Comparison and judgment were at the wheel because of social media. This is how I was engaging with others and with everything that was happening in the world. The more I scrolled, the more anxious, judge-y, and comparison-y I felt.
Sure there's snappy ad copy to schedule a discovery call or to visit their website to "learn more", but I don't just want to learn more. Before I take my earbuds out of my ears, I want to spend time with the host and discover new perspectives, have space to self-reflect, and feel all the feels.
Every time I went to work on it further, a small voice inside of me whispered, "When there's so much horribleness going on in the world, why would anyone want to hear a season of a podcast about you, the book you wrote when you were 10, and how our stories play a huge role in our identity?" In other words, why would anyone care about my story?
Introduce yourself
Illuminate an idea
Win an argument
Strengthen a call to action
Be a stellar podcast guest
Perhaps you're feeling increased self-doubt when it comes to how you look on camera, or how your tone of voice and body language are translating virtually. Maybe its obsessing over “appropriate” work from home fashion choices (Can I get away with "business" on top and sweatpants on the bottom?) Then are the introspective questions around personal vs. professional identity.
But the more you dwell on the “what if’s?” when it comes to video conferencing and communication, the less chance you’ll show up in a way that feels good, easy, and true to who you are.
Flash forward to the next class. All of the kids were abuzz, talking about the character they had created. Of the fifteen students, fourteen of them brought in drawings of the character. Each drawing showed what their personality was like and what superpowers they possessed. What about that fifteenth student? She sat quietly in the circle with a look of horror and embarrassment on her face. And she was clutching a shoe box.
When I first started telling stories on stage, I thought that what I was doing was doing stand-up comedy. I would perform on comedy nights, with other comedians, and people would laugh at what I said. But my material had a different rhythm to it. I wasn’t out there just to get a laugh every few seconds, I was sharing things from my life that I could now look back on and laugh at (and with). And the payoff for the audience — who would still laugh, repeatedly, along the way — was a complete story, that they could connect to, relate to, and feel joy from.
Lately the most visited page on the Tell Me A Story website is… this one. The problem? I wrote the original blog post in the Spring of 2016 and so much has changed for me since then!
In the past three years, I went full time with Tell Me A Story and have been building it into a full service brand. I started a podcast. I joined several professional networking organizations. And I grew less and less nervous showing up to events because as I showed up as my true self.
No blazer.
No agenda.
Just presence and an open mind to meeting new people, learning new things and seeing what might come of it way down the line.
When beginning to craft your personal narrative it can feel like there are so many places that you could begin. And when you are overwhelmed by the number of starting points, it makes it all the more difficult to begin the story brainstorming process. There are two common anxieties when it comes to crafting a story that you want to share with your audience. The first is the deep rooted belief that you don't have a story worth telling. There are many many reasons why this statement is false. Every single one of us has a story worth sharing. It doesn’t have to be monumental. You just need to have a purpose for sharing it. The second major worry when it comes to finding the right story to tell is the feeling of having so many personal narrative ideas that you just can’t wrap your head around where to start. Here’s where the tidying up comes in. To find the best story to tell, you need to brain dump all of the ideas out of your head and then check in with each one to see whether or not it sparks joy.
Here's the thing: I've watched many brilliant TED Talks. And I am sure there are many brilliant ones just waiting to be discovered. But I do not think that a TED Talk makes you a thought leader. I do not think that following a very rigid format is the best way to connect with your audience and communicate and idea that you are passionate about sharing.
