CHAPTER 2
What Is Story?
WE NEED A clear definition of story that translates immediately to useful application. But first I want to unravel some of the misconceptions you may have about storytelling and your talents as a storyteller. Too many people think “I’m not a good storyteller.” Horsefeathers. If you are breathing you are a storyteller. Moreover, you have talent.
Simply taking the time to read this book means you have the one natural talent necessary to become a wonderful storyteller—the talent of curiosity. You were curious enough to get this book so you are way ahead of the game. Your curiosity causes you to pay attention to what others think and feel is important, to the human details; you listen to other people’s stories. Listening is observable evidence of curiosity. Over-confidence, the opposite of curiosity (also known as arrogance) makes a storyteller preachy, boring, and disrespectful.
Know-it-alls don’t make good storytellers. These are the people who buy books that promise to teach how to “influence anyone to do anything.” They actually think they deserve that kind of influence. I can’t teach you that. Actually, no one can teach even them how to “influence anyone to do anything” because it isn’t possible. It is a myth. It is a big fat lie. No one on earth has that much influence and no one deserves that much influence. Those who believe the myth are in danger of following false prophets.
One story that exposes the myth of absolute influence is the story of King Midas. Remember? King Midas wished that everything he touched would turn to gold and he got what he wished for. The food he touched turned to gold. He couldn’t eat. He picked up an apple and before he could bite into it, it turned to gold. Much worse, his daughter ran up to him and the second he reached down to pick her up his touch turned her into a statue of gold. He killed his own daughter. You see, 100 percent influence is 100 percent isolation. You don’t want it.
In some cases “no” is the best thing that could happen to you. I don’t know about you, but there have been times when I was truly grateful no one listened to me. I was so sure I was right, too. But if they had listened to me it would’ve been a disaster.
When you get a “no,” you are on the trail of a new story. It means that person knows or believes they know something you don’t yet understand. Either way you need to find out. “No” can be a gift. It’s your opportunity to hear their story. Storytellers approach influence as a reciprocal process that flows both ways. To be a good storyteller you must be a good story listener. I’ve never met a good storyteller who wasn’t equally good at listening to stories. Where do you think they find their stories?
Experience Reconstituted
But what is a story? There are a thousand definitions, mostly academic, quite accurate but not very instructional. For our purposes our working definition of story is:
Story is a reimagined experience narrated with enough detail and feeling to cause your listeners’ imaginations to experience it as real.
Experience is the best teacher … always has been, always will be. If we could magically transport the people we wish to influence into a life-changing experience we could change the world. Imagine popping a certain software engineer into your client’s daily life so he could personally experience the frustration of bugs in the system. Or better, let’s place a deserving politician into the body of a low-income, single mother’s life for just one day. It’s a sweet fantasy to imagine a guy who doesn’t even pick up his own dry cleaning shopping in a supermarket with three unruly children, trying to buy fresh fruits and vegetables on minimum wage. That politician would never forget that experience.
Direct experience is the Scrooge method of education. Transport your short-sighted boss, coworker, customer, or teenager to a place and time that leaves an indelible experience in the deepest parts of their brain. Way below the intellectual knowing, personal experience delivers deep understanding that allows true empathy and challenges false clarity of entrenched positions or slick politics. Put an investor to work in a sweat shop in an underdeveloped country and then ask if it is possible to better monitor suppliers’ working conditions. If we could GIVE them the experience, it would change their minds, alter their decisions, and create cohesive action in the right directions.
Yet, the best tool to influence others—experience—isn’t feasible in most cases. Kidnapping, even for good reason, is frowned upon. The best we can do is to bring the experience to them through a story that is so vivid it feels as if they are actually there.
Let’s say you want to create trust with new employees, or more likely with old ones disgruntled by the last reorganization. The best way to build trust is for them, over time, to experience you keeping your agreements, acting with integrity, and holding confidences secure. Over time, the entire group personally experiences you as trustworthy, and they decide to trust your decisions and to trust you without second-guessing, arguments, or passive resistance.
The problem of course is that you don’t have time to build up that track record. You need cooperation now. Worse, in real life people rarely experience your keeping your agreements or acting with integrity because they aren’t there when it happens, or when you tried to keep your agreements you were over-ruled. They can never know what it costs you to go to bat for them—at least not firsthand. Other people can only experience an incomplete and imperfect sample of who you are. They only see little glimpses—usually out of context—which quite frankly don’t showcase your better side.
Think about a typical day. You wake up with great (okay, good) expectations of having a productive day. Then the kids spill their cereal and the dog jumps on your freshly cleaned trousers. Some idiot cuts you off in traffic. And your day is up and down, like most days. You get to work, and the up and down continues. The phone rings with news that you got the big client you wanted. You decide to tell the team at a staff meeting that afternoon, maybe buy some doughnuts. Three hours later, after slaving over exhaustive and questionably relevant reports due yesterday, you see two staff members putting golf balls instead of working. Suddenly a new policy about playing golf in the hallway becomes your first order of business at the staff meeting and your enthusiasm about winning the new business has waned by the time you get around to announcing it.
My question to you is: When during this typical up-and-down day does your team experience you? When you are happy, productive, and at your best? Or when you are disappointed and frustrated? Most of us have to admit we are not that noticeable when we are happy and productive. We sort of fade into the woodwork. The times we seek attention are the times when we think a correction needs to be made. Indeed we are almost addicted to correction. Monitor and correct. Monitor and correct. The problem with that is that people’s experiences of you become skewed to the negative.
It’s completely natural. Things are moving so fast, we pay more attention to problems rather than building relationships, teaching, communicating vision, or explaining misunderstandings. No one seems trustworthy anymore. And it seems irrational to think otherwise. Because we are all about being rational, right?
Unfortunately, the exclusive use of “rational thinking tools” is the root cause of feeling disconnection and overload. We are buried under the burden of collecting objective data instead of doing a good job. Data—at best—only provides an illusion of “good management” for insatiable measurement junkies. What began as a good thinking habit now costs us vital personal connections and imposes negative perceptions that cause more problems than the benefits our mountains of data could ever deliver.
Stories You Tell Every Day
In a way it’s unnecessary to “learn” storytelling because you tell stories every day. This book is actually designed to help you pay more attention to the stories you tell so you can be more mindful about the perceptions you build and sustain. Most of the time you don’t even realize you are telling stories. It is less obvious still how powerfully these stories impact your life. So what kind of stories do we tell? We tell stories about how stressed we are, how stupid some people are, and how no one on earth has ever had an airplane/airport experience worse than we have. In this pressure cooker life we lead, we use every spare moment we can find to vent our frustrations. Know that you need to vent frustrations, and you need to vent them by telling stories. BUT … not with people you want to influence.
Mindlessly telling war stories and playing “that’s nothing, listen to this” reinforces and reexperiences unavoidable frustrations every time you tell them. Telling stories amplifies whatever the story is about. The fuel of perceptions—good or bad—is storytelling. That’s why we need to be more intentional about the stories we tell.
To help us pay attention, let’s look at six kinds of stories that deserve your attention. The six types of stories are:
1. Who I Am
2. Why I Am Here
3. Teaching
4. Vision
5. Value in Action
6. I Know What You Are Thinking
If we were to judge by the stories most people tell on a daily basis we would conclude they are stressed-out, misunderstood victims (who I am) here to survive red tape and stupid decisions (why I am here). They pine for retirement or the firing of a certain individual (vision), and they believe that the “haves” couldn’t care less about the “have nots” (value in action). They unconsciously tell stories that ensure coworkers learn that no amount of effort is going to change things (teaching) because they’ve already tried and failed (I know what you are thinking).
Okay, so that is an overstatement, but you get my point. You are already telling stories about who you are, why you are here, what you envision, value, teach, and know about other’s secret thoughts—the problem is that you haven’t realized how much your stories matter. You may not realize every story you tell is important. Maybe you think data is more important than your informal and subjective stories. No. Nothing is more important than the stories you tell yourself and others about your work and your personal and community life.
I’d like to encourage you to mindfully tell stories that create the kind of results you’d like to see at work, in your family, and in your community. When you turn your attention to these stories you can be more intentional in creating the kind of perceptions that achieve goals rather than reinforce problems. These are the six types of stories I recommend you invest with your time and attention:
Who-I-Am Stories
What qualities earn you the right to influence this person? Tell of a time, place, or event that provides evidence that you have these qualities. Reveal who you are as a person. Do you have kids? What were you like as a kid? What did your parents teach you? What did you learn in your first job? Get personal. People need to know who you are before they can trust you.
Why-I-Am-Here Stories
When someone assumes you are there to sell an idea that will cost them money, time, or resources, it immediately discredits your “facts” as biased. However, you chose your job for reasons besides money. Tell this person what you get out of it besides money. Or if it is just about the money for you, own it.
Teaching Stories
Certain lessons are best learned from experience—some of them over and over again during a lifetime. Patience, for instance. You can tell someone to “be patient,” but it’s rarely helpful. Better to tell a story that creates a shared experience (simulated, of course) of patience along with the rewards of patience. Your story will change behavior much better than advice. Story is as close to modeling patience as you can get in three minutes.
Vision Stories
A worthy, exciting future story reframes present difficulties as “worth it.” Big projects and new challenges are difficult and frustrating for implementers who weren’t in on the decision. Without a vision, these meaningless frustrations suck the life energy out of a group. With an engaging vision, however, huge obstacles shrink to small irritants on the path to a worthwhile goal. (Note: Vision stories that promise more than they deliver do more damage than good.)
Values-in-Action Stories
Values are subjective. To one person, integrity means doing what his boss tells him to do. To someone else, integrity means saying no even if it costs her job. If you want to encourage a value or teach a value you have to provide a “demonstration” by telling a story that illustrates in action what that value means, behaviorally. Hypothetical situations sound hypocritical and preachy. Be specific.
I-Know-What-You-Are-Thinking Stories
People like to stay safe. Many times they have already made up their mind, with specific objections to the ideas you bring. They don’t come out and say, “I’ve already decided this is hogwash,” but they might be thinking it. It is a trust-building surprise for you to share their secret suspicions in a story that first validates and then dispels these objections without sounding defensive.
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Before we move on to developing and testing stories we need to return to the issue of subjective and objective thinking. I hope I’ve done a good job demonstrating that stories are subjective, and that subjective doesn’t mean irrelevant. Now let’s address the specific ways that subjective story thinking breaks three rules you learned when you were taught to think objectively. It is much easier to develop your storytelling skills when you suspend your internal critic’s message that you are breaking important rules for good thinking. We have to create a new category of good thinking that may be substantially different but is just as valid as objective thinking.