Storytelling is about finding your lens: figuring out how your way of looking at the world is unique. And while this may seem obvious, it is a tremendously challenging and time-consuming process! Finding your lens can be elusive, because it is really hard to know how your way of looking at the world is unique – after all, it is how you understand and experience the world!!! It is hard to hear yourself as others hear you – but have you ever felt yourself being utterly transported into someone else world when they tell you a story that is so richly infused with their ways of understanding? It is intoxicating, and this is one of the main reasons why I find storytelling to be so valuable.

“But this is just a funny story that I like to tell!”
When we first choose something to take the stage to tell, it is difficult to see that this series of events might “mean” anything or “say anything important.” After all, you experienced this as a series of “things that happened.” And I know that when I first started telling a few years ago, the first couple stories that suggested themselves to me to tell were of the genre “and this happened, and then this happened, and then this.” When pushed to say what the story was really about, I would say something like, “well, I have a lot of crazy things happen to me!” That was how it felt!

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