Contents

1) A HUGE OPPORTUNITY FOR STORYTELLERS

2) MY HOLIDAY GIFT TO YOU: A NEW, FREE NEWSLETTER

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1) A HUGE OPPORTUNITY FOR STORYTELLERS

We face a significant opportunity

In the U.S. public schools, 48 states have now adopted the “Common Core State Standards” for what students should learn.

This is an enormous development for teachers of children in kindergarten through high school.

The near-universal adoption of these standards is so new that teachers are scrambling to adapt their teaching to them. Even some of the largest textbook publishers have not yet provided full sets of materials.

As a result, these standards represent, I believe, a significant opportunity for storytellers.

“Standards? Storytellers Don’t Do Standards!”

For those of us who, like Einstein, cherish imagination above knowledge, trends toward standardized curriculum don’t necessarily sound inviting.

We are reminded of the French school administrator of years past who famously bragged, we are told, that he could look at his watch and know what every student in France was studying at that moment.

Where is there room in such a system, we might say, for individual learning styles? Individual interests? Divergent thinking?

Where is there room for education as an exciting adventure? For the thrill of discovery? For any form of enjoyment at all?

Not As Bad As I Feared…

Once I looked at these standards, though (and talked to the forward-looking educator/storyteller Lynne Burns about them), I saw them in a more hopeful light.

First, the creators of these standards have given some thought to what skills they think high school graduates need, to succeed in college and their careers. Indeed, each grade-level standard refers to a long-term “College and Career Readiness” standard.

This means that, unlike some other systems, the work at each grade level builds in a meaningful way on the work at previous levels – and helps prepare the student for the next levels.

Second, these standards don’t seem to lend themselves to over-reliance on uncomprehending memorization.

The vast majority, in fact, seem to focus on thinking skills. They are dominated by words and phrases like “analyze,” “compare and contrast,” “explain the relationships between…,” etc.

But Wait: There’s Another Problem

If the good news is that these standards seem to challenge students to do more than memorize, that merely highlights an ongoing problem: from the students’ point of view, why would they want to exert the effort? What will motivate them to rise to the challenge?

Imagine a student who is faced with a task like this, for example:

Determine two or more main ideas of a text and explain how they are supported by key details.

I readily imagine the student thinking, “What does that have to do with my life? Why would I care about that?”

The more a curriculum requires mental exertion (learning to analyze requires more effort than simple memorization, for example), the more important it becomes to answer the students’ questions about “Why?”

This is a huge potential problem inherent in all standards-driven education: the student might be treated like a thinking machine, expected to perform tasks that seem unconnected to the student’s universal human motivations, such as:

• What do I want to accomplish? How can I accomplish it?
• Who is on this journey with me? How do we fit into each others’ lives?

In other words, these standards don’t, by themselves, make curriculum meaningful to the student.

Stories and Connection

Who could help humanize such a curriculum?

Needed: connection, meaning, involvement

Such helpers would need to be experts in:

• Connecting to human motivations;
• Putting problems in understandable contexts; and
• Engaging people both intellectually and emotionally.

Sound familiar?

If anyone knows about connecting to human motivations and emotions, it’s storytellers. After all, such meaning-building is the essence of what stories do.

Re-wording E.M. Forster’s famous dictum, I would say:

“’The king died and then the queen died’” is a series of unconnected events. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a story.”

In other words, a story differs from a recital of facts in that a story creates causal connections between the facts. A story is really the most basic way of giving meaning to events, of interpreting people’s motivations and personalities.

Such interpretation is essential both to story and to human life.

Specialists in Meaning

Whenever you need to create personal involvement in an otherwise impersonal context, the premier discipline to call upon is storytelling.

Said another way, the missing element in the Common Core State Standards is EXACTLY what storytellers have, since time beyond memory, always known how to provide.

We specialize in helping people create meaning and become involved.

Like a shovel-store in a gold rush, we have what people need

How Often Does This Happen?

Two factors are therefore converging. First, teachers are desperate for help in this time of change.

Second, storytellers have the exact skills that educators need.

We are like a long-established shovel store that just happens to be near a new gold rush. Suddenly, everybody needs what we offer!

A convergence like that comes once in a long, long while.

So How Do We Help?

I see three principal ways that storytellers can help well-meaning teachers carry out a Core Standards based curriculum, so that students become engaged. We can do, or assist teachers in doing, the following:

1. Perform stories;
2. Help students learn, create, and tell their own stories;
3. Teach storytelling games.

In a future article, I’ll talk about the contributions that each of these methods can make.

In the meantime, read on for a new, free resource for the least familiar of the three: Story Games.

2) MY HOLIDAY GIFT TO YOU: A NEW, FREE NEWSLETTER

Storytelling is a part of every human culture; so are games.

Storytelling games can help teach subjects, enjoyably

So it’s natural that people in many cultures have created games that involve stories.

For me, a storytelling game is any game that involves:

• Telling a story;
• Telling part of a story; or
• Using a skill that’s used in storytelling.

It turns out that people have created such games, for entertainment purposes, for generations.

Many such games help the beginning storyteller develop a particular storytelling skill. Other games focus on particular kinds of content that are of interest to teachers – and that apply to educational standards.

For example, there are storytelling games that require the use of words or phrases that can have two or more meanings. In such games, the spotlight of attention is easily and entertainingly focused on homonyms and metaphors.

To learn more about storytelling games every month, just subscribe – at no charge – to my new, free Storytelling Games newsletter.

In the newsletter, you’ll get games, variations on games, hints on teaching games, and suggestions of Common Core Standards that particular games help develop.

In time, I’ll have a website devoted to storytelling games. For now, you can subscribe by double-clicking this link:

http://www.storydynamics.com/games.newsletter

Questions or problems? Please use my contact form: http://www.storydynamics.com/contact

This newsletter is a gift from me to the storytelling (and education) communities. Happy Holidays! Enjoy!

• Subscribe to the Storytelling Games Newsletter (free)

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.

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

To play the video, click the small triangle

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—and contains advanced storytelling instruction!

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Now there is a storytelling bracelet that is much more than decorative. In fact, it contains the most advanced storytelling course available – all 37 lessons of it.

Through November 16, 2011 you can save $130 on the complete, deluxe version of the Storytelling Workshop in a Box[tm] – pre-installed on a 2GB USB bracelet. There’s even plenty of room for your own storytelling files.

You get all 37 recorded lessons of the acclaimed Storytelling Workshop in a Box, all the exercises, all the transcriptions, $524 worth of coupons, and all the rest. The drive itself, no bigger than a small fashion watch, is built into a bracelet – so you can take it anywhere you like.

Can you imagine a better conversation starter?

In short, now you can Keep Your Storytelling Close At Hand™.

Read more about this bracelet, how to use it, and what it holds:

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“It’s a goldmine on your wrist!” – Jay O’Callahan, holder of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Storytelling Network.

Note: The $130-off intro price ends on Wednesday, November 16, 2011

• Read about your storytelling advanced training, conversation-starter, file-storage bracelet

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!

(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.

(Twelve Skills of the Storyteller, part 1)

The first ability of the storyteller is to imagine

This is the first in a series of articles on twelve fundamental storytelling skills. These skills focus on the act of storytelling itself (rather than on areas like voice production, finding and researching stories, relating to event organizers, marketing yourself, and other ancillary topics which each have their own skill sets).

Musicians practice low-level skills (like playing scales) as well as high-level skills, like playing expressively and feeling the overall shape of a piece of music.

Every day, though, we each speak and even tell stories. As a result, the lower-level, physical skills don’t usually challenge storytellers very much: for example, we have all developed fluent muscular control over the mechanisms of speech.

But the higher level storytelling skills can be challenging, if only because so few of them are ever even acknowledged in our daily lives.

The Skills of Imagining

The first three of the 12 skills relate to imagining. Why?

At the moment of telling a story, the storyteller imagines the story and then describes it to listeners. The first ability of storytelling, therefore, is the storyteller’s ability to imagine – to “re-member” or re-embody the scenes of a story.

Stories can be told well with even rudimentary imagination skills, just as musicians can produce enjoyable music without having achieved virtuosity.

But the most masterful story-imagining requires several skills, each building on the ones before it. What follows are descriptions of the imagination skills of the story virtuoso.

Skill 1: Imagine Vividly

Imagine.

Imagination draws from sights, sounds, gut and muscle feelings, emotions, and more. Imagine in every sensory mode.

Imagine all the emotions felt by each character.

The more vividly you imagine, the more vividly your listeners will imagine.

Skill 2: Let Your Imagination Act on You

Imagine without holding back!

Allow yourself to be changed by what you imagine.

It’s possible to imagine something without letting it touch you. The best storytellers, though, can imagine in such a way that they themselves are energized, moved, and even transformed by what they imagine.

This is imagining without holding back, without trying to tame the images or to separate yourself from them.

This form of imagining is magnetic. Like a thunderstorm, it draws listeners’ attention by its pure intensity and drama.

Skill 3: Thinking in Images

Mathematicians learn to think in numbers. Musicians learn to think in sounds. Storytellers need to be able to think in images.

This includes the ability to transform images in your mind.

Thinking in images includes allowing unexpected images to appear

It also includes the ability to notice images that come to mind in response to complex challenges (such as deciding on an audience’s needs or responses).

If skill #1 is about vividness and skill #2 is about a relationship to images, this skill is about flexibility and openness.

Young children have easy access to images, but society teaches us to close our inborn connection to images. As a result, few of us go beyond a child’s level of “image intelligence.”

The most advanced imaginers, on the other hand, have developed the most fluid imaginations. They can drink in the flow of images or “pause” it to focus on a single image.

They can do “virtual tours” of what they imagine, seeing it from any view point, hearing all the sounds, feeling all the tensions, cautions, and flows of energy from a group of characters.

They can glide from one image to another, fully responsive to the threads that unite two images as well as the subtle or striking contrasts between them.

This skill involves not just seeing, hearing, smelling, or feeling what you remember or imagine, but also being in touch with what those images could become. It involves a mastery of image dynamics.

Image masters can also allow helpful images to come to the surface. For example, some tellers, when faced with an audience, find themselves imagining scenes from a story they might not have planned to tell.

For myself, I have learned to welcome such unexpected images and to regard them as helpful responses to the complex input I receive unconsciously from the listeners (such as how they sit, breathe, cough, look around the room, and more). When I trust the images and tell the story whose images came to me unbidden, I usually learn later that it was even more appropriate for the group than what I had planned to tell.

More Skills to Come

In future articles, I’ll describe the nine skills in these four additional categories:

• Oral language
• Relating to your audience
• Flexibility in performance
• Being and showing yourself.

All four categories are important. Yet the skills of imagining remain fundamental. After all, images are the very stuff of story itself!

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.

2) SAVE $500 ON MESSAGE TELLING COURSE

Message Telling: Leading Your Listeners to Meaning, Through Storytelling

Just ask for an application for the upcoming Message Telling course, and you’ll lock in the $500 Early Bird discount.

If you need to communicate clear meanings through stories, this course is the only full treatment of the tools you need – tools that will help your communication for the rest of your life.

This course includes 9 lessons, 9 coaching calls, individual responses to your online assignments, and much more. It takes you through the complete array of Message Telling techniques.

Dr. Charles Martin is a successful dentist, a trainer of other dentists, and an executive coach. Here’s what he said about his experience with Message Telling:

“I learned how to work with a story to give it a specific meaning, a specific message. But the big revelation for me was this: it’s a lot of fun! Working within the constraints is enjoyable, once I understand what you’ve taught me. Bravo!”

How much does the course cost? Normal price: $1097; your price: $597. If money is tight right now, use the payment plan option: $97 now and $97 a month.

please check out the full story:

http://www.messagetelling.com

To request an application, either use my contact form at:

http://www.storydynamics.com/contact

Or use the link on this page:

http://www.messagetelling.com

The $500 discount is only valid if you request an application by April 5, 2011.

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

The Duck Derby table caught my attention, but it led me to think about storytelling...

I asked the friendly-looking woman behind the table, “What’s a Duck Derby?”

She said, “Once a year, we throw rubber ducks into the river and let them race downstream. The sponsors of the winning ducks get prizes. The proceeds benefit Habitat for Humanity.”

Thinking strategically, I said, “Can I help my duck along?”

She replied, “No. You can’t touch it, even if it gets stuck in the reeds.” She smiled. “The Duck Derby’s not meant to be too serious.”

In my storyteller’s brain, which imagines such things without my conscious volition, I saw eager “duck sponsors” along the river bank, trying to control their rubber ducks without touching them. I pictured dozens of business people on their knees, blowing into long straws aimed at their ducks.

I smiled to myself.

“That’s the spirit,” said the woman at the table.

Storytelling As Rubber Duck Racing?

For some reason, the image of “trying to influence the direction of a rubber duck by blowing on it” has stuck in my mind with regard to storytelling.

After all, stories can lead people to create meanings. Such meanings are powerful, because listeners are committed to meanings that they create for themselves.

Not all tellers, though, are satisfied with allowing each listener a different meaning. Applied storytellers like teachers, clergy, salespeople, and managers often want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want two things at once:

1. The listener’s commitment to the meaning that the listener has given to the story;
2. The assurance that the listener’s meaning is the same one the teller has in mind.

Some tellers would maintain that such expectations are like saying, “You can have whatever you want – as long as you want what I feel like giving you.”

Such tellers might go on to say: If you intend for people to create their own personal meanings about a story, you need to “throw” the story into the river of the listener’s consciousness – and then leave it alone. If you “touch it” by telling the listener what the story means, the story runs the danger of never making it to the listener’s mental “finish line.”

Are There Other Ways?

If you could steer your duck, you could avoid these pesky traffic jams!

The “throw it in and leave it to work” point of view is valid much of the time, especially in performance settings.

But what if there were ways to “blow on” the story’s meaning without “touching” it? What if there were ways to influence the listener’s meaning-creation process without the listener crying, “Foul!” and going home before the race is over?

Such ways exist, I believe. Most are, individually, as subtle as the influence of one straw blowing on a rubber duck from a yard away. But many straws blowing at once can, indeed, change the duck’s course.

What Varied Meanings You Have, Grandma!

Consider the folktale, “Little Red Riding Hood.” Here are a few of the many meanings that have been attributed to the tale:

- The danger to children posed by strangers.
- The perils of sexual awakening for young women.
- How women can pretend innocence as part of seduction.
- How humans of any age can be “reborn” with more wisdom after a foolish act.

"Good day to you, Little Red Cap!"

How might you tell the story, in order to influence the listener’s interpretation of the girl’s actions – without coarsely telling the listener what to think? A simple method is to shape the characters’ non-verbal communication. Here is the girl’s simple first exchange with the wolf in the Grimm’s version:

[Wolf] “Good day to you, Little Red Cap.”

[Little Red Cap] “Thank you, wolf.”

If your intended meaning is “stranger danger,” you might give the wolf a predatory posture and an evil-sounding voice as he speaks these commonplace words. Red Riding Hood, on the other hand, might respond with the posture and mannerisms of a child at play, along with an innocent tone of voice.

But if your meaning is “how women can pretend innocence…,” on the other hand, the Wolf may stand as a humble servant and sound as benevolent as actor Morgan Freeman. For her part, Red Riding Hood might sound and act mature and seductive.

Dozens of Subtle Methods?

The use of body language and tone of voice are fairly obvious ways to “blow through the straw.” Less obvious ways include color clues.

Charles Perrault, for instance, explicitly interpreted his 1697 “Little Red Riding Hood” as about the dangers of “charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet” men who pursue young women “at home and in the streets.” He was also the first to associate the girl in his story with red-colored clothing. (In European cultures, red is often associated with blood and with sexuality, especially with menstruation and a woman’s first experience of intercourse.)

If you wanted to emphasize the danger to the innocent girl, on the other hand, you might choose to talk about her white cheeks or dress – and the wolf’s dark colors, which, in Western cultures, tend to be associated with the sinister.

There are dozens of such tools for “blowing” a listener’s attention in one direction or another. They range from obvious to extremely subtle. They can be delivered via the words of the narrator, the words of a character, and even the words of the master of ceremonies. They can alter the story itself or just the context in which the story is told.

And the Meaning of This Essay Is…

The moral of this essay applies especially to stories told in applied situations, when it’s also important that listeners adopt the teller’s attitude as their own:

“Don’t pick up the duck when simply blowing on it would do.”

When you take this advice, your stories for teaching or persuading won’t be so often “disqualified” in the minds of your listeners.

To be sure, the development of subtle storytelling tools requires some extra investment of time and thought. But the reward is great. In the end, you’ll more often cross the finish line. And both you and your listeners will feel that the race was fairly run.

Contents

1) 30 REASONS TO THANK A STORYTELLER, PART II

Looking for Part I? Go to http://www.storydynamics.com/thanks1

2) STORYTELLING FOR MINISTERS – PAY JUST $50 NOW

• Read about “Trusting the Story Vessel,” a course for pastors

1) 30 REASONS TO THANK A STORYTELLER, PART II

Storytelling makes so much possible!

Let’s start our new year with gratitude for storytelling. After all, storytelling makes so much of human life possible that it’s tempting to take storytelling for granted.

In this second half of “30 Reasons to Thank a Storyteller,” I’ll look at the big picture, from how storytelling helps our species survive to how it helps us live in communities and even whole societies. (Read Part I at http://www.storydynamics.com/thank1 )

Our Survival Skills As a Species

Humans have extraordinary intelligence, which allows us to respond creatively to ever-changing circumstances. In addition, we cooperate with each other at a level unmatched in other species. Biologists call it “ultrasociality.”

16. Storytelling is a uniquely human way of comprehending not just what is, but what was, what is likely to be, and what could be. This aspect of our intelligence allows us to learn from the past and plan for the future, overcoming some of the limits of the here and now.

17. We survive and thrive by functioning in highly cooperative societies. Storytelling gives us imagined experiences of behavior and its consequences, allowing us to learn about and react flexibly to social life.

18. Science gives our species powers beyond those of any other species. Yet storytelling, along with other artforms, makes possible the imaginative leaps of science.

“If man had not encountered dragons and hippogriffs in stories, he might not have conceived of the atom.” – Lewis Mumford (as edited by Brian Boyd)

Community

Living together is vital to our species. That doesn’t mean it’s easy! Storytelling helps bind us together, appreciate each other, mediate disputes, and create a common identity.

19. Storytelling is fundamentally a communal act. One story reaches the ears of many, giving listeners shared imaginative experiences. A community is created whenever a story is told.

20. Because stories allow us to reveal ourselves and our motivations, they make communal relationships safer.

“Stories can help people trust one another. They can lead to a sense of sharing without coercion.” – Doug Lipman, Improving Your Storytelling

Successful communities – from hunter-gatherers to Facebook groups – depend on a sense of belonging.

21. Stories convey shared history and identity: who are we? What is our heritage? Any group’s cohension is cemented by the shared stories of its founding, its trials and its triumphs

“Out of shared telling and remembering grow identity, connection, and pride, binding people to a place and to one another.” – Tom Rankin

22. Stories don’t just tell us how to be, they show us characters taking actions in specific situations – and the consequences. Shared stories become a communal background for future action.

“We hunger for what stories can provide – context enriched by emotion, a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters.” – Daniel Pink

Successful communities also require ways to mediate the inevitible disputes and to motivate each other to action.

23. Stories help us find common ground, even when we quarrel or disagree.

“A good story can build a bridge, reconcile a difference, heal an old wound, and promote peace.” – Holly Stevens

24. “Stories help move people from compliance to commitment.” – Ronn Lehmann

Building a Society

Stories help us gather together, share what we know, establish norms for behavior, lead each other to constructive action, and overcome barriers to understanding and cooperation.

25. “Throughout history, people have gathered together and created cultures bound by a foundation of narrative.” – Laurence Vincent

Storytelling assists us in several vital social functions:

26. Sharing knowledge

“If you can get [experts] to tell you about tough cases, nonroutine events where their skills made the difference, then you have a pathway into their perspective, into the way they are seeing the world.” – Gary Klein

27. Establishing constructive ways to behave

“Stories are a way for gaining an understanding of virtue so we can act virtuously.” – C. Edward Weber

28. Effective leadership

“Leaders achieve their effectiveness chiefly through the stories they relate.” – Howard Gardner

29. Mobilizing people around a vision

“Storytelling…is one of the world’s most powerful tools for achieving astonishing results. For the leader, storytelling is action oriented – a force for turning dreams into goals and then into results.” – Peter Guber

30. Reducing inter-group hostility.

“You can’t hate people whose stories you know.” – Roz Bresnick-Perry.

Storytelling, of course, is an art in its own right, and needs no justification beyond the pleasure of creating, telling, and hearing great stories. But, like all art, its pure existence has practical advantages. As an artform that can survive the generations, it contributes to the achievements of civilization.

31 (bonus). Along with the other arts, storytelling helps build a rich, robust culture. Each country is rightly proud of its unique artistic achievements – and is enriched by the artistic achievements of other cultures.

“The arts…have nothing to do with the defense of the country. They just make the country worth defending.” – Ken Burns

2) STORYTELLING FOR MINISTERS – PAY JUST $50 NOW

Six years ago last month, I married Pam McGrath, who was then a seminary student. Naturally, I coached Pam on her coursework. I got to know some of her fellow students. In the process, I got an inside look at the education of future preachers.

Much of that education impressed me with its depth and completeness. But I was appalled to learn that, at many seminaries, future ministers get NO training in storytelling.

And, even when a beginning course on storytelling is offered, it’s necessarily just a first step on the road to realizing the potential power of storytelling in a minister’s life – especially in sermons.

For years, Pam said, “Doug, please offer instruction in storytelling, just for clergy. Ministers need it. They don’t realize how much easier it could be for them to get their meaning across!”

Well, at last I’m offering a telephone/online course in storytelling, just for ministers. It’s called:

TRUSTING THE STORY VESSEL: a course for ministers in inspiring, teaching, and commanding attention through storytelling.

If you want to communicate with maximum effectiveness, either as ordained clergy or as a lay leader, give it a look:

http://www.storydynamics.com/preachers

Or do you know a minister – whether beginning storyteller or beyond – who might be interested? If so, I’d appreciate your forwarding this message. I can even send you a link to a printable flier. But, don’t delay: the payment plan option ends Wednesday, January 19!

Yours in storytelling,

Doug

P.S., You can pay just $50 now and $37 a month. Preach now, pay later! For details:

http://www.storydynamics.com/preachers

• Read about “Trusting the Story Vessel,” a course for pastors