Telling authentic stories
I was fortunate in my life to meet and work with a master storyteller. Everyone has people in their lives who they consider master storytellers, people who can hold the attention of everyone at the dinner table, people who gather small crowds at cocktail parties as they recount some anecdote from their lives. These are master storytellers, certainly, but Diane Wolkstein was a different kind of storyteller.
Diane Wolkstein’s first book was Inanna: Queen of Heaven, a translation she wrote in collaboration with archaeologist Samuel Noah Kramer. The book tells of the myth of Inanna, working from a text discovered on ancient Sumerian clay tablets. She then performed that epic poem from 9th century BCE for audiences all over the world, including at the Museum of Natural History in New York. She lived in New York City, and every Saturday in the summer she performed at the statue of Hans Christian Andersen in Central Park for an audience of children who hung on her every word. She was declared the “official storyteller of New York City.” She went on to write over 20 books, including books of folktales from Haiti, stories from the Bible, Chinese legends, and other ancient and modern stories she had gathered through years of research. She was one of the founders of the Storytelling Foundation of North America. She gave workshops on the art form of storytelling.
She was literally a master storyteller—it was her job. Spending time with her, I understood how to take storytelling seriously, not as an amusement for the dinner table or the cocktail party, but as a foundational element to the human experience.
She told me that good storytelling is actually quite simple. There are three things to remember when telling a story:
1. Stand with your feet rooted in the ground.
2. Make eye contact.
3. Know why you’re telling this story to these people at this moment in time.
The first two seem simple enough, but it’s surprising how many people can’t do them. The third one is obviously the most important—in fact, if you have the third one then the other two come much more easily.
But why are these three rules so important? Why not tell a story while staring just over the tops of your audience’s heads?
Storytelling, at its foundation, is about emotional connection. When Diane Wolkstein tells us to stand with our feet rooted in the ground, she’s telling us to fully inhabit our bodies. She’s asking us to tell from where we actually are in the world, today.
Let’s say you have to give a presentation for work. Any presentation skills seminar will tell you to stand with both feet on the ground and make eye contact with your audience. They will then give you a series of physical gestures that are intended to project a sense of confidence and power. But what if you don’t feel confident and powerful that day? What if you’re unsure about the way forward, but you have to give the presentation anyway?
With the spread of ideas from researchers like Brene Brown—who is herself a master storyteller as much as she is a researcher—people are coming to understand the importance of sharing vulnerability, not just in our personal interactions but in every aspect of our lives. The reason why? Authenticity. The contrived gestures learned at a presentation skills seminar will give your audience the sense that you are in charge, that you demand to be listened to. But it won’t communicate the sense that you actually have something to say—because it’s very likely you don’t.
What if when you stand in front of your team to give that presentation Monday morning, you stand with both feet on the ground and accept how you actually feel that day? I’m unsure of myself. I want to be a strong leader, but the world is an uncertain place. We have no guarantee of success.
Most leaders in the business world would be horrified to begin the week sharing thoughts and feelings like this with their team. It runs counter to everything we have been taught about what it means to be the boss, why we’re given the privilege of standing in front of a group of people to begin with. Yet if you did begin your talk this way, can you imagine the reaction you would get from those listening? Because unlike most business presentations, they would be listening. They would be hanging on your every word.
Remember, however, that this is not about how to share your feelings authentically—it’s about how to tell a story. Every good story includes vulnerability, uncertainty, real danger and loss. If a story doesn’t include this, no one will listen. But the function of a story is to integrate these truly frightening experiences into a narrative that teaches us how to live with fear and uncertainty in our own lives. Stories teach us values that help us to deal with the pain and uncertainty in the world.
You stand on your own two feet and you look them in the eye, not because you were told to by your presentation skills tutor, but because you actually have something to say. You have an authentic human experience you want to share with them. You want to connect on an emotional level. You want to bring your humanity to the story.
Please keep in mind that this doesn’t mean that the story needs to be autobiographical or deeply revealing of personal details. When Diane Wolkstein told the Haitian story of The Magic Orange Tree, it wasn’t her story. It wasn’t a story from the culture she grew up in. But it was still an authentic story, because she connected to it with her humanity. She made it personal for her and for us. She understood why she wanted to tell that story at that particular moment in time—and if she didn’t want to tell it, she wouldn’t.
Authenticity is powerful, and it brings real risk with it. It forces you to live consequentially in the moment, and that’s not always comfortable. From that discomfort brings strength. A quote often attributed to Brene Brown: “He or she that has the greatest capacity for discomfort rises the strongest and the fastest.”
Crafting a story and then delivering that story to an audience in an impactful way is an art form. Diane Wolkstein traveled the world searching out folktales and myths, and then she practiced for hours, honing each element of the performance so that she could communicate these stories with an audience using the only instrument we carry with us at all times, ourselves. We know that storytelling is the most ancient art form not because we have historical records but because it is the historic record. We have never stopped telling stories.
The next time you find yourself telling an anecdote to connect with an audience, ask yourself: Why am I telling this story to these people, at this particular moment in time? If you know the answer, you may find that it’s easier to stand on your own two feet and look people in the eye.
