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I’ve been a storyteller all my life and so have you. Welcome to our world of storytelling.
I’ve not always known this and perhaps you haven’t either or maybe you will realise once you’ve read this.
It was around 2009 I started to become aware that I was an outstanding storyteller. This is when I discovered my own creative ability to produce whiteboard animations. Showreel enclosed to illustrate what they are.
When clients asked me to create one for them and they gave me their scripts, I held my head in my hands in despair. The scripts were boring and were basically adverts. They said, here’s my product or service, please buy me.
I know the purpose of any advert is for people to buy a product or service of course I do. But unless you have thousands or millions in your budget to use the hammer on a rock method, you can repeat your advert daily until it has been hammered into your prospect’s brain. The brain being the rock which eventually will develop a huge dent to make the information (ad) stay there forever or at least for a very long time. But this is an expensive and a very time consuming method. I'm not saying it won't work and most small businesses (my ideal clients) don't have deep pockets to be able to afford constant advertising.
You’d be better off sharing a story. Let me explain why. You and I learnt about stories as soon as we were born. We couldn’t speak or maybe even understand what these people around us were saying but we learnt to make sense of their noises and expressions. It’s how we learnt body language. We then also learnt that when our tiny body was hungry we could make a very very loud noise by crying which almost immediately made the food (mother’s milk) come to us. Just like a delicious takeaway.
This continued for a while until my and your parents decided to read stories to us every single day. Believe it or not you and I never got bored of these stories we loved them and we also wanted to hear the same story every single day and we never got bored! How does that work?
On top of our learning of body language when we were babies, we now learnt to remember stories and get lost in them. We created other worlds in our minds, worlds of good and evil but also worlds where the hero(in) overcame adversity.
See, you and I hardwired our brains for storytelling. We now love stories, that’s why we love the movies, we are curious about other people’s stories, we converse with friends and family by sharing our stories with each other. We are storytelling masters and story sponges.
We are also the hero(in) in our own life story overcoming adversity regularly throughout our lives, whilst we speed around in circles on this beautiful planet, literally and metaphorically.
So how can we use storytelling for our own transformation? If we experience adversity in our lives, we get addicted to focusing on that story, we may share it regularly with family, friends and colleagues during the stage of adversity. Those around us will help us by asking about our story of adversity every single day, helping us to reinforce our focus on all that is bad in our lives. Remember we all love hearing stories even the bad ones, our brain is wired for stories from the very start of our lives.
Adversity is tough, but, it will pass it always does. It can pass faster if you tell yourself a different story. Write down how your story of adversity will be transformed in the coming days, weeks, months or maybe even years. Read that story to yourself every single day and learn to love it like you did when you were a child. Get excited about the undoing of your adversity, maybe even record your new story in your own voice on your phone in a voice memo and listen to it daily.
In the same way we wired our brains to hear and love stories all our lives, we too can become master storytellers of our own lives by rewriting the script, directing and producing a new blockbuster movie with ourselves as the leading character and everything we wish to be present in our new reality.
We all live the same story, sure people, places, things, times and events are all different but the underlying story is exactly the same, we are the same, we are after all, all human!
Happy storytelling.
~ Michael de Groot - bio.link/stayingaliveuk
