What a week! I’m on holiday, it's my birthday on Monday and I celebrate my 300th week in a row writing this very blog. I’m always impressed at how the universe brings important occasions together to create a deeper meaning. A great example is blog number #200 was also our 10 year wedding anniversary. It feels like a wink from the universe.
Doing anything for 300 weeks is pretty awesome. Turning 43 doesn’t sound as awesome but it’s a reason to celebrate nevertheless. Like most people, I feel reflective around my birthday and this year is no different. It's been a pretty crazy year. I’ve closed a business, started a completely new career and become an Australian citizen amongst other things.
I live an interesting life and being able to share those stories for 300 weeks in a row is probably what I’m most proud of (excluding raising useful humans of course). Every Friday morning I sit down to write and worry that I might not have anything to write about and for nearly 6 years, that has never happened. Sometimes it takes me a while to get into the flow of it - like this morning - but once I get started, the outside world fades away and words just emerge from my tip tapping fingers on the keyboard.
Coincidentally this week I was putting together a communication workshop for our BTS student leaders about the importance of storytelling. It’s going to sound silly but as I was hunting through Vinh Giang, a communication expert, online material about good storytelling it dawned on me that storytelling is kind of my jam. It’s only taken 6 years of practice to make that connection, or at least acknowledge the important role it plays in my life, but it all makes sense.
According to Vinh, being able to tell good stories takes practice and most good stories consider the following:
Good stories have a point, and that point is relevant to your audience and / or the conversation you're in. I’m sure there are hundreds of examples you can think of when someone tells a story that has nothing to do with what you're talking about. I'm pretty sure this is why listening to other people talk about dreams is so boring. A good storyteller makes that connection rather than tasking the audience to do it themselves because most people won’t.
Good stories are based around a peak emotion or action. What happened? What was the lesson you learned? How did you feel? When a story is born there are normally a series of events that lead to the climax or outcome. A good storyteller has the ability to remove the superfluous detail and whilst keeping enough information to bring the audience along.
Good storytellers set the scene. The key is to help your audience ‘relive’ the event rather than just ‘reporting’ the event to them. One of the easiest ways to relive the event is to play the characters. Rather than just summarising the conversation, you can play out the important parts. Sounds weird to write it but it happens pretty naturally in a human conversation. Another trick is to be specific. Where, what, when, why and how. Setting the scene helps people imagine what was happening. Even using the word ‘imagine’ is a great way to invite the audience in.
Good storytellers practice. Like any craft, it takes time to refine. This little lesson was a lightbulb moment for me because this blog is my practice. Vinh’s number one exercise to get better at telling stories is to start collecting stories. I now have 300 of them. Every time I write a blog I’m capturing a moment in time. It needs to stand on its own as a piece of writing because I have no idea who reads it and because I write with my mum in mind. It needs a beginning, middle and end. Set up, climax, lesson.
In one video, Vinh was asked by an audience member how to come up with good stories and his answer was quite profound. Live an interesting life. If we go about doing the same thing day in, day out, how can we expect to have any stories worth sharing? At 43, I can honestly say that I wholeheartedly live an interesting life. 300 weeks of content is evidence of this.
This weekly practice catalogs the mundane alongside the momentous. It gives me the opportunity to transform moments from my life into lessons, thus extending their impact beyond myself to anyone who cares to read. I used to think that I experienced an extraordinary, sometimes unfair, amount of life events, since I never had nothing to write about on a Friday morning. The reality is that I only have something to write about because I show up every Friday. I live an interesting life because I find life interesting. That realization is the best birthday gift I could ask for!
