university. But before being seriously considered for sponsorship, you had to attend a selection event. So, at 18 years old, I went with about fifty other hopefuls to a large country house to be assessed. We did leadership exercises, problem solving, presenting, and wrote essays. But at the end of the event I was told, in no uncertain terms, that I wasn’t ready to join the army. And they were right, I certainly wasn’t mature enough then for that sort of life. Anyway, this meant that I ended up doing Civil Engineering at university without much idea of why I was doing it. Some of the course I did like. Engineering is very mathematically based, and I enjoyed this side of it. But it also has a more practical hands-on side, and I enjoyed that much less. I worked for two summers in a drawing office too, which I strongly disliked. By the start of my last year at university, I was convinced that my future did not lie in engineering either. I can still remember this moment in my life very well. I was only twenty years old, but the two things I had thought of doing in my life so far weren’t working out for me. I sat at my desk one evening and I asked myself, what should I do with my life. Somewhat to my surprise my unconscious mind gave me the clear sense that I should be a teacher. Now, teaching is an honourable profession, but I didn’t think then that I would earn very much money as a teacher. And, anyway what would I teach, the only thing I was good at was maths. So, I immediately dismissed the idea, and instead thought about becoming an accountant. Accountancy is numbers based, some of my friends at university were already thinking about this as a career, at that time accountancy firms recruited 10% of all graduates, and my best friend’s dad was an accountant. The decision was made. I became an accountant and worked happily in that field for 12 years before becoming dissatisfied. There were many reasons for this, but the final straw was having a strange dreamtime experience. This experience convinced me that there was more to life, than working as an accountant, and more to reality than the material world. But it still took me another 7 years of searching, reading, and attending courses until I discovered Neuro Linguistic Programming, NLP, and could finally follow my unconscious mind’s suggestion to become a teacher.
So, what’s your story?
“No story lives unless someone wants to listen. The stories we love best do live in us forever.” – J.K. Rowling
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