The healing power of storytelling

About a month or two ago I celebrated five years of blogging on LinkedIn, something I never thought I would keep up let alone build a community and a business around the thing I love most. As I reflected on my LinkedIn blogging milestone I looked back on my journey and the importance the role of creativity, writing and storytelling played, not just professionally but also personally. I was definitely a natural storyteller but I was never a natural writer I grew up speaking Spanish at home, learnt English in school and by the time I was eleven I was already fluent in French and Italian having spent lots of summers there (a blog for another day). My brain has always been a combination of a sponge, absorbing languages relatively easily and also a minestrone soup mixing up grammar and vocabulary, the not so fun perks of being a polyglot at a young age. The art of storytelling and writing has been a long journey for me but I would say nothing has been more powerful than developing these skills and sharing it with the world in the past five years. I wanted to share with you what I’ve learnt…

Storytelling to serve 

When I started blogging on LinkedIn, I had one mission in mind ‘to be the person I never had’. I grew up in the first generation to go university and so I didn’t have parents in city careers or access to a professional network. When I looked online, there weren’t that many role models, well at least people that looked like me that came from similar backgrounds. My intention was to serve, help and support by sharing my own personal story of what went well and what didn’t. I began blogging to students and graduates about all things career and professional development. But over time that began to change as I evolved as a person and my experiences and challenges changed and new stories were born. I went from using my words as a way to serve a younger audience to using my words as a way to help heal myself and in turn inspire others to heal themselves too. A way for me to process the pain of my adversity and to let it go. My mission had shifted to ‘help one person either feel less alone’ and if I succeeded then it was worthwhile publicly sharing my adversity. 

Storytelling to connect

I have lost track of the amount of messages I have received around my #traumatotriumph newsletter and how much of my story is relatable. It is precisely for this reason that I write about my not so great experiences in life because most of the time we feel so alone in our pain and yet we all experience this collective rollercoaster called life. When we share who we are truly, we expose ourselves. We are showing the deepest parts of who we are and naturally the fear of being judged, criticised and so on appear. But when we our vulnerable and we dig really deep to share openly who we are, we can truly connect with each other. Just this week I was packing up my belongings to put into storage (blog coming soon) and I came across a small painting with some words that was sent to me by a homeless man named  Robert who I spent many evenings talking to in front of my house. It took me back to the first time I met Robert and how we bonded of writing and travelling and how captivated I was by his story of walking from London across Europe every summer. 

“Stories connect us no matter who we are.”

Storytelling to heal 

After suffering a miscarriage, I found it really hard to engage with the world. I had lost my sense of self and had little interest in doing much at all. A friend of mine had invited me to a weekend where we would listen to a story being told. I went with my fragile body and broken heart into the woods for a weekend with a group of women. What I experienced was nothing short of magical, it’s the only way I can describe it. One of the exercises was to write what came to us from poems that we were read and slowly as I put my pen to paper, poem after poem poured out of me. I hadn’t written one single poem since I was in my early teens. Word after word wrapped itself around my grief and soothed me. It didn’t take the pain away but it felt like a warm balm was appeasing the intensity of my pain. I could finally articulate everything that had felt locked up inside me, worried that if even a syllable was uttered aloud I would crumble into a million pieces, and yet on a piece of paper everything felt safer. 

Storytelling to empower 

A few months ago I decided to design a course unlike anything I’ve ever done. It was created through numerous virtual nudges that came from people that read my blogs, “Alex, I wish I could write like you do” or “I feel like I have something to say to the world, but I don’t know where to begin.” I thought long and hard about the amount of impact I had with my words, what if I could teach people to do the same, how much more people could we inspire and empower collectively? And so the course was born. In the last class of my six week course, the attendees were given one final exercise which would bring all of the work they had been studying into their final ‘piece de resistance.’ I watched as they all bravely and courageously spoke in front of others that had merely been strangers to each other a few weeks back. Voices waivered, tears flowed and hearts were beating fast and yet the smiles that were left on their faces told me my job was done. In empowering themselves through their very own stories and writing, they were in fact empowering others.

“By writing and sharing ourselves in a vulnerable and authentic way we feel empowered to own our stories and to honour them.”

Whilst my writing journey has been ongoing for the past five years it was in the last year where I was encouraged to join a creative writing course much to my reluctance that really took my storytelling to a deeper place within me. When I started creative writing I thought “but I’m not a creative writer, I’m just a blogger that share a few musings every now and then.” It was through these courses that the creative in me slowly awoke from a deep slumber that had been initiated by the stifling of creativity that had happened in my corporate days. I began to recollect, as though playing back a film of all the vivid memories of reading and telling stories to people, writing letters and journaling as a teenager. Where had that writer gone? Where had that creative gone? Then I started noticing it in my clients and further afield. We were all ‘playing it safe’ with our business, educational and informative content and then a pandemic happened. Week after week new stories popped up in my feed and somehow, we started to become more human. We started to show people who we truly are and I sure hope it stays that way. 

With love and care,

#AuthenticAlex

If you like what you read please hit like, comment, share and subscribe to continue being notified of my online therapy journal. If you think this might be helpful for someone that you know please do share or tag them in the comments. The more we talk about mental health, the less of a stigma it has.

The next Tell Your Story Course is due to start on the 1st October and there are still a few spots left. The 6 week course is ￡399. Please get in touch if it’s of interest and I will send you through the brochure and testimonials. 

You can follow more of my musings and antics here @imauthenticalex or sign up to my newsletter that covers topics such as finding your purpose, telling your story and growing your presence https://mailchi.mp/1d671953165c/authentic-alex-newsletter

About me: Hi I’m Alex, after experiencing a quarter-life crisis I decided to leave the corporate world and create my own definition of success. On the day I left that job I wrote a post that went viral on LinkedIn. 

Since then I've been named LinkedIn Top Voice UK twice and have worked with companies such as Deloitte, Shell, Dyson, BP and Fiverr all through building my own Thought Leadership on LinkedIn

By day I help people grow their presence on LinkedIn, helping them find their sense of purpose and tell their own stories. By night I turn into a superhero keynote speaker and blogger under the hashtag #AuthenticAlex, knocking down one stigma at a time! 

I'm also the co-creator of #LinkedInLocal, the biggest hashtag campaign on LinkedIn that created offline communities in over 100 countries and 1,000 cities.