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Inviting Your Protégé to Enchantment

The Gift of Story

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

Hannah Arendt

“People are different. They don’t all see things the same way.” It was the opening line of a mentor’s effort to help his protégé cope with the challenges of learning about relationships. The mentor continued: “It reminds me of the comic strip Mutt and Jeff.” In the early 1960s the comic strip was one of everybody’s favorites.

“Mutt and Jeff were playing a competitive game of golf and having a great time,” the mentor began. “As they approached the ninth tee, they were even. As Mutt was setting up to tee off, he turns and says to Jeff, ‘You know, Jeff, if everybody saw like I did, everybody would want my wife.’ Jeff saw this as the perfect time to bring his starstruck buddy back to reality. ‘I don’t know about that, Mutt,’ Jeff says. ‘If everybody saw like I did, nobody would want your wife.’ They both have a great laugh!” The corny story helped the protégé gain new insights into how important it was to try to see things through the eyes of another.

People love stories. They love to tell them and they love to hear them. A really good story makes a campfire worth lighting, a cocktail party worth attending, and a reunion worth holding. A story can evoke tears and laughter. A good story can touch something familiar in each of us and yet show us something new about our lives, our world, ourselves.

Stories can also be powerful tools for mentoring. In the words of author Rudyard Kipling, “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” Stories can reach resistant protégés in ways that well-crafted advice may not. Unlike straightforward advice or feedback, stories have a way of circumventing the mind’s logic to capture the imagination. As such, they are great gifts when delivered with care, content, and caution.

Most stories are either crafted or chosen. The crafted ones are “baked from scratch”; the chosen ones are “re-crafted”—in other words, tailored to fit the mentor, the protégé, and the learning objective. The objective is paramount. Stories without purpose obviously lack relevance, but they also tend to lack charm.