Contents

1) WHAT KEEPS A STORYTELLER GOING?

2) SUBSCRIBER SPECIAL: NEW COURSE ON LEARNING YOUR GIFTS

• Read more or request an application

1) WHAT KEEPS A STORYTELLER GOING?

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

We get up early, pack the car, and drive to our audiences...

We spend years developing our skills and our repertory. We figure out how to find audiences. Most of us spend countless hours on the phone arranging performances and negotiating what we’ll tell.

Then we get up early (or stay up late), pack the car, drive to our audiences (or to an airport), and deal with the sound systems, the noisy auditoriums, the sometimes poorly planned events. And then we repeat the process again and again.

Oh, and did I mention that the pay is often low?

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

Riding the Racehorse

I remember my first time to perform as a featured teller at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN.

The audience had been listening to stories for two days straight. Their response was immediate and strong!

On Friday and Saturday, I told in short sets: 12 to 30 minutes at a time.

Then came 1pm on Sunday: my solo hour. My listeners were primed and ready. They had been listening to stories for two days straight.

I began my first story and felt awe. The audience’s response was immediate and strong! As the performance went on, I adjusted happily to their amazing responsiveness. It was like spending an hour horseback riding, in perfect unity with a powerful, sensitive thoroughbred in its prime. Wow!

Last in Line

After my set (and the applause) was over, a line of people formed, waiting to thank me individually for the particular ways in which I had touched them.

After 30 years, I remember one person in that line.

He was the last in line. He was perhaps 30, slight of build, wearing a worn, long-sleeve denim shirt. He looked to me like he came from the rural South.

When nearly everyone else had left the tent, he stood about 5 feet from me, as though he were too shy to come nearer. I took one step closer to him and looked in his eyes. They were wide open and moist.

I waited. At last he said, “Things have been kind of hard.” He sounded choked up.

I nodded and waited again.

He said, “Those were some stories I needed to hear.” He began to cry.

I stepped forward, put my arms around him, and held him gently for a few minutes.

Then he stepped back, locked eyes with me for a second or two, smiled, and turned and left.

The Gift

I never saw him again or learned what he had found in my stories that day.

But I didn’t need to. I had received from him a precious gift, perhaps the most precious a teller can receive.

He let me know that I had given him what he most needed that day, that my stories had touched him in the exact way he had needed to be touched – that, in their mysterious way, the stories had spoken through me a message perhaps unknown to me.

The Reason?

Isn’t that what keeps so many of us at storytelling? Sure, most of us love the applause, the attention, the chance to hold sway. But those things aren’t the deepest motivators.

My deepest motivation became visible that day in Tennessee, in that one man’s face: storytelling gives me a chance to give people something they need. It gives me the feeling of offering just the right thing, of being the right person at the right time.

That feeling doesn’t depend on all my listeners being generous enough to tell me what it was like for them. In fact, the more often I feel it happening, the more I learn to sense it – to know that, even when no one thanks me for it, someone in the crowd has received a unique gift.

That’s what keeps me coming back. That’s what keeps me going as a storyteller.

What about you? I welcome your reasons at http://www.storydynamics.com/current.

2) SUBSCRIBER SPECIAL: NEW COURSE ON LEARNING YOUR GIFTS

Over the years, I learned that I can give people just what they need by performing – but also by other ways.

I discovered the joy of teaching about storytelling, of helping people find the “missing second leg” in their communication, the leg that propels the heart and the imagination, not just the intellect.

I also learned the joy of coaching, of helping other tellers to overcome obstacles they face in their storytelling, helping them move closer to being the unique tellers that only they can become.

Help Others Learn to Help Others?

They I began to think: If meeting people’s unique needs is my prime motivation, and if I can learn multiple ways to meet people’s needs, then could I maybe help other tellers get that same satisfaction, using their unique gifts in new ways, too?

I tried multiple approaches, from “mastermind groups” to four-month, online courses with 20 people.

But last year, I pioneered a new approach: a telephone plus web course with only 6 people. The small number meant that, in the 6 sessions of the course, I could schedule two coaching sessions for EACH participant (one of them for a full hour) as well as two meaty lessons.

Better yet, the group of 6 would gain from hearing each other be coached to make such significant progress. They would become a mini-community of people learning to use their storytelling skills to meet customers’ needs in unique ways.

Course Starting in October

I am offering such a phone/web course again this fall. Its six sessions will begin the first week of October and be over by the Thanksgiving holiday.

Learn to use your gifts in new ways - without leaving home

It may happen, of course, that not every participant gets the coaching they need in the first 6 sessions. If that happens, we’ll schedule additional meetings in January. I promise to give enough coaching (in the class or privately) that each of you in the course will:

1. Discover a group (a market) who is hungry for what you have to offer;
2. Create the title and outline of a digital product that will attract just the people in that group.

(If you want further help in actually creating the digital product from your outline and offering it to members of your new market, additional optional courses will follow in the winter and spring. In fact, with one of the additional courses, I will offer free websites optimized to help you reach your market.)

Save By Just Asking for an Application

To make this $795 course more affordable to you – and to encourage you to sign up early – I’m offering an Early Bird Special discount.

All you need to do to lock in your discount is to request a simple, 5-question application. Just click the large button toward the end of this web page:

http://IrresistibleOfferCourse.com

You may want to read the page, even if you’re not interested in the course at this time. It contains useful information about how to “get off the storytelling treadmill” by adding to your storytelling income.

• Read more or request an application

(Twelve Skills of the Storyteller, Part 3)

The prior three articles in this series described:
“Preface”: The dangers of focusing on storytelling skills;
Part 1: Imagination skills;
Part 2: Oral language skills.

In this article, let’s take up the skills of relating to your listeners.

Skill 6: Respond to Your Listeners

When you tell a story, you begin by imagining your story. Then you use oral language to stimulate your listeners to imagine the story in their own ways.

Your listeners, in turn, respond to you by constructing images in their own minds. But they also respond with oral language: facial expressions, posture, laughter, even how they breathe.

The communication streams in an endless feedback loop

Then you respond to their response. Each moment builds on the ones before.

For example, you might begin, “There was once a girl so small that she could have hidden in a pea pod.”

Perhaps your listeners lean forward. Some of them smile a bit.

Then you respond to their responses. You smile back. Or perhaps you repeat, “Yes, a pea pod.”

Now maybe some of your listeners laugh a little. Or more of them smile.

Buoyed by their positive responses, you continue in the ”groove” you have created together – which, in turn, weaves the spell even more tightly.

Adjusting As You Go

Of course, your listeners don’t always respond the way you want. In this case, you respond by adjusting your telling to produce a different response.

For example, if your group of 5-year-olds begins to snicker at the word “pea” (taking it for its homophone “pee”), you might say, “Yes, she could hide inside a green bean!” If they laugh at her tiny size (instead of at the saying of a forbidden word), then you’ve gotten the response you want – and you’ll likely replace “pea pod” with “green bean” for the rest of the story.

The Loop Called Rapport

The feedback loop of responding to each others’ responses builds a state of synchronization between you and your listeners.

When you respond to your listener's response to your response, you create synch, a sense of rapport

Have you ever seen the tandem storytelling duo Gerry Hart and Leanne Grace (“Hart and Grace”), of Pennsylvania? They tell stories as a team, and they tell well. But what distinguishes them most is the almost magical rapport they display with each other as they tell. Sitting down and facing forward, if one crosses her legs, the other does, too – uconsciously, at nearly the same instant. If one puts the palms of her hands on the sides of her chair seat, so does the other. They are always in synch, both mentally and physically.

In storytelling, as in other communication situations, when synch builds, the feeling of rapport builds, too. When you are in such a state of rapport with your listeners, your influence is magnified.

At this point, a nearly invisible raising of one corner of your mouth, for example, may create a ripple of laughter. But if you break the rapport, you lose the “multiplier” effect of synch, and will need to expend more energy again (perhaps you will need to speak louder or gesture more broadly for a moment) to have as much effect.

Intense rapport with an audience is a highly rewarding experience. It requires you to maintain a sometimes precarious balance between attention on your listeners and attention on your story. A moment of distraction (such as when someone new enters the room or when your mind wanders) can sometimes be enough to break the spell. Then you need to re-create it.

Learn to pay close, delighted attention to your listeners. Learn to respond, and to swim in the currents of the resulting endless feedback loop.

Skill 7: Feel Your Listeners

Some years ago, I asked several professional tellers how they experience their audiences during a successful performance. Some talked about responding to individuals: “Tell to one listener at a time,” one said. “If you can get one person on your side, the others will follow.” Many tellers, however, described a sense of the group as a whole.

One veteran teller said, “It’s as though the audience offers their energy to you so you can mold it for them. Their energy seems to meld together above their heads. My job is to give it a shape without trying to take it away from them.”

When Pam McGrath and I give workshops called “Dancing with the Audience,” we have each participant tell a story to the group while blindfolded. Afterwards, we ask what the teller noticed about the audience. Most tellers describe being more in touch with their listeners than usual. I believe that, denied the convenience of sight, the tellers turn to additional ways of sensing their listeners – ways that great tellers call into play at all times.

The Power and the Burden

When you connect deeply, with all your senses, to your listeners, you form a bond of trust with them. The audience gives you a gift of power over them.

The power is not yours to exploit, however. As soon as you use your power to aggrandize yourself or to manipulate, your listeners begin to withdraw their consent. In a way, you are like a coach driver: you are hired to direct the horses, but the horses don’t belong to you. If you mistreat them or drive recklessly, you lose your job.

Such power comes with responsibility, which can feel frightening as well as exhilarating – perhaps like taking the reins the first time you drive a coach-and-four.

Talking About the Ineffable

All this talk about connection with your audience is necessarily a bit indirect, because the bonding happens primarily at a subconscious level. Generally, connection is experienced consciously only after it is established; it is created through a myriad of adjustments, each too small and rapid to be noticed individually.

Describing a strongly connected storytelling event, we often use words that suggest being highly present in the moment, such as:

• immediacy
• vibrancy
• vividness.

More commonly, though, we turn to metaphorical language to describe the effects of connection with your audience. These effects are difficult to analyze but unmistakeable to experience. To describe these effects, we compare them to:

• physical force:

• powerful
• compelling
• captivating (which derives from “to make captive”)
• moving
• “She had her audience in the palm of her hand.”

• being engulfed or submerged:

• - absorbed
• - engrossed
• - immersed

• the effects of magic:

• conjure
• “The teller cast a spell…”
• enchanted
• spellbound

If you want any of these qualities in your telling, pay attention to how you respond to your listeners. That’s where the magic lies!

Two centuries later, in 1820, Daniel Webster, the U.S. orator and stateman (a great storyteller!) spoke at a gathering where five grains of corn were placed on each plate, as a remembrance.

Gratitude is sweeter when we remember times of scarcity. And scarcity is sweeter when we season it with gratitude for what we do have.

Share Your Wealth of Stories

I trust that you have enough to eat today. But no matter how bare your larder, you have a feast of stories to share. If you are fortunate enough to have friends and family to share them with, then you are truly wealthy!

Please ask others for their experiences today, both of hardship and of gratitude; please listen well. And then take a turn to share your own.

If you wish, you could place five kernels of corn on each plate, and ask each person present at your meal today to remember five losses or worries, and five moments for which they are grateful. I promise this will draw you all closer.

A Scarcity of Stories?

What keeps people from telling their stories? Here are the top three items mentioned on my subscribers’ survey results:

• Lack of confidence.
• Fear of not holding listeners’ attention.
• Don’t know how to learn a story (for the uninitiated, this often takes the form “I don’t know how to memorize a story.”)

Over the years, I have constructed audio lessons, supplemented by exercises and more, to help storytellers at all levels tell stories with a minimum of effort and a maximum of effectiveness.

These include:

1. The Beginning Storytelling Toolkit (a beginner’s guide to learning to command attention through storytelling)
2. The Storytelling Workshop in a Box (all the key information for intermediate and advanced tellers)
3. The Image Riding Toolkit (how to create vivid stories by connecting with your mind’s ability to think in images)

My Thanksgiving Gift

For the first time this year, you can get all three of the in-depth collections listed above, in the most convenient possible form: pre-installed on a new iPod.

I call an iPod with story instruction installed on it a Story-Pod.

I sell the Story-Pod all year round. But for Thanksgiving, I offer a discount, and add $301 worth of gifts.

The gifts go only to the first 12 to order.

Please check them out:

http://www.story-pod.com

And let me know how your Thanksgiving stories go, by adding a comment on this article, below.

Why haven’t I done story work so far? Sure, the house work has taken most of my time and energy.

But, to be honest, there is another problem: I have lost confidence in myself. After 6 weeks devoted to packing, moving, and unpacking, I have a bad case of what I’ve come to call “Time-Off Poisoning.”

Not the First Time

I remember other times when, intentionally or because of a slump in some section of the storytelling market, I have taken a couple months off.

Each time, I had a hard time starting up again. Each time, I could hardly remember – in spite of decades of this work – that I knew anything about telling stories. Or about coaching. Or that anyone else thought well of my work.

Others, Too

Some of my buddies experience this, too. It doesn’t seem to matter how much fame or success you’ve had. If you take an extended time off, you may face a crisis in self-confidence when you return.

If famous and successful long-time storytellers face this, it’s no wonder that many (most?) beginner and intermediate storytellers do, too.

What to Do?

If you are facing – or have already faced – such a “Time Off Poisoning” effect on your confidence, start by remembering two things:

1. You are not alone. Others face this, too.

2. This feeling has nothing to do with your actual abilities. Therefore, don’t take it as a sign that you shouldn’t be telling. Treat it as a phantom feeling, unrelated to the reality of your storytelling abilities.

Next week, I’ll send out two more quick tips, on strategies for dealing with Time Off Poisoning – including the antidote that got me back on track.

For now, just note that this effect exists for many of us. Don’t be fooled by it!

When you are faced with the seed of a story, you may not recognize it. This is in part because story seeds can vary so much from each other.

But it’s mostly because, until you’ve made up a lot of successful stories, you probably haven’t had many chances to connect story seeds with the stories they grow into.

The Unrecognized Seed

Think about it: you hear finished, fully-grown stories and you love them. Then one day you get a simple image. Do you think, “Boy, I bet that image could grow into a great story?” Probably not!

Instead, you think, “I’ve seen stories. They don’t look much like this image.” So you ignore the image. You don’t “plant” it.

Given that our society talks so often about “artistic talent” as a rare thing that most people weren’t born with, you may even conclude that your baby image “proves” that you could never create a finished story.

So you abandon the image before it can grow. It’s understandable that you might do that. But it makes no sense!

To help you connect a seed of an image with the tree of a story, let me give you an example of a very simple image, which grew into a story that I perform and have even recorded.

Noticing the Image

Years ago, Jay O’Callahan and I gave a series of workshops together. In them, we helped people notice and respect the images in their stories.

Our last workshop was in Pennsylvania. On the morning of its final day, I said to Jay, “Let’s try out a new exercise. Let’s ask people to just wait for an image to come to them.” It was a risky exercise, because I had never done this myself! Still, it seemed worth trying.

Joining in as a listening partner, I got a ten-minute turn to try the exercise. During that turn, I sat in silence and waited for an image. As I waited, I felt a slight pain in my side. I thought, “I have to ignore this pain. I’m waiting for an image.”

But something about it made me think, “No, this feeling is part of the story. Go with it.”

So I said to my listening partner, a little apologetically, “Well, I’m feeling this kind of pain in my side.” Soon after I said that, the pain got more specific.

I said, “I think there is an old man having this pain.”

A minute or so after I said THAT, I had an image of a particular old man. “I think it’s a rabbi,” I said. “He’s holding his side, and he’s bending over in pain.”

I waited a minute or two. More clarity came; I said, “A sound is causing that pain. Someone is singing, and that sound is going right to that place in his side.”

That was the end of my turn.

Planting the Sprout

A few days later, I had a fifteen-minute turn to be listened to by a partner. I said to my partner, “I want to get more images from the story about the rabbi with the pain in his side.”

Nothing came to me right away. But after a few minutes of waiting silently, I saw the rabbi again. Now I heard someone singing coarsely. Then I realized that the singing was a prayer. After a couple more images came, my turn was over.

The third turn I devoted to this series of images was 40 minutes long. I told my partner the images that I had seen, heard, and felt so far. I tried to let the images come anew, even if they had changed since last time. I just imagined the images, describing and experiencing them.

I did not tell the images in “performance style.” Rather, I sat with my partner, waiting for images to come. When the next image came, I said, “Okay, now he’s doing this. Okay, here’s what I see.”

By the end of this third turn, I understood that the singer was an old man who had been a cantor but couldn’t sing anymore. When he tried to sing, though, the rabbi heard, in the cantor’s unmusical singing, the exquisitely painful and beautiful music of God. That was the bones of the story as I had received it.

In the coming weeks, I repeated the process two or three more times, until the story felt like it was wasn’t changing much anymore. At that point, I felt that I knew what happens in the story.

But How Do I Tell It?

But knowing what happens isn’t the same as knowing where to begin telling it. So I devoted a turn with a listener to “asking” where the story began. I waited for an image.

In a few minutes, I saw the rabbi walking back and forth in front of his congregation, gesticulating and muttering. He wasn’t talking to the congregation; he was talking to God. I could tell that the congregation was waiting for him impatiently.

So now I knew what happened, and also where to begin the telling. At this point I stopped “riding the images” and began my usual process of getting playful about the language and deciding how to tell the story. In time, I gave this story the title, “Hearing the Music.”

(You can read the story online at http://hasidicstories.com/music ; I have also recorded it on the CD, “Can You Hear the Silence?” – http://www.storydynamics.com/cyhs )

The Sprouting Process

This story began with an image so subtle that I nearly ignored it. It was a kinesthetic image, not a visual one.

But when I paid attention to it and described it aloud, the image began to come into focus and to grow. I merely kept describing, to willing listeners, the images that came to me – until it seemed that I had uncovered all the images of the story.

Later, I began the process of deciding in what order and with what language to tell those images. In other words, I decided how to decorate my story. But by then, that first seed – of a pain in my side – had already grown up.

So, the next time an image comes to you – in any sensory mode – you can try to treat it as a potential story. You can water it with your attention, and wait, patiently and attentively, for it to grow.

Even more miraculous, my parents’ new bed was covered with the most luxurious object I had ever come across: a chartreuse, satin comforter. (I never knew the word “chartreuse” until my mother used it to describe the comforter.) I had never touched anything so silky. I had never seen anything that color, or with that kind of sheen. Even the word “comforter” suggested luxury.

Each day, while our parents lingered at the dining room table after supper, my brother and I found ourselves in our parents’ new bedroom, admiringly stroking this smooth, shiny, miraculous comforter.

Going Under Cover

We never knew how we ended up IN our parents’ bed. But every evening, there’d we be: lying on our backs, side by side. We always snuggled down so that we could feel the comforter on the bottom of our chins and see our little feet poking up beneath it.

We started playing little footsie games. His foot would nudge mine and I’d nudge his back. Then we’d giggle.

Once, my foot said “hello” to his foot. His smaller foot said “hello” back. Our feet began having conversations.

Then, one day I told a little story about two feet. One was Big Foot; that was clearly my foot. The other was Little Foot; that was his. The two feet did what my brother and I had done that very day.

After that, I always told stories about Big Foot and Little Foot. If my brother had said something funny or had done something endearing, then that would show up in what Little Foot had done. If we’d had an adventure or been scolded that day, so had Big Foot and Little Foot.

These stories would simply flow out of me. I never thought ahead about them. But our memories of the day were always fresh. And it was simple to reframe them as stories about two feet. The stories felt as rich to our imaginations as the comforter felt to our skin.

Stories in School?

Years later in middle school, I learned about “stories.” Stories were something you wrote. If you spoke them, you had to get every word right. You argued about their meaning.

Suddenly, to tell a story seemed difficult and subject to criticism. By the time I was in high school, I was afraid to even try.

Then in my early 20′s, I took a job as a teacher. One day, when I needed to keep a group of 70 very tough children busy for a few moments, I told a story that I’d heard on a recording. Luckily, the story not only calmed them but it also made us feel closer to each other than we’d ever felt before.

As I told that story to those students, the experience seemed vaguely familiar, even though it had little in common with my experiences in English classes. Many years later, I realized it was like the experiences I’d had laying in bed with my little brother.

Four Ways to Make Storytelling Easy

The “under the comforter” storytelling experience had four important qualities that made it easy and enjoyable. In fact, I’ve discovered that, if you can replicate those conditions, your storytelling will be as easy, enjoyable and successful as mine was at age seven.

First of all, I was talking to a particular person. I wasn’t telling the story of Big Foot and Little Foot with the hopes that it would “be a good story.” At that point, you see, my little brother wasn’t old enough to go to school, but I was. As a result, our daily experiences had diverged. Our times in our parents’ bed became a way of bringing our worlds together a little. So I was motivated to connect, not to make something “good.”

Second, I followed my sense of fun. If he laughed when I said something I hoped he would find amusing – or snuggled up tighter saying “ooah” when I hoped he would – then I felt rewarded. Encouraged, I’d go on to try something else that felt like fun.

Third, it was totally correctable. If something went wrong in the story, I just dropped it and went on to something else. In other words, there was no big penalty for mistakes.

Fourth, the response and the reward were both immediate. I wasn’t telling for some future day when this would be a good story. I told for right now. When it worked, we both enjoyed it fully in the moment.

Claim Your Right To Tell!

Humans have told stories since before we have any history. (After all, our first way of recording history was through stories!) Storytelling is natural to us. It’s a birthright. It’s significant. It’s part of how our brains work. In large measure, we take the world in through stories and process our experiences through making stories out of them.

It’s not hard to tell stories. It just requires us to have the four conditions that I had the good fortune to stumble on during those evenings snuggled under a comforter, next to a precious little brother:

1) Direct communication with your listeners;
2) A playful attitude;
3) Lack of concern for momentary failures; and
4) A focus on the immediate moment.

Changing Our Lives

At the time, my brother and I didn’t think we were doing anything that would affect our futures. To be sure, neither of us remembers a single story that I told.

But those moments changed our lives. How do I know? Well, a couple times a year, my brother, who is now in his 50′s and has two grown children, will sign one of his emails to me, “With love from Little Foot.”