part0009

When working with teams, I most frequently hear this comment after the personal storytelling session: ‘I’ve learned more about my colleagues in this one hour than I learned in working with them for a year!’ In the act of storytelling, we are seen and heard with complete attention. We own our moment. Our stories reveal the collective humanity behind the job titles, and we begin stepping into our authentic presence.

There is only one of you in all time. You are unique and you are the author of your story, the person who can tell that story like no other. Your story is worthy of contemplation and needs expression. Within your life experiences – the ordinary, the epic, the dark and the light – there are important lessons, compelling insights and powerful messages to be revealed. You discover your beliefs and your commitment to them. Your stories live within you at a cellular level and shape your very physicality. Like the ground upon which you stand, your story is a place from where you can say, ‘Yes, I know this.’ This is a place where I can trust what I know .

Kafka’s dramatic take on the subject is that ‘a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us’. 12 I love the power of that image – a splitting open, an almost violent disruptor of the sleepwalker in us, the breaking through that which has become frozen (in time), shaking things up and releasing the stories once held captive in all the ice crystals.

Before your audience, team, clients and other stakeholders can care about what you know, they have to know who you are . That means you have to know who you are. This self-knowing comes from your life story. Hands down, it is your best asset.

What could be more powerful and effective in shaping your authentic voice and presence than your honouring and valuing the stories you carry within you? Wear them like a long, majestic cape that flows from you as you move through the world!

Often our life stories begin with the stories of our ancestors – those who came before us and made it possible for us to arrive ‘here’. These stories might be epic tales of journeys to new lands, of sacrifice and hardship to create a new life and learn new ways. Sometimes these stories are about continuity, roots, and tradition; about beliefs and community.

Most of us have character stories within our families: anecdotes or repeated tales about the antics and habits of a parent, grandparent, eccentric auntie or ever-reliable uncle. These ancestral stories – celebrated or quietly gathered across the day-to-day – are rich starting points for understanding the story of yourself. And, of course, your childhood stories have a profound influence on your future choices, paths and passions.

ANCESTRAL CONNECTION EXERCISE

Sit comfortably, close your eyes and take a few deep breaths.
Imagine all those ancestors who came before you, making it possible for you to be where you are today – those you knew and those you never knew.
Conjure up the extraordinary trail of beings behind you, whose lives created the bridge to your own life here and now.
Slowly come back to now .

When I was five years old, living in an apartment building in New York, a teenage girl who lived in the same building took me up the lift to the rooftop. When we stepped onto the roof, we saw a group of construction workers toiling away in the glaring sun. Many of them had T-shirts wrapped around their heads like turbans for protection.

That rooftop offered a panoramic view of the city. In my childhood innocence, having never seen this view nor turban-headed, shirtless men, I truly believed that I had magically stepped into another world.

The experience didn’t last long, as my frantic mother found me and snatched me back inside, ferociously rebuking my tour guide! Although the adventure was short-lived, its impact on me and the sense I made of it was immense. I had caught my first glimpse of a world way beyond my own, a world that was exotic, mysterious, extraordinary and huge.

I’m convinced that the indelible impression it made on me motivated my nomadic adult life. I travelled around the world and lived in many countries and cultures. I would call this a micro-size story because I can tell it in a minute. But again, its impact on me was epic. That single moment was a story that packed a mighty punch.

What’s so marvellous about the stories we choose to remember is that they can come in all sizes – from the recollection of a single moment to an epic tale – and we get to be the author. We can embellish them, re-jig them and exaggerate them. We can make them film-noir black-and-white or we can explode them into Technicolor! Purist accuracy be damned!

Our stories contain essential truths and significance for us when we tell them from the heart and the gut. What matters is the impact they have on us and the sense we make of them. For all I know, those men on the roof were firemen or actors on a set. We don’t need to tyrannise our stories with facts. We’re not historians!

Your stories feed your personal and professional life. By taking ownership of your stories, you tap into the powerful wellspring of your unique life force, clarify your strengths and ignite your courage.

Think of an anecdote about a remarkable person and their impact on you. Remember a time when you felt excluded. Conjure up the enchantment of a landscape you love. Capture the inventory of what makes you feel ferocious and want to rant! Think of a time you truly seized the day. Recall a time when you turned lemons into lemonade and salvaged the situation. Think of the funniest things that ever happened to you. From your metaphorical rocking chair, share significant lessons you’ve learned with a younger person or a childhood you. Mine your life experiences for stories.

There are great themes to be captured from your mining: achievement stories, failure stories, courage stories, inspiration stories, decision-making stories, stories about when you said yes to something and when you said no to something, turning-point stories, memorable-event stories, stories about seeing the world in a new way – epiphany stories, stories of adversity – crucible stories and many others.

Continue the list of stories that are calling for your attention. Get out your hardhat, gloves, goggles, picks and dusters and enjoy the archaeological dig for stories in your very own repository.

STORY INSIGHTS EXERCISE

Make a list of the stories you easily recall, the ones that leap out at you.
Next to each one, write, ‘What I learned from this was…’, and then fill in the blank. Don’t overthink it. Work from the gut and work fast. For instance, on my own list is a story about working as a dishwasher at a performing arts camp and learning the value of earning my own money.
When you’re done, read your lessons aloud. Enjoy your discoveries as your voice rings out and you feel the energy that comes from the clarity of your insights. You are in the process of cultivating your authentic voice.

Many years ago, while in my teens and dancing with a ballet company, I landed the role of the Russian doll in the ballet Coppélia . What thrilled me about this role was that I didn’t have to be en pointe but got to dance folksy, earthy steps in tall red leather boots. How I loved those boots and how thrilled I was to have got this part!

On opening night, I performed my dance and then took my leave of the stage. Adrenaline pumping, I tore off the boots. That’s when the terrible stomach-on-floor, rabbit-in-the-headlights moment hit: I was supposed to take a curtain call right after my dance! The audience was applauding and I had shed my boots! There was no way I could get them on again quickly enough.

I grabbed my boots, rushed back on stage, took a curtsey-like bow and held my boots up high with a final flourish. It was a triumph for me in two ways. First, I had acted as if my unorthodox curtain call was intentional, and the audience seemed to accept it. Second, I had chosen not to forego my curtain call just because my costume was incomplete and not in compliance with the ballet’s rulebook. I chose to go out there, claim my applause – the audience’s gift to me – and celebrate my success.

My achievement in this story was not that I got through a performance, or even that I invented a curtain call in a moment of crisis. My achievement was in recognising that my performance was in service to my audience and receiving their applause was part of a contract of respect and valuing. The ballet company’s director was less impressed with my ‘achievement’ and reprimanded me mightily in front of the whole corps de ballet afterwards. Nevertheless, if I could do it again, I wouldn’t change a thing!

Tell me a story about something you achieved and are proud of. I’d really love to hear it! Please, please , don’t say these fatal words: ‘I don’t like to big myself up.’ Your stories are not for you alone. They are in service to others . By telling your stories in service to others, you inspire and motivate them. You share learning and powerful messages with them. You give them an opportunity to reflect on their own lives, to feel more and dare more. Blowing your horn with a proud achievement story makes music for others to hear. It is a gift of permission to value themselves and claim the contributions they, too, can make. In shining your own spotlight, you enable others to see you and see themselves more clearly. Please use this magic mantra:

My stories are in service to others .

It will transform your habitual self-deprecating ‘humility’ into generous, open-hearted, self-valuing manna. With this mindset, you will experience an exciting and powerful shift in your presence. There will be no backing off, no apology in sight. Here, you are at your most authentic. Here, you are the artistic director of stories that connect you to powerful truths and a deeper self-knowing.

Let’s get started on some storytelling! You can focus on an achievement story or you can choose one you captured from your ideas earlier in this chapter. Remember, to move others, you need to be moved yourself, so pick one that genuinely excites, energises and inspires you. Is there one in particular that leaps out and attracts your attention like no other? Commit to it and test-drive it to determine its impact on you and others.

You can download a larger version of this template by going to www.theatre4business.com and clicking on the Performing As YOU resources link on the website.

Now take a deeper dive and craft the full story from your distilled bullets by ad-libbing. Total improvisation. Tell your story without a script. Record it if that feels helpful. Let your spoken story be as raw and messy as it needs to be. Just experience getting it ‘out’ and surprise yourself!

On reflection, did you notice:

Once you’ve experimented with your raw story, enjoy shaping and editing it. You can write it down or record it or both. You now have one great story to start your archive or to add to it.

If you’re preparing for a promotion or transitioning into a new job or role, this is a perfect time to take stock of your career story and tell that story in a compelling way for those who need to hear it. By career story I don’t mean your CV – I mean the narrative that underpins your bigger résumé and that prioritises story over data .

Try this: On a whiteboard or on flip-chart paper (work big!), draw a timeline and divide it according to your professional chapters, positions, or experience. Here are some examples.

Valerie, a regional director of business growth in a multinational chemical company, talked through the challenges she had overcome in her life and connected her strengths from those experiences to her capabilities in her career story.

Beth, a bio engineer, talked about the origins of her career path. She explained that her sibling had a rare disease and that an engineer had designed a medical device that massively increased her sibling’s life expectancy, which was inspirational to Beth. She developed her story to illustrate the ways in which her love of engineering played out and made an impact on her organisation.

Donna drew two parallel timelines – life events and career events – and captured the significant links between them. She used ‘I can’ moments from both her life and work; for example, making the key speech at a family milestone celebration, sailing a boat single-handed, delivering increased profits in her market sector, standing up and being counted in a critical moment on the job, and so forth. This produced a confidence and self-belief ‘map’ that helped Donna see clearly the value she brought to her organisation and how it played out. She was able to summarise her key leadership assets and how they would serve her in her next role.

Another approach was Meg’s. She was leading a new team in a large tech firm. Meg began by storyboarding her career (chapters of jobs, roles, responsibilities). For each section, she summarised her key achievements and the strengths they illuminated; eg ‘I am a great decision-maker, I exercise astute judgement, I enjoy relationship building one-to-one, I am energised by winning,’ etc. Finally, Meg looked into her personal life story for evidence of these assets and how they operated in her life outside the office.

The big ‘aha’ moment for everyone was in seeing the connections between their career and life stories and feeling a powerful sense of integration. They were in the act of bringing both their ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ selves into play, of bringing more of themselves through the door.

It’s not always easy ‘bringing more of ourselves through the door’ at work. Companies have their cultures, their spoken and unspoken rules and codes (‘That’s the way we do things here’), their unique jargon, their dress codes, and, very often, their male role models, who define what professional looks and sounds like.

Let’s hack our way through the low-hanging fruit to get to a clear space. See if you recognise any of these thoughts:

Just reading this list makes me feel as if I’m walking through a petrified forest full of thorns and brambles. But in the clearing is a woman dancing in the moonlight, laughing at the gods, running with the wolves.

It’s easy to see how, over time, the routine, company culture and habits we fall into create professional masks and heighten our conformity, risk aversion, and fear of failure or standing out for the wrong reasons. But companies are communities, and their conventions are entirely human-made, capable of becoming mythologised. Over time, those myths are perpetuated and become entrenched. They become the story.

In response to the tyrannical ‘That’s the way we do things here’, one might ask, ‘Who makes the rules?’ Why not break the rules if they don’t serve us? Storytelling can help us to see the big picture more clearly, make sense of our personal and professional selves and provide evidence of our growth and gifts. Our storytelling can make us more courageous by making us whole.

Remember those habitual stories we discussed earlier, in Chapter 2 , ‘Your Own Cast of Characters’, the ones that go unchallenged?

These know-it-all voices can take up an awful lot of airtime, and we let them! A particularly dramatic example of this is Ava’s experience. Ava asked for coaching to ‘find her voice’. She explained that her visibility was rising in the male-dominated automotive sector. She had been invited to give a series of keynote talks to large audiences and she wanted to sound more confident.

We were in a room that was well protected from outside noise and had good acoustics, but I struggled to hear Ava. Her voice sounded tight and whispery. When I asked her to speak up, she stopped, blushed and said: ‘I can’t. This is how I speak. And I’ll always use a microphone.’

Ava believed that with a few tips and techniques she could get through her keynotes with the aid of a microphone. But no amount of microphone volume was going to make her talks compelling. Why? Because when I listened to Ava speaking, I had no idea who she was. Why would anyone listening to Ava’s keynote be inspired, moved or persuaded by her ideas or trust her if they didn’t know who she was and if she didn’t share her humanity with them?

We threw away the script and the agenda. Ava told me her life story, a story of loss and hard work and reinvention. It took a few starts; her eyes welled up, and she got short of breath, anxious and stuck. I encouraged her to keep going through her tears. I asked her to move as she wished and as her emotions led her: to walk, to sit, to stand, to make eye contact, to face the wall; to let her body lead ; to break all the rules. There were no rules.

In this rehearsal space, Ava bravely explored her story. She didn’t stop. Not when the going got tough and she was close to tears. Not when she actually cried. Not when she moved and not when she was still. Her story found new life. Her story found new words. Her words started to pour forth with pace, with volume, with tones, with intensities. They carried weight. She was unstoppable. When she came to the end of her story, Ava looked and sounded very different.

Ava had broken through her fear of expressing her emotions .

By following role models who believed vulnerability was off-limits in the boardroom, she had left her full self at the door. There was nothing Ava needed to learn about vocal exercises or speaking techniques.

By facing the fear of an old story – ‘If I start crying I won’t stop’ – and by honouring the wisdom and experience behind her tears, Ava found her voice. She may always prefer microphones, but now she can still be heard if the technology breaks down. Even if Ava chooses never to tell personal stories in her talks, she has experienced their power and can show up in her full humanity when she walks to the podium, takes a breath and begins. She will inspire her audiences with the weight of her presence and her words.

1.	The title of my story is _____________________________ _________________________________________________
	(Wear your imaginative storyteller’s hat. Your title doesn’t have to be literal. Hook your audience’s attention)

2.	This is a story about (One sentence) __________________ __________________________________________________
	(Think movie-poster blurb; eg ‘This is a story about a catastrophic climbing expedition’)

3.	Picture this ______________________________________ _________________________________________________
	(An image that symbolises your story or key message, that one larger-than-life slide projected on the screen)

4.	The message is ___________________________________ _________________________________________________
	(What do you want your audience to think about? Care about? Be inspired about?)