Story Dynamics – Stories

  Contents: Your Hidden Storytelling Strengths (Part 2) XXXX? (offer) Your Hidden Storytelling Stengths: Part 2 In part 1 of this series, I talked about “effortless strengths,” strengths that are so natural to you that you might not notice them. In part 3, I will describe strengths you have learned to divert in a way [...]

As a coach, I sometimes hear people say, “I know what I’m doing well. Just tell me what I’m doing wrong.” They seem to take it for granted that their strengths are obvious. But my experience suggests just the opposite. Discovering your strengths turns out to be a process that can take years – and [...]

When we first discover storytelling, it opens opportunities for us to use and develop talents we have developed in our earlier lives.

But there can come a time when holding too tightly to the identity of “storyteller” can hobble us from continuing the sorts of exploration that led us to storytelling in the first place.

Should you be labelling yourself by the tools you use, or by what you create with those tools?

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for students in US public schools emphasize thinking skills. But they lack something essential that storytellers can help provide. We are in the enviable position of knowing things that teachers are desperate to learn!

This makes storytellers like pickaxe-sellers in a gold rush. We have meaning-related tools that teachers desparately need.

Much of what is hard for us as storytellers and artists stems from how important—and dangerous—arts can be.

For all the difficulties, we live in a great time to be a storyteller, not because rivers of money are flowing to us or because we are prominent in society, but because it’s a great time to become the storyteller you are capable of being – and therefore to help nudge society ever closer to what it, too, is capable of becoming.

Showing yourself sounds easy, but it can be difficult, indeed. Throughout our lives, we may have learned to hide our uniqueness. Carried to extremes, this may make us inoffensive but also bland. The best storytellers can allow themselves to be tasted just as they are, to let their flavor completely emerge – and not try to disguise it with salt or MSG.

The second skill of showing yourself can seem contradictory to the first: find your purest motivation and ignore the others while you tell. But this involves shining a light on your desires for your audience and leaving your other desires in the shadows. When you succeed, you have the great opportunity to become a servant to your listeners.

Storytelling Skills, Part 4. Human experience is rich with emotions, yet our society denigrates emotion and sometimes actively denigrates it.

Storytellers, who portray the gamut of experience, need to master two key skills about emotions: 1) Letting emotions flow unimpeded as the story requires; and 2) Creating emotional safety for our listeners, so that they, too, can feel our story.

In many ways, we performing storytellers don’t live easy lives.

So, why do we do it? What’s in it for us?

Could it be something about the mysterious ways that stories pass through us, conveying meanings of which we may be unaware?

In this third installment of “12 Skills of the Storyteller,” I take up the two key skills of relating to your listeners. This is where the magic happens!

In this second installment of “12 Skills of the Storyteller,” I take up the two key skills relating to oral language.