Discovery Through Stories
The Storytelling Series: Part 4 of 5
Why do you do what you do?
It’s a challenging question, isn’t it? Along the same lines as: why do you love your partner? Your family or friends? What is your life’s purpose?
Why Do You Do What You Do?
The fact is no matter what we do or why we do it, part of our purpose will always be to help others - to help our clients. One of the best ways to do this is through storytelling.
When our clients discover something that they didn’t know before - about themselves, about a process, or about the world - it’s as much a victory for them as it is for us. We learn about ourselves and our world from the stories we hear, read, and tell.
Why Do We Tell Stories?
It’s natural for us to want to explain our world, our experiences, and ourselves using stories. It’s how we make sense of everything. It’s also natural to want to tell these stories to others. Stories help us see patterns, demonstrate cause and effect, and present correlations.
Patterns
While our lives likely don’t follow the traditional five-act structure of the exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution, we can place certain events and experiences into this structure. It’s another way of making sense of our lives.
We set the scene, then build up the suspense because we already know about that Big Moment where things changed, and then we bring the story down into a satisfying ending.
The important thing here is that when we place our stories onto a structure like this, we have the chance to step back and look at several stories all at once. We can identify common mistakes or beliefs that may have held us back. Essentially, we can find patterns - patterns we can recognize, categorize as either good or bad, and then seek to change.
For example, maybe we continuously doubt our business capacity and turn down opportunities to expand and grow without even realizing it. We might want to hire more staff, but we’re stuck with a pile of resumes, and no one seems to be the right fit. Or we want to open a new location, but we talk ourselves out of it because we think it’ll be too expensive.
By telling and then sharing these stories, we have the chance to change old habits and define new patterns geared towards success.
Cause and Effect
Similar to the above, stories also demonstrate cause and effect. While this can look like not hiring anyone because of doubt and internal beliefs, it can also look like taking that leap or trying something new and seeing the amazing results.
It can be difficult to always see the big picture. We get carried away in the day-to-day and forget how far we’ve come. But when we tell our stories, we’re not focusing on the minute details of that Wednesday afternoon, we’re sharing the moment we planned an event for clients and the turnout exceeded the expectations. Yes, it was those daily activities on those weekday mornings and afternoons that helped us get to where we are, but it is the culmination of those days that led us to our current success. Cause. Effect. If I do this today, it will help me tomorrow.
Correlations
The best part about stories is how natural it is for human beings to want to share them. We write books, plays, and poems, and we tell each of our friends the same story again and again because it was just so good. And we do it because we simply want to.
Sometimes we share a story because we think it will help someone else. We believe that at least one person - or many people - can relate to the story and can find correlations between their own story and this one. We often have a favourite character in a book, even if it isn’t the hero or protagonist, because they are likely someone we can empathize with. We can see the correlations between the character and ourselves.
Why Do Stories Help Us Change?
Sometimes stories share happy moments. Our successes or our accomplishments. They inspire us to dream and to imagine all the possibilities our future may hold. Sometimes it can be these very same stories that contain things we don’t want to see. Things that make us uncomfortable - uncomfortable enough to contemplate change.
Often stories allow us the distance and perspective we need to take a good, honest look at ourselves, our lives, and the path we are on. If we’re open to making things better, we can learn how to make those improvements through stories.
When we share our experiences or even past client successes through stories, our prospects can discover patterns, causes and effects, and correlations in themselves. And we can guide them towards even more positive discoveries by helping them envision their future successes when working with us.
As with stories that provide conflict and lead prospects to a decision, stories that encourage discovery help our prospects identify and empathize with the story we're telling - they connect to the story. Without that emotional connection, people become bored and ignore the story completely. With the emotional connection, they become engaged in the story as they discover themselves within it. And this leads to them actively making a change.
Next Time
Next time, we’ll bring all of the conflict, decision, and discovery together to incorporate storytelling into your brand, and that will bring us to the end of this storytelling series.
Listen to the podcast episode here.