Contents

1) THE SKILLS OF SHOWING YOURSELF WHILE YOU TELL

2) SAVE $130: KEEP YOUR STORYTELLING CLOSE AT HAND

• Read about your storytelling file-storage bracelet

1) THE SKILLS OF SHOWING YOURSELF WHILE YOU TELL

It's not always easy to show yourself

(Twelve Skills of the Storyteller, Part 5)
The prior five articles in this series described:

• “Preface”: The dangers of focusing on storytelling skills;
• Part 1: Imagination skills;
• Part 2: Oral language skills.
• Part 3: The skills of relating to your listeners
• Part 4: The skills of emotional authenticity.

This article takes up skills #10 and #11, the two key skills of showing yourself.

You can tell very well without having mastered these next two skills, but they are essential to becoming a great storyteller. In fact, if you have either of these two skills, you may be able to succeed in spite of lacking several of the other ten.

Skill 10: Show Yourself

The first skill is showing yourself. This sounds easy. Yet it can be one of the hardest skills of all.

We all have unique characteristics, a unique flavor. Along the way, our most obvious characteristics are likely to have received negative attention. People may have teased us for our way of laughing, our sense of humor, or our way of phrasing things – in short, for having any identifiable characteristic at all.

As a result, 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 do not try to disguise it with salt or MSG.

Letting Your Light Shine

I met someone 15 years ago at a concert I gave of Jewish mystical stories for adults. She came to several such concerts over the next months. One day, though, she heard me tell participation stories to school children. She said, “I didn’t know you could be like that!”

I said, “What?”

She said, “You were so playful, so uninhibited!”

I understood that she was right. I was showing a side of myself with the children that I had largely kept hidden from adults. I was doing well with adults, I realized. But until I could figure out how to let my playfulness show, too, this hiding would keep me from being the best storyteller I could be.

“He's always himself. He doesn't try to be funny. He just is.”-- Betty, Will Rogers' wife.

We have all heard storytellers, stand-up comedians, even politicians who, no matter what they’re doing, always seem to be themselves.

Think of Will Rogers, the Oklahoma cowboy, comedian, philosopher, and actor. He had such a strong sense of being Will Rogers – and no one else. His voice, his facial expressions, his attitudes, and his way of expressing himself were unmistakable.

That’s what the best storytellers can do. They have figured out how to let themselves show through, to be transparent. They are not holding anything back. They show exactly who they are.

Skill 11: Find Your Purest Motivation and Stick With It

This skill involves choosing a part of yourself to put forward, while ignoring other parts.

You might say, “But, Doug, you said that we’re not supposed to hide anything!”

Ignoring is different from hiding. Hiding something is putting up a barrier between that part of yourself and the audience. When you do so, you can be sure that your listeners will sense the barrier, sooner or later, and respond negatively.

But “ignoring” doesn’t involve drawing a curtain in front of a part of yourself. Instead, it means to leave that part in shadow while you shine a light on a different part.

It means to put all your vitality into one part of yourself while letting the other parts lie dormant. Those other parts aren’t hidden, but neither are they activated by your energy or your attention.

Choosing a Motivation

We have many motivations for telling. For example, we may love to be the center of attention, to have people love us and applaud us. Or we may be motivated by our self-image as an inspiring teacher, a lively entertainer, or an agent of personal or societal transformation. We may be hungry to see ourselves reflected in our audiences’ eyes as clever, warm, honest, or charming.

Those motives aren’t bad. We don’t necessarily need to purge ourselves of them.

But if these motives come to the fore, we risk betraying our listeners’ trust.

Offer a gift of hope?

Somewhere inside us, we also have a motivation that is purely for the sake of the listener. It may be to offer them a gift of hope, or of seeing their own goodness, or of relieving them of a burden (of busyness, guilt or timidity, for example).

In each situation, our motivation for their sake may be a little different. But that motivation (or that cluster of motivations) is what that belongs at the forefront as we tell.

In other words, your listeners didn’t sign up to give you a good time. Instead, they signed up to get a good time for themselves. It’s just fine for you to enjoy the process, but they expect you to be there for them.

Therefore, you need to find the particular altruistic motivation you have in each telling – whether to instruct, to entertain, to delight, or to warn – and place that motivation in the sunlight. Breathe life into that motivation. Let your heart’s blood flow into it and cause it to pulse.

For the duration of your telling, all your other motivations will wither from lack of attention, from the loss of psychological nourishment. They may well be present, and they may come to the fore later on at home. But for this moment, you put this motivation first. When you do, you become a servant to your listeners. You are there for their sake. All else becomes as nothing.

Only then can you become a slave to their delight, to their thirst for meaning. You have the great opportunity then to place your own desire far behind your listeners’ deep hungers – including their hunger for connecting to you, to each other, to the story, and even to the transcendent realities that stories hint at, everywhere and in every time.

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(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!

I have been uneasy with the idea of standards. After all, humans have been telling stories well for millennia without the benefit of formal standards. More importantly, in our society we tend to misuse standards to rank what can’t be ranked and to focus on that which can be readily measured – as opposed to that which really matters.

On the other hand, storytelling done well is transformative, whereas storytelling done poorly can be boring or inane. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could separate one from the other or at least identify clearly what needs to be improved?

It’s easy to start making lists of things a storyteller must do in order to be excellent. They range from the physical, like “have good diction” to the structural, like “have a dramatic build to a climax.”

As sympathetic as I am to the intent of this approach, I remain uncomfortable with the fact of an abstract list of what makes storytelling excellent. Why? Storytelling is so dependent on the context in which it’s done. We tell stories differently (and hear them differently) depending on the who, where, and why of the storytelling event.

The story that might be transformative in a bar among friends, for example, would be interpreted differently if told from the pulpit in a house of worship. A story that might be moving and memorable when told to your child at night would not necessarily work at the National Storytelling Festival. Of course, the festival story might not necessarily work well if it were told in a corporate board meeting.

Therefore, standards need to be dependent on the situation. As a first step toward clarity about this, let’s look at the six “bosses” that I believe we serve: six sets of expectations that jointly determine our success.

Suppose you are hired to perform stories. First, the person who hired you (the “organizer”) has goals and objectives. If you don’t achieve those, you will not succeed.

Second is the funder – who may be the same as the organizer or not. If you’re telling in a school and a teacher brings you in as the organizer, the funding may come from a Parent Teacher Organization or a state arts council. The funder’s goals must be responded to, too.

Third is the listeners. In schools, students are the primary listeners – and may have very different expectations and needs from those of the teacher and the PTO. To succeed, you must respond appropriately to all these sets of expectations.

Fourth, the situation in which you are telling brings along its own expectations, both implicit and explicit. The way you would tell a story in a 400-student assembly in the cafetorium of an elementary school will likely differ from what you would do in an individual classroom of 30 students or in a private moment with an individual child – not to mention what you would do in a child’s bedroom at home or in the school committee board room.

Fifth, you have goals and expectations of your own. Someone might say, “YOUR goals don’t affect excellence. The goals of the others are the only goals that matter.” But there is a danger to that perspective. If you aren’t finding a way to engage your passions, if you’re not tapping into your vital energies, then, even though you may meet the surface expectations, your storytelling won’t be fully alive. It won’t have the spark of creativity and joy that only comes when you’re having the time of your life.

Finally, there is a sixth “boss” that can trump them all: the needs of the moment. You can go in with a story that is likely to be perfectly suited to the situation, the listeners, the funders, the organizer, and your own goals. But something can happen at the last minute or even during the performance that changes everything. If you do not respond to the needs of the moment you will fail – no matter how well you’ve met the expectations of others.

Years ago, I told at an international conference of several thousand educators. The conference was large enough to have its own impromptu daycare center. There was so much programming that one of the storytelling performances started at 11pm.

The late-night show included four other tellers and me. The show’s topic was so specific that I knew only one suitable story of the right length. As a result, I knew exactly what I planned to tell.

But when we arrived at 11pm, the emcee made an announcement:

“Some of you know that there was an accident today in the daycare center here. A two-year-old fell off a platform. We have just learned that the child has since died.”

Immediately, the audience began murmuring to each other. Parents who had brought their children to the conference left to see them. Parents who had left their children far away left the room to call them on the phone. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, we were finally able to start the show.

What were the needs of the moment? To speak to these people who had just learned that something terrible had happened.

I had a choice: tell the story I had planned or tell a different story that might better meet the suddenly altered emotional needs of the listeners.

I decided to try to introduce the pre-selected story in a way that might somehow make it connect to the fact of the child’s death. It didn’t work. My story would have been excellent had the needs of the moment been different, but as it was, it failed.

When we are thinking about how to be excellent as storytellers, we cannot rely exclusively on abstract absolutes. As important as standard ways of speaking about storytelling excellence may become in the future, we will still need to relate everything we do to the task of meeting the needs of our six “bosses” – who change their demands from situation to situation, and, occasionally, from moment to moment.

Okay. Your storytelling house is built. That is, you are telling stories excellently. When people hire you, some are pleased enough to hire you again. It’s a solid, pleasing house that serves well those who enter it.

If you’re like most storytellers, though, not enough people seem to enter your “house”!

We hate marketing, but…

To be sure, conventional marketing has little in common with what we love about storytelling. It all seems manipulative. It seems like puffery: exaggerated and unseemly.

Unwilling to be crass, many of us just don’t market at all.

Others try what “everyone else” around us seems to be doing: making a glossy brochure, designing a logo, choosing a catchy business name, etc. We get some results. But it’s seldom clear that such efforts are worth the time, energy, and money that goes into them.

What’s the result of all this? Too many of us either toil endlessly to make ends meet, or give up altogether. The world is then deprived of our storytelling gifts – both because we reach fewer people AND because we don’t get the years of experience required to develop our storytelling to its fullest.

The Big Question

Having created a fine storytelling “house,” how do you help enough people enter it, so that you can afford to remain in it?

And how do you do all that without making your house into something you wouldn’t want to live in?

Answer: To get the right people to enter, make an appealing doorway.

Let Me In!

I call a “doorway” anything that allows visitors to “come in” to your storytelling life. It’s a way for customers to enter into your world, to engage in the process of simultaneously supporting you and benefiting from your work.

You would certainly recognize these “doorways”:

- having a phone number so people can call you;
- having a postal address, fax number and/or email address so people can write you.

But the above doorways share some disadvantages, from the point of view of the customer:

- They can be hard to find unless a customer already knows you;
- Using them requires effort and initiative from the customer;
- There is little pressing reason for customers to “enter” through them.

Here are some other familiar doorways that partly (but not entirely) address those problems:

- Offering a CD for sale in a local store or at your performances;
- Attending meetings and conferences with your business card in hand;
- Having a sign-up list on hand at your performances so you can stay in touch with interested audience members.

The Four Requirements!

None of the conventional doorways mentioned above is capable of systematically energizing your storytelling business.

But it’s possible to create your own unique doorways. It’s possible to personalize them so that they suit you perfectly – and suit the people who are most hungry for your work.

What’s an ideal doorway for you? If you are seeking new customers (rather than getting closer to existing customers, which requires a different kind of doorway) an ideal doorway meets these requirements:

1. In itself, it fulfills a need felt by your particular customers [Meets a need];
2. It involves little risk and relatively little effort for customers [Low Effort and Risk];
3. It allows you to reach out to customers over time while also allowing them to reach in to you [Continued Two-Way Exposure];
4. It fits your energies, style, and budget [Personalized and Energizing].

Real-World Examples

For me, my email newsletter is one such ideal doorway:

1. It gives useful information that is hard to find elsewhere [Meets a need];
2. It’s free, and my privacy policy makes clear that I won’t sell email addresses or make it hard to unsubscribe [Low Effort and Risk];
3. When people sign up for it, they give me permission to contact them every month, so each issue shows them ever more of who I am; and through their comments and any surveys and offers they respond to over the months, I learn about them [Continued Two-Way Exposure];
4. It fits my enjoyment of writing, my love of technology, my limited budget, and my need for deadlines. [Personalized and Energizing]

What’s another example? I don’t think that Brother Blue thinks he’s doing marketing (and that’s a sign of how right for him it is), but his weekly story-swap in Central Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts meets the requirements in a different way, more suited to Blue than to me:

1. It meets the needs of attendees to hear and tell stories that are powerful but not necessarily polished, and to experience a storytelling community [Meets a need];
2. It’s free, near public transportation, informal enough to allow coming in late or leaving early; and it offers a great variety of tellers (if you don’t like one teller, you won’t have to put up with her or him for very long) [Low Effort and Risk];
3. Many attend every week, giving Brother Blue a chance to hear their stories and otherwise get to know them over time; and they get to experience Blue’s style of hosting and responding to the stories he hears [Continued Two-Way Exposure];
4. It doesn’t require any planning for Blue (he can just show up, and his great resource of a wife, Ruth Hill, does all the organizational work), it allows Blue to extemporize about the stories he hears at the event, and it brings him into personal contact with lots of people. [Personalized and Energizing]

Create Your Own Doorway

So, what’s a doorway that suits YOU? How could you change something you already do, so that it meets all four of the above requirements?

What new activity could you start, that would attract those people you want more of?

Don’t stay inside your “house” lamenting how lonely it is. Instead, unleash your creativity. And make yourself easy to find, for those who are eager for the benefits of your work.

Build a new storytelling doorway, and invite people in!

Six years ago, I made an exploratory trip to Oklahoma; I was considering moving from my home in Boston.

The first place I stopped was at a grocery store. Leaving it, I found myself in a short line of people waiting to go out the automatic door. To my dismay, we were moving very slowly.

I was impatient. After all, I had a lot of Oklahoma to explore!

I looked at the woman ahead of me, patiently pushing her shopping cart. From behind, she looked like she was in her mid-thirties and able-bodied. Her shoulders and her posture didn’t suggest that she was in a hurry. She didn’t even look frustrated by whatever it was in front of her that was making us go so slowly.

So I stepped to the side and looked over her shoulder, to see what was causing the delay. I saw an old man, bent over his cane, inching along. We were going so slowly, I realized, because he NEEDED to go slowly.

I thought to myself, “This young woman is quite happy to give this old man exactly what he needs: lots of time!”

This was my first realization that Oklahoma differs from my experience of the East Coast. Back in Massachusetts, I had unconsciously come to expect that people should do everything they can to “keep up” with others. If someone needed more time, space, or assistance than someone else, it was that person’s job to accommodate to everyone else.

In Oklahoma, though, if people need something, the others expect to give it to them.

This attitude – along with several others prevalent in Oklahoma – has subtly changed me as a teller. Why is this on my mind now? Because my years here are about to end.

Farewell to Oklahoma

My wife, Pam McGrath, has accepted a job as a sole pastor in a church in Marshfield, Massachusetts. In early July, we will move 1700 miles east.

We are eager to go Massachusetts, but we are also sad to leave Oklahoma. As a tribute to the state that has taught me so much these last four and a half years, in this article and the next I will share seven lessons for life and storytelling that I’ve been blessed to learn here.

Lesson 1: Give People What They Need

If a stranger can give an old man the time he needs to walk, I can certainly try to give my audiences what THEY need. This means that I should consider my listeners’ needs first when I choose:

- The story to tell them;
- How much background information to offer them;
- The style and language in which I tell the story.

But I can also give MYSELF what I need, in order to offer the story. After all, even the airlines tell us to secure our own oxygen masks first, before trying to help others.

So, as long as it doesn’t prevent my listeners from getting what they need, I can ask for whatever I need, including:

- A sufficiently quiet and well-lighted environment;
- The time and place to prepare myself before I tell;
- A chance to catch my breath, get a drink of water, and meet my physical and psychological needs as I tell.

Some of you may always do all that, but I can think of times when I failed to ask for each of those. My storytelling always suffered as a result.

Lesson 2: Expect and Be Open to Connections

Soon after I moved to Oklahoma, I needed repairs to the fence in my back yard. So I got the phone number of a recommended handyman and called him. He agreed to come over and look at my fence. Sure enough, we agreed on a price, he did the work, and I handed him a check.

But he didn’t just take the check and leave. Instead, he stood there looking absently at the back of his hand.

“You know,” he said after a moment, “I used to have a job as a sales executive. It was so stressful! At the end of a day, I never really knew if I had done a good job.

“After ten years, I decided to give it up. I took a huge paycut to become a handyman. Am I sorry?” He looked at me and continued. “No,” he said, “it’s very satisfying to me when I can do a job like this, do it at my own pace and see the result for someone like you.”

When he left, I realized that what was unusual about this encounter wasn’t just his story. It wasn’t that he wanted to be listened to. It was that he really expected to connect with me.

Most people here – from cashiers to letter carriers – expect every interaction to become a connection. They’re not bent out of shape if you don’t connect with them, but they are open to it and want to feel that our interaction has brought us closer.

How does this affect storytelling?

Well, as tellers, we can have a tendency to view ourselves as “performers.” But we’re not really in the performance business; we’re in the relationship business.

Our primary job is not to “wow” an audience. Our job is not to “blow them away.” Our job is not even to “perform” for them. Our job is simply to connect to them, in such a way that they’ll connect to the story we tell.

If I focus on being open to connection with my audience, a certain magic tends to happen. First, I offer myself to them more openly. Second, if they respond, I tend to respond more quickly and genuinely to their response.

Third, I don’t get urgent about getting a particular response from them. After all, I’m just offering a connection through the story. I’m not forcing it on them.

If I am just present, ready to connect to them and expecting it but not insisting on it, then everything else I do as a teller goes more easily.

Lesson 3: Wait Placidly

I already mentioned the woman in the supermarket not showing any signs of impatience.

On the East Coast, I would expect the woman waiting for the old man to tap her feet or look around as though to say, “What’s going on here?” Or even to check her watch.

But here in Oklahoma, people seem to wait without getting agitated.

I’m an informal student of body language. But again and again, I have watched people here standing placidly – and haven’t been able to tell that they were waiting for me.

What this tells me about storytelling is that there’s a magic in standing there looking like I am having a grand time.

Suppose that, even before I say a word at the start of a performance, I look like I’m in a hurry. In that case, I create a sense that we have to get on with things, that I will be hurrying us along.

But when I stand there completely in the moment, completely enjoying whatever there is to enjoy, I become an object of fascination. It is wonderful to see someone standing placidly, patiently delighted.

And if I can make that be my habitual stance – instead a stance of wanting something or trying to make something happen – then I become a different kind of guide through the storytelling experience: the guide who is both trusted and enjoyed.

(For more on the lessons of placid waiting, see my 2005 article at http://www.storydynamics.com/tulsa).

Lesson 4: Let Others Shine

On one of my first visits back to Boston after living in Oklahoma for several months, I noticed a kind of tension in my stomach when talking to new people. It was a familiar tension, but one that I hadn’t felt much since moving to Oklahoma.

I realized that this is the tension that comes when I’m meeting someone who is trying to show me that they are smarter, more powerful, or otherwise have some higher status than I do.

In thinking about it, I realized that in Oklahoma, by and large, people don’t so often make the little gambits that establish their place in the pecking order.

After a few months here, I found myself relaxing in a new way. But I only noticed that relaxation when I returned to my old circle and began experiencing once more the tension that comes with the “status dance.”

As a storyteller, if I am unconsciously projecting to my audience that I want to establish that I am smarter or more charming or in any way “one up” from them, I demand too much of them.

It shouldn’t be necessary that they grant me higher status, just to enjoy my story.

Instead, I can decide, unilaterally, that we get to be equals. I can take the attitude that “you are just wonderful, all you people there. Yeah, I’m fine, but what I notice is that you are fine, too, and that I am open to and respectful of you.”

In that case,, this act of storytelling will be between equals, and we can equally share its delight.

(Next month, I’ll continue this article with three more Oklahoma lessons for storytellers.)

Contents

1) WHAT CAN STORYTELLERS LEARN FROM TULSA?

2) EXERCISE: COMPARING THE STANCES – IS YOURS TULSA OR BOSTON?

1) WHAT CAN STORYTELLERS LEARN FROM TULSA?

Note: I am re-posting this newsletter, which I first wrote in November, 2005, in honor of my upcoming move from Oklahoma back to Boston (scheduled for July, 2009).

Since I moved to Tulsa last winter, the city has been my storytelling teacher.

One day last month, I walked between my car and the car parked next to it, as I was about to leave a crowded parking lot. Fifteen feet ahead of me, I saw a woman in a denim jacket standing there, smiling. I smiled back at her.

II got in my car, then took my time arranging my seat belt and my CD player. Finally, I started the engine and backed out of the parking space.

As I pulled out, the woman in denim walked into the space where I’d been standing and got into her car.

I realized with a start that I hadn’t known she was waiting for me. I had thought she was just standing there, perhaps enjoying the day. I felt a twinge of guilt, because I certainly would have moved faster, if I’d understood.

Then I remembered: this has happened to me before in Tulsa. I don’t always recognize that people are waiting. Why? Tulsans have a behavior that I never recognized in 35 years living in Boston, which I call “placid waiting.”

In Boston, if someone is waiting for you, you know it! Their body language gives many clues, some subtle, some not. The most obvious signs, which are fortunately rare, include glancing at their watches, folding their arms, and even tapping their feet. But the less obvious signs are just as clear. People stand with their weight forward. They may even lean forward at the waist. They have an expression on their faces as if they are about to take a breath and leap into something.

They do not look placid.

Now, whenever I catch myself leaning forward impatiently, I think to myself, “My impatience won’t really make this line at the grocery go faster. I might as well enjoy myself.”

When I can remember to wait placidly, I love it. I feel like I’ve been freed from an evil enchantment and can now enjoy the world around me – including the people who are making me wait.

The Storytelling Connection

You might be wondering, “What does placid waiting have to do with storytelling?”

To understand the answer to this question, you need to realize that your storytelling thrives because of many factors. For example, it’s important to imagine your story well. It’s also important to shape your story well, It’s equally important to be in touch with the emotions of the story’s characters. And much more.

But, in the end, imperfections in any of those factors can be compensated for by one skill. Further, if that one skill is absent, your storytelling will almost cetainly fail.

What is that one skill that, when present, almost guarantees success – and that, when absent, nearly always means failure?

The skill is relationship building. If you build a good relationship with your listeners, you will succeed. Your listeners will forgive you many mistakes, because they feel that you are talking to THEM. Conversely, even if you’re wonderful in every other detail, they will tire of you if you’re not creating an honest relationship with them.

What is the most important part of creating a relationship with your listeners? You must begin by letting them know that you choose to be with them, that you respect and care about them.

Sending the Message That You Care

How do you show your willingness, respect and caring? Don’t try to put it into words. As soon as you say, “I care about you,” your listener will think, “Why? You don’t really know me. What do you want from me?”

Instead, you reveal your attitude through HOW you talk, not through what you say. You convey it with tone of voice, with the pace at which you speak, and through a number of subtle but observable behaviors: How far forward is your weight? How much tension is in your head, your neck, your throat, and thus your voice?

People will respond to these cues, usually unconsciously – but all the more strongly because such signals operate below their awareness, and therefore they can’t compensate for them consciously, as they can for your words.

How do you give the right cues? It’s easier than you might think. To be sure, it’s possible to break these elements of body language into small pieces. You can work on any habitual tension in your neck, say, or on where you place your weight when you tell.

That isn’t usually the best way to improve, though. It’s often counter-productive, and, at best, not a good use of your time. Actually, the best tactic is to find your placid place, your sincerely pleased place inside you.

The Simple Way to Tell Like a Tulsan

As you tell, remember that you’re not in a hurry for the storytelling to be over. You’re not in a hurry for your listeners to like the story – or to like you. Rather, you’re having the time of your life, wanting nothing more than being right here with these people, right now.

If you find that placid place, then your subtle body language will convey a respectful invitation to your listeners. Then, if you follow up well, you and your listeners will form an ever-more-solid relationship. And that is about the most important secret ingredient of your storytelling success.

When you’ve succeeded – when you can look back at storytelling well done – remember to thank the people of Tulsa. They may not have received much recognition for their city yet. But they’re enjoying themselves anyway, while they wait.

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2) EXERCISE: COMPARING THE STANCES – IS YOURS TULSA OR BOSTON?

Want to put the ideas from the Article of the Month (above) into pracitce? I’m giving away an exercise you can do with a partner (or a group), to notice the effect of your stance as you tell.

In this exercise, you will have a chance to learn the effects of a very specific change in your way of telling – a change that can make the difference between success and failure.

Here are the full instructions for an exercise you can do with a partner (or a group), to notice the effect of your stance as you tell.

1. Choose a story that you know well. Tell about 2 minutes of it to your partner.

2. Ask your partner for appreciations: What did your partner like about the story, your telling of it, or the effect on your partner?

3. Now spend a moment finding your relaxed, confident state. It may help to remember a time when you felt completely relaxed and alive, when you didn’t want anything to be different from how it was. Perhaps you remember:

a time you were in a favorite place?
a time you were with a favorite person?
a time you were engaged in a favorite activity?

Focus on how that time felt. Then try to bring that feeling into your body.

4. Now, tell for another two minutes. Perhaps you would like to:

tell the same exceprt or story again.
continue with the next section of the story you told
tell a different story. (This may make #5 less conclusive.)

5. Ask your partner for appreciations. Then ask one or more of these questions:

Was there anything different between the two times, about the way I told?
Did you feel differently toward me during the two tellings?
Did you notice anything different about the way I stood? About the gestures I used? About my tone of voice?

6. Talk to your partner about how the two tellings felt to you. Did you notice a difference. Did you feel differently toward your listener?

If there was a difference that you or your partner noticed, what does that difference tell you?
If there was no difference, check out with your partner which of the following may have caused the lack of difference:

Perhaps you always tell with relaxed confidence.
Does this fit your and your partner’s experience?
Perhaps you were unable during the exercise to become relaxed.
Does this fit?

7 (optional) If you wish – and your partner consents – you can try to tell one more time.

8. Switch roles with your partner and repeat steps 1-7.

Let me know how this goes for you!

But is this an accurate assumption? What is the exact relationship between a story and the meaning or meanings that a listener experiences? If you tell stories in a practical context (such as business, religion, education, therapy, public policy, or persuasion of any kind) what is a useful way to think about how stories convey meaning?

Interpreting a 3-Word Sentence

Let’s start simple and work our way toward complexity.

Suppose Jack said to Jill, “I love you!” What meaning does Jill attribute to that three-word statement?

Obviously, it depends on Jill’s past experiences with Jack and her attitude toward him. For example, does she take Jack’s statement as a long-awaited declaration of undying affection? Or does she take it as an insincere attempt at seduction?

Equally obviously, Jill’s interpretation of meaning depends on the immediate context – on where they are and on what has just happened.

For example, if they were sailing on Jack’s yacht for the twentieth time and she had just told him that she was sick of sailing in stormy weather, does she take Jack’s statement as an attempt to stop her from being mad at him?

Or if they had met only three days ago on a cruise ship and she had just told Jack that she has decided to leave the cruise and go back to Yonkers, does she take Jack’s “I love you” as his attempt to make her change her mind and continue with the cruise?

In other words, Jill’s interpretation of Jack’s words depends on the nature of her relationship to Jack, her attitudes toward him, and the context of his remarks. But that’s just part of the problem.

But the Story of Jill?

Jill is responding to the Jack she knows. But what if you hear about all this second-hand? In short, how is this different for the listener to a story about Jack and Jill?

There are multiple differences between Jill’s interpretation and a listener’s interpretation. For today’s discussion, let’s notice simply that Jill has first-hand knowledge of what happened with Jack. But the listener to Jill’s story has to imagine what happens during Jill’s story, based on the storyteller’s description.

What Actually Happened?

Even though you and I may have heard the same story about Jill and Jack, we may imagine subtly different events.

For example, suppose you heard a story that begins like this:

“On the shifting deck, Jack knelt down in front of Jill and said, ‘I love you!’”

When you read that, you most likely created your own mental images. For example, you probably created a “shifting deck” in your mind.

Take a moment to notice: What was YOUR “shifting deck”?

Did you imagine the deck of an ocean liner? Or of a sailing ship? Or did you imagine the porch of a house in an earthquake? Or…?

And when Jack knelt down, how did you imagine him? Was he on one knee or two? Was he looking at Jill or not? Did you imagine how he was dressed?

If you took the time to imagine that scene, you imagined it in your own way. No two people ever imagine a scene exactly the same way, because each has his or her own predilections and memories to draw on.

So the details of your images differ from Jill’s and from every other listener’s. Your exact version of the story itself is unique! It’s no surprise, then, that your interpretation of those events will be unique.

Be Thoughtful About the Factors

Once we understand that many factors go into the process of a listener’s creation of a meaning and that listeners will arrive at many different meanings from a given story, then we can be more thoughtful about the problems of applied storytelling.

In entertainment storytelling, the engagement of your listeners is paramount. You want listeners to find your stories meaningful, but you are generally not invested in a single meaning.

But in applied storytelling, the particular meaning your listeners arrive at is as important to you as their engagement with the story.

Not an Arrow in a Target, but Ripples in a Pond

If you assume that telling Story #1 will automatically cause listeners to arrive at Meaning A, then your communication will fail for many of your listeners. Why? You will not be paying attention to all the factors under your control that tend to guide people toward a particular meaning.

What are those factors? There are many. But they all affect the exact context in which the story is heard. They affect the listener’s relationships to the storyteller and to the events of the story.

All great applied storytellers make use of these factors, at least unconsciously. Fortunately, everyone can learn to be aware of these factors. With experience, you can learn how changing each one of them affects the listener’s likelihood of creating a particular meaning. It is even possible to master the adjustment of several factors simultaneously.

But first – and foremost – you need to understand that stories convey meaning only by influencing the individual meaning-creation decisions of your listeners. This is an artistic process, not a mechanical one.

In even the most matter-of-fact environment, stories “mean” by initiating a complex, interactive series of communicative events. That complexity is the source of the power of stories. If you use creativity and thoughtfulness about the process, you can fully unleash that timeless power.