Storytelling helps us know what it means to be human...

Storytelling is important, in all times and all places. Storytelling, like all art, helps us know what it’s like to be human, including:

- What we have been in the past;
- What we are like now;
- What we are capable of becoming in the future.

Art does this in myriad ways, from van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers to great novels about imagined worlds. The art of storytelling does this through both informal and formal exchanges, from folktales told around a campfire, to personal experiences shared in a diner, to concert storytelling performances on large stages.

The Experience Factor

Is it any secret that the pace of our society is accellerating? And that the more we work and the more we consume, the less satisfied we are on the deepest levels?

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy not having to worry about the basics like food and shelter. I also love the fine things in life. I like my tools, including computers; I am very glad they exist.

Yet I also believe in the wise words of the Jewish compendium of writings known as the Talmud:

“Who is weathly? The one who is happy with his portion.”

In a society based largely on consumption, status, and the profit-motive, artists help shine a light on the quality of human experience.

Art Is Dangerous

Any government dependent on deception or injustice fears art...

Because all honest art helps us know who we are as humans, art is important to societies.

Without accurate knowledge of human experience, human nature and human potential, no society can make intelligent decisions about how to use its resources.

At the same time, any government or system dependent on deception or injustice fears the truth about humanity and our experiences – and therefore fears art.

If you don’t believe this, consider how often a new dictator moves immediately to control art. Consider why Franco’s forces killed the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca even before their full military victory in Spain, or why songwriter Victor Jara was assasinated – and the masters of his recordings burned – soon after a military junta overthrew the elected Chilean president in 1973.

Controlling Art in a Free Society

In our society, we control art not with guns or a Soviet-style bureaucracy, but, in part, with the star system. The star system elevates a few artists to “star” and even “super star” status. Because there is a limited supply of such stars, it’s possible to profit from them by creating a monopoly.

A recording company, for example, can control the supply and distribution of the star musician’s work. And, because the star is now dependent on the company, the company can also partly control the star.

Incidentally, the extravagant promotion of a relatively few artists’ work, in itself, often discourages other artists. (“If you had talent, you’d be rich.”) Still others are kept from seeking their own truth by their desire to “make it big” (that is, by pursuing fame rather than the truth of their own vision).

This is not to disparage the work of famous artists. Often they are magnificent writers, singers, painters, etc. Yet there are many non-star artists whose work is also worthy of being more widely shared, but is filtered out by a system that requires mass popularity for mass profits.

Such filtering affects all artists, but some artforms, including in-person storytelling, are particularly ill-suited to mass consumption. The for-profit organizations that dominate our society are indifferent to such artforms. As a result, performance storytelling operates only along the fringes of society, where resources are in shorter supply.

Sadly, all this works to encourage artists to compete against each other, fighting over the crumbs available to us as non-stars. Our natural gratitude for each other (as companions on the path of art) can be replaced by carping and jealousy. This further distracts us from our true possibilities—and our importance to each other and to society.

Signs of Hope

A new appreciation for people telling their own stories...

In spite of the difficulties currently faced by artists in general and storytellers in particular, I am excited by hopeful developments in recent years. We see, for example, a new appreciation of people telling their own stories, as evidenced in the U.S. by the rise of The Moth, of story slams, and of organized story-collection projects like StoryCorps.

The internet is another source of hope. To be sure, live, two-way storytelling is not yet taking place in significant amounts on the internet. But the strangle-hold of mass publishers over the availability of art is being weakened. It is increasingly easy to create and post audio recordings, videos, books, photographs and more – and it is increasingly easy for others to access and pay for such art.

Further, artists can now easily connect with each other via the web. We can share our work with each other. We can share our experiences, even when separated by oceans.

We can also share how-to information about our artforms, information that would never have found its way into the more limited pre-internet channels of books, broadcast, and recordings.

Thankful for Being A Storyteller Now

In other words, it’s a good time to be a storyteller. No matter how isolated we are locally, if we have access to an internet connection we have a world community at our fingertips. And we have access to information about our art.

In this case, information is power. It gives us the power to be inspired by each other to create our unique styles, to understand the inner workings of our art, and to share what we have learned widely and easily.

It’s 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.

For all this opportunity, I give thanks – and a promise to re-dedicate my efforts.

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 2)

This series describes the skills practiced, consciously or unconsciously, by masterful storytellers.

To be sure, effective stories can be told with just a subset of these skills. But familiarity with the advanced skills can help you advance your abilities and even recognize skills that you have been unaware of having.

In Part 1 I described three Imagination Skills. Now, on to the skills of oral language.

Oral language

Oral language has its own operating principles, strengths, and limitations.

At its most basic, storytelling involves imagining or remembering scenes, then describing them to your listeners.

In in-person storytelling, you describe scenes using oral language (spoken language), which differs from its close relative, written language. Oral language has its own operating principles, strengths, and limitations.

For example, written language relies chiefly on words, which vastly overpower the lesser channels, such as punctuation, typeface variations, etc. Oral language, though, uses many communicative elements in addition to words, such as:

• Tone of voice
• Facial expression
• Gestures
• Body language
• Eye behaviors
• Orientation in space (facing toward or away from listeners)
• and a dozen or so more.

Further, many of the communicative elements of oral language, such as tone of voice, are powerful enough to completely overpower words. Sarcasm, for example, uses tone of voice to give words an opposite meaning. Said sarcastically, “Right!” means “Wrong!”

Skill 4: Master the Elements of Oral Language

There are an infinite number of effective oral language styles, ranging from leaping about the stage and declaiming in Shakespearean tones, to sitting quietly on your hands and shading your words with a subtly raised eyebrow.

Whatever style makes sense for a particular teller and telling, however, the masterful storyteller calls on well-developed expressive abilities in voice, face, eyes, hands, posture and the rest.

The masterful storyteller’s voice easily conveys a wide range of emotion. It creates interesting and appropriate shapes through rhythm, repetition, tempo, volume, pitch, pauses, and more.

The masterful storyteller also uses her or his body well, using postural changes and changes in muscular tension to convey clearly the attitudes of characters and the narrator herself.

The masterful storyteller uses her or his eyes well, alternating naturally among the “big four” eye behaviors:

i) Looking up and to the side while accessing images;
ii) Looking down and to the side while accessing emotions and attitudes;
iii) Looking at imagined objects or people while describing them or pretending to interact with them;
iv) Looking directly at listeners.

Each element of oral language has a wide range of expressive potential. It is possible to master each of them in ways that are unique to you.

Skill 5: Master the Interplay of Oral Language Elements

Not only does oral language use a variety of expressive elements, it also uses elements simultaneously and in succession.

Written language is basically linear: the second word comes inexorably after the first word, and so on. But because oral language broadcasts its communicative power over several channels, it is “multi-linear.” The “word channel” may carry its own programming while the “tone of voice channel” and the “posture channel,” for example, may be reinforcing that programming, negating it, or introducing new nuances.

1st photo: all messages the same.

2nd photo: mixed messages

Notice the two pictures of women giving non-verbal messages. In both photos, a woman holds out her hand in a clear gesture of “Stop! Don’t come closer!” In the first picture, all the other oral language channels support that message. The fingers are tightly together; the eyes are hard, the mouth firm, the chin set, the torso squared.

In the second picture, though, the messages are mixed. The fingers of the hand giving the “stop” gesture are somewhat relaxed and separated; the eyes are soft; the mouth is slightly opened (giving a feeling of uncertainty or apprehension); the torso is straight but without tension. The fingers and thumb on the woman’s other hand touch each other nervously. This person is communicating something like “I will stop you” but also “I am uncertain whether I can” and even “I am afraid.”

Taken together, these photos show how powerfully and succinctly oral language can communicate messages, even when the messages are complex.

The interplay of oral language channels also allows complex transitions. Imagine that you are telling about a critical boss’s response to your presentation, like this:

I knew I had said something stupid. Then my boss came charging over to me. He said, “Is that what I pay you to say?”

Suppose your posture begins as your own. Then, when the boss speaks in your story, you switch to the boss’s posture.

	My Boss Got Mad At Me, version 1
What was said	“I knew I had said something stupid.”	Then my boss came charging over to me	He said, “Is that what I pay you to say?”
Whose words?	Narrator’s	Narrator’s	Boss’s
Whose “body”?	Narrator’s	Narrator’s	Boss’s

Even more is possible in oral language, though. You can go beyond alternating between the narrator and the boss by allowing them to overlap. For example, you could shift to the boss earlier in one of the channels than in the other.

To create this effect, you could begin with your own words and posture (“I knew I had said something stupid.”) But then you could begin shifting into the boss’s posture while you continue with your own words as narrator, “Then my boss came charging over to me.”

In this case, your words remain the words of the narrator. But the posture channel shifts to that of the boss, creating an anticipation of the full-out boss qualities that include the boss’s words, “Is that the way I pay you to talk?”

	My Boss Got Mad At Me, version 2
What was said	“I knew I had said something stupid.”	Then my boss came charging over to me	He said, “Is that what I pay you to say?”
Whose words?	Narrator’s	Narrator’s	Boss’s
Whose “body”?	Narrator’s	Boss’s	Boss’s

Masterful storytellers are expert at conveying such complexity through oral language.

An oral language aficionado?

How do you become so masterful? Begin by paying attention to the oral language of others. Notice it everywhere.

Watch videos with the sound turned off, then again with it on. Notice how people walk, stand and sit in airports and shopping malls.

Become an oral language gourmet. Play with it. Be swept away by it. Be tickled speechless by it. Be awed by it.

Try it out in your buddy sessions and your everyday conversation. Go over the top, beyond the limits – and then adjust back to what works. Conversely, start subtly and see which small changes can give big effects.

The ocean of oral language is enormous, offering endless territory to explore over a lifetime. And it fertilizes the river delta of storytelling with its unending expressive potential.

Practicing skills might sound harmless. But it has dangers!

Long ago, someone asked me the question, “Musicians practice scales to develop their skills. What can storytellers practice? To get better, what should we work on?”

I will answer this question positively, in a future newsletter. But first: you must be warned!

Danger!

It sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? “Put in your hours practicing basic skills, and you’ll be a better storyteller.”

Unfortunately, this apparently worthy quest for skills can easily lead your storytelling astray.

How? Here are four dangers of “skill work” in storytelling:

Danger 1: Disconnecting

If you focus too much on the mechanics, you can become disconnected from the big picture, from the purpose of your storytelling.

I knew a violinist from the New York Philharmonic, Mischa Borodkin. He heard me dutifully practicing scales on my guitar one day and stopped me. “When you are playing scales,” Mischa said, “always play with soul.”

The last thing we want to get better at is disconnecting from our stories, our selves, and our listeners. “Practicing” can help us improve, but only if we are practicing communicating what matters to us.

Rather than practice mindlessly, tell stories often to caring listeners. As you tell, seek immediacy and connection. Seek to lead your listeners on a satisfying, mutually enriching journey.

Danger 2: Running from Your Fears

The urge to develop skills can sometimes be a response to fear. We can be afraid of doing poorly, of being disliked, of being vulnerable, and much more.

All those fears are understandable. But the way to conquer them is to face them and heal them, not to “build your arsenal of skills.”

Rather than learn skills as a way to not feel afraid, try to embrace the exhilaration of telling, of letting go of the bar on the roller-coaster, of joyfulling riding the story wave.

Danger 3: Neglecting Your Strengths

There may be one best way to play a rapid C-major scale on a piano, but there are infinitely many ways to be a great pianist, a great composer, or a great storyteller.

Think of the storytellers you love best. They do not all tell stories the same way! Instead, they have each found ways of telling that build on their unique strengths.

Build new strengths, of course. But don’t neglect the noble search for the strengths you already have. Rather, notice what works now. Experiment with doing it more – more often and more boldly. Find safe places to tell in new ways, then allow your unique qualities to emerge in them.

Danger 4: Not Prioritizing

There are lots of skills I could use in storytelling. I could certainly make use of Odds Bodkin’s harp skills and Kevin Locke’s hoop-dancing skills. I could use some less obvious skills, too: Donald Davis’s ability to move an audience to long, deep laughter and then on to other deep feelings. Connie Regan-Blake’s deep sense of integrity. Penninah Schramm’s flowing river of connection to Jewish tradition. And more.

But such skills can take decades to develop, so I can’t develop them all. Which skills are, in fact, worth my life’s blood?

That’s the question I need to answer. My answer will be mine alone, and it will likely shift over the years.

This is the fourth danger: focussing on a list of skills can divert me from the path of prioritizing, of wrestling with the question, “Exactly which potential strengths of mine will pay off the most for my listeners and me?”

So What Path Should You Take?

The quest for storytelling skills is an honorable one. But rather than being the safe path it might appear to be, it is strewn with the dangers described above.

The only path worthy of your art is one that keeps you connected and brave, that leads you to the hard choices that assist you in discovering your own flavors of greatness.

(Please look for a list of “The Twelve Skills of the Storyteller” in future newsletters.)

Contents

1) “STRENGTH VISION” FOR STORYTELLERS?

2) SAVE $500 ON MESSAGE TELLING COURSE

• Please read how Message Telling solves a problem in applied storytelling

1) “STRENGTH VISION” FOR STORYTELLERS?

Calling all storytellers: Put on your strength-vision goggles, please!

I was a sophomore in college, listening to the teacher speak about how poorly a student had done on an assignment.

Suddenly I thought, “I get it!”

I had already realized that the atmosphere at this school was very critical. It was both draining and isolating. But at that moment, I realized the implicit understanding of the teacher’s role, as practiced in that university:

The teacher’s job is to hold up a hoop for the students. If they succeed in jumping through it, then the teacher holds the hoop up higher. When each student has missed the hoop and fallen on the ground, then class is over for that day.

Giving challenges to students, of course, is useful and important. But in that school the challenges were more antagonistic than encouraging. And there was rarely a word of appreciation. We heard only what we had done wrong.

Meanwhile, in the Basement…

Elliott Coleman as I remember him (I wish you could see his caring, blue eyes)

Then one day I heard that there was a professor named Elliot Coleman who taught something called the Writing Seminars. In one windowless room in the basement, he practiced a different form of teaching.

The problem was that to enroll for his class I first had to show him my poems in person and be accepted. At this point, I wasn’t sure that I could bear to subject my personal poems to possible rejection.

I got up my nerve. I made an appointment. I handed him my poems – and to my amazement, he told me what he liked about them. I was speechless.

I joined the class. When I read aloud one of my poems, he would speak of it in a way that made me feel he was in touch with my innermost intention in writing the poem. Whenever he had a suggestion, therefore, I eagerly looked for a way to implement it.

One day I was lingering in the classroom after class, savoring the halo of encouragement. Two graduate students from the class remained in the room, too, talking intently to each other. Since I was an undergraduate, I was invisible. So I eavesdropped.

They were talking about a poem that one of them had written. Instead of speaking like Elliot Coleman, though, the other student was listing the poem’s deficiencies. After a time, the poem’s author seemed to be running out of defenses. He said desperately, “Well, Elliot Coleman likes this poem.”

The critical student arched for the kill: “But Elliot Coleman likes everything!”

At that moment I understood two things. I understood what the critic meant, of course: if you like everything, it’s the same as liking nothing.

But I also understood that liking everything indiscriminately was not what Elliot Coleman did. Neither did he pretend to like anything. I understood his great gift: to FIND WHAT THERE WAS TO LIKE in everything.

An Indispensable Ability for Storytellers

The ability to find the likable in a story, even when it is not obvious, allows you to grow the seed of a story into a seedling, and a seedling into a tree. It prevents you from throwing away stories and story ideas prematurely. It helps you focus on your strengths – which are the key to your success.

It also helps you help others. As a result, it helps your storytelling communities grow, becoming circles of artists who develop their unique strengths and support each other to do the same.

Two Ways to Develop…

How do you develop the skill of finding the strengths in a fledgling story – of finding what there is to like about it?

First, study the coaching of those who have this “x-ray vision,” who can see strengths even when they are partially concealed beneath layers of unsolved problems. Be coached by coaches with this ability. Watch others be coached, in person or via recordings.

Second, and even more importantly, practice viewing stories positively. At the very moment that you think to yourself, “Boy, this story has a terrible ending,” go on to ask, “And what about this story is strong, funny, clever, or beautiful? What artistic impulses are evident in this story?” Only when you have identified the story’s existing successes, are you capable of helping the story become even more successful.

This kind of “strength vision” can be cultivated, even in a society devoted to “hoop jumping.” If you learn it well, it will help your own storytelling, the storytelling of those around you, and eventually the growth of the storytelling movement.

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• Please read how Message Telling solves a problem in applied storytelling

When I told her that, she said, “Well, I have trouble doing marketing.”

I said, “You’re not alone! What kind of storytelling jobs would you most like to have more of?”

She thought for a minute, then said, “I want more school residencies focusing on diversity education.”

That was a well-formed and achievable goal. So, over a couple coaching sessions, I helped her come up with a five-part plan to achieve her goal:

1. Establish herself as a local expert in diversity education;
2. Develop an ongoing list of people in a position to hire her for residencies, who have an interest in diversity education;
3. Give the people on her list easy ways to get to know her and her work;
4. Build and maintain mutually-beneficial relationships with any people on her list who show an interest in her work;
5. Make an ongoing series of offers that will be catalysts for these people – offers that will make it convenient and attractive for them to hire her for residencies.

As it happened, I moved from Massachusetts to Oklahoma soon after coaching Rita. We fell out of touch about her progress.

Five Years Later…

Recently, having moved back to Massachusetts, I had a chance to check in with her. I said, “Hey, how is your marketing plan going?”

Rita admitted, “I haven’t really done any of it.” When I asked why, she said, “It was the part about becoming known as an expert. Do you remember, I thought I’d write a series of articles in a regional teacher newsletter about my ideas?”

As it happened, I did remember. It had been Rita’s idea in response to my questions, and it had seemed perfect.

“Well, I wrote one article, but I never sent it in. I had a lot of ideas, but getting them on paper was a struggle. I meant to revise the article and submit it, but I never did. After that, I guess I just lost interest in the plan.”

Rita’s plan was a sound one, but her story helps identify three reasons why many of us storytellers fail to get more work:

1. Not matching the method with her energies;
2. Not getting enough help – and the right kind of help;
3. Not changing the plan when needed.

We can all learn from those reasons, and prevent them from wasting years of our own progress.

An Energy Obstacle

I had approved of Rita’s article-writing plan, in part because of her excitement about it. What I didn’t know was that her excitement was more about coming up with ideas than about actually writing and publishing them.

Is this Rita’s fault? No! We all have tasks that energize us and others that drain us. The problem was that Rita and I didn’t notice that writing was a “drainer” for her.

After our coaching sessions, flushed with excitement about her new plan, she had created a rough draft of an article. But the coaching “boost” wasn’t able to propel her to actually complete this task, given how much energy it would have required from her.

The idea of becoming known as a diversity expert was sound. But the method (writing) turned out to be more difficult than expected.

Change the Method?

How could this method have been changed to match her energies better?

Perhaps instead of writing articles about her good ideas, she could have offered telephone seminars or free workshops in which she’d explain her ideas to a small group. Then she could record those sessions and make the recordings available; she might advertise them in that same teacher newsletter, or even get interviewed about them for it.

Or she might have created workshops containing her ideas to present at teacher conferences. In any case, to stay with the overall plan, Rita could have replaced the writing method with one that energized her.

Getting the Help You Need

What if Rita didn’t want to change the method? It’s possible to use a method that drains you, if you get others to do the draining tasks – or at least to help you with them.

For example, Rita could have found an editor for her articles who could take her first drafts and put them into printable form.

Or she might have asked someone to interview her about her ideas, record the interviews, and then transcribe them into first drafts – or even turn the interviews themselves into articles.

Her plan might also have succeeded if she had sought direct help with her writing difficulty. A good coach could have helped her solve the problem, one way or another.

Changing the Plan

Making a marketing plan is a daunting task. It involves thinking simultaneously about our goals, our abilities, our energies, and the needs and situations of those who might hire us.

As a result, once we have made a plan we often avoid rethinking it, even when unforeseen obstacles arise.

As it turns out, no complex plan ever works without a hitch. Do you remember Apollo 13 – how the method for getting oxygen to the astronauts had to be completely changed, on the fly and with improvised materials?

The “perfect” plan isn’t one that succeds 100% as envisioned. Rather, it is one that directs our energies toward a goal – and then lets us learn from our efforts and change course as needed.

Now that Rita and I are back in touch, I look forward to helping her use one or more strategies to make her plan succeed.

How About You?

Have you made plans for your storytelling – whether in marketing, or in learning new stories, or in sharing your ideas and stories with others – that haven’t worked out so far?

If so, ask yourself about each plan:

1. Does this plan really match my energies?
2. Could I get help with the parts that have turned out to be challenging?
3. Can I change the plan based on the information I’ve gotten so far in response to my efforts?

When you tell stories, you use flexibility and creativity to match the story and your strengths with the audience’s needs.

To allow the world to benefit from your unique strengths, apply that same flexibility and creativity to your own plans for success!