Do you want to become a better storyteller? Read this book!

Do you want to tell your stories better? This is the purpose of Sarah Elkins’ Your Stories Don't Define You. How You Tell Them Will: Storytelling to Connect, Persuade, and Entertain. I know quite a number of books about storytelling have come out over the past few years. This one, though, strikes a different tone, and this is what makes it compelling, convincing and endearing: Think of it as a workshop about storytelling in which Sarah takes you through her journey to invite you to hone your own skills. 

The book is composed of eight chapters: Your Brain and the Stories You Tell; Perception Gap; Know Yourself; Know Your Motivation; The Internal Stories That Shape Us; Stories Help Us Process Experiences; Stories Can Build and Improve Our Relationships; Storytelling for Career and Business; Storytelling: Observation is the Key. While each of these titles refers to a clear topic, Sarah doesn’t turn into some professor lecturing us about a collection of dos and don'ts. Instead, she addresses the art of telling stories through the process of telling them, i.e. recursively. As a result also, the chapters’ titles read more like beacons guiding us along three major themes: 1) the stories we choose, 2) the way we stage and transform them into self-discovery narratives, and 3) how these narratives can become connectors with others. 

The stories we choose… 

Sarah starts her book with a short reference to her dad hosting a fraternity party where Chuck Berry played and did the duckwalk across the stage… Wow! Should we all look for spectacular anecdotes, then? Nope. Because it’s not a story. It’s an anecdote, albeit a nice one. “In my experience,” Sarah insists, “many of our small, less-epic experiences are the ones we can point to as pivot points in our lives.” In reality, many stories that turn out to become memorable are small, even ridiculous, incidents that we may dismiss as unworthy of anybody’s attention.

Is the fact that Sarah’s best friend in seventh grade told her that she didn’t understand why a boy would like her because she was “not very pretty” worth discussing? At first sight, it’s just the mean comment of a teenager to another teenager. But it becomes a story because of its situational meaning, i.e. the implicit or explicit interpretation we add to the event itself, both at the time and over time. So when is a story worth telling? When does it stop being one of the thousands of cases listed in the museum of bullying horrors? When we restage what happened to understand the story behind the story.

Great storytelling is not predicated upon the intrinsic theatrical or unique features of an event. However trivial the initial matter may be, what will make your stories stand out is the intent and the meaningfulness we instill in them. Consequently, anybody can become a great storyteller—hence Sarah’s encouragement to all of us to jot down the one or two-liners that will initiate your “story portfolio.”

Our stories: self-discovery narratives

The way we process stories is what defines us, not the stories themselves. The events we recollect are never raw material. They are always “primed” with some initial emotional coating and can—even should be— re-primed over time depending on the message we want to send to others, but also and before anything, the message we want to send to ourselves and the person we want to become. This is not being inauthentic, because more often than not, authenticity is just a sclerotic version of who we were at a given point in time. 

Reprocessing stories is part of our own character development. When a girl is told that she is not very pretty, will she be more authentic for reliving her pain and feeling like a victim forever? What if reviewing the context of this calamitous situation enabled her to pay attention to details she initially overlooked? Memories are complex prisms and the color of a story depends on the light you cast on that prism. The story of Sarah’s 1974 Beetle whose throttle cable snapped can be told in two almost opposite ways: as a mutual standoff between a young lady and a rough mechanic or as an unusual path to shared courtesy. 

The salient points that we pick in one situation are often disguised judgment calls that prevent us from understanding our relationship to our environment and consequently to ourselves: Know yourself, know your motivation, know who you want to be, know how you want to come across. Stories are identity and personal brand constructors.

Stories are connectors with others…

Before you tell any story, you must connect with yourself in order to also be able to master the impression you want to convey to an audience, which means that there will always be something that will change ever so slightly. If you tell the same story in exactly the same fashion over and over, you will transform yourself into an automaton: you will stop enjoying telling it, and your audience will be bored stiff listening to you… Neither the speaker nor the addressees will relate to the story, which is one of the original meaning of the world “tell”—from the old English “tellan.”

Storytelling is not a narcissistic exercise. You draw people to you if you keep in mind that sharing is a multipartite mechanism. That’s when you see how Sarah, a professional musician, has a unique edge as a business storytelling trainer for groups or organizations, as a podcaster and as the founder of the No Longer Virtual Conference. You have to listen to the vibes of the room: “Our best tool for learning to be a great story-sharer is observation.” 

Preparing for storytelling is as subtle as building a repertory. Lots of thing can go wrong if you pick the wrong story for an audience, get into too much detail, remain too vague, or if the intent of your message is lost in a verbal deluge. Prepare… Prepare… because this preparation is what will make you available to your audience, which in turn will enable you to re-adjust on the fly if needed: “Remember, the intention of sharing a short story is to connect AND to draw out a story from the person in front of you.” 

Storytelling is the art of resonance with oneself and with others.

This short book is very easy to read and will undoubtedly give you the desire and the confidence to become a storyteller.