Tip 22: Protect Yourself

I was driving through downtown Chicago, practicing reciting a story I planned to tell while leading a storytelling workshop later that morning. Like many of my stories, it was about some injustice I had suffered, which many of my stories tend to be about. As I spoke, I felt my hands clutching the steering wheel tighter and tighter. My voice was rising. I was becoming angry, just like I was the day the events in the story unfolded.

I thought to myself, "Storyteller is the only job where it pays to hold a grudge."

I laughed. Then I smiled. Then I frowned...

...because I remembered something.

My favorite band is Fleetwood Mac. I love their music, but I also like that they are so messy. That adds passion and emotion to their music. There's always a feeling that something is at stake. They are also artists of the singer-songwriter era, so every song tells a story.

So, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were at the end of their relationship. While songwriters often change the origin story behind their classic songs seemingly for kicks, I remember seeing a video where she said she wrote Dreams (my favorite song) about that breakup.

And because this is Fleetwood Mac, petty begets petty, so Lindsey wrote Go Your Own Way in response. I've also read that it was the other way around, but the point is that they were fighting through music.

About Go Your Own Way, Stevie told Rolling Stone, “I very much resented him telling the world that ‘packing up, shacking up’ with different men was all I wanted to do. He knew it wasn’t true. It was just an angry thing that he said. Every time those words would come onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him. He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that. It was like, ‘I’ll make you suffer for leaving me.’ And I did.” (source)

When I first heard that, I thought, damn. These people have spent 40+ years performing songs that were written specifically to hurt them. They weren't the only ones, Christine McVie (RIP) wrote You Make Loving Fun about the man she was cheating on her husband with - her husband being the bass player of the band. I read that at the time, she told her husband it was about a dog. He didn't find out the truth about the song until years later.

So messy! And this was before social media.

I'm saying this because I realized I have to be careful rummaging around in my memories. All storytellers must be careful. Yes, the more I remember about the incident, the more passion and emotion I can convey when I tell the story. But, the price is that I end up re-living that hurt. How does a wound heal if you keep ripping off the bandage and saying to everyone, "Look what happened to me!"

Keep in mind that I'm not talking about telling the story. I'm talking about the labor it takes to rifle through your memories, remember what happened, visualize it, and then try to shape it into a story. It's the pre-game.

I don't have the answers for this one, but I do have a few recommendations for me and you:

• Identify your purpose: Consider why you want to share this particular story. Is it to connect with others, to find closure, or to help someone in a similar situation? Clarifying your purpose can guide how you approach the story and what aspects to highlight.
• Reflect from a distance. Begin by viewing the event from a more detached perspective, as if you were an observer. This helps you analyze the story without getting too emotionally involved, making it easier to identify the key elements worth sharing.
• Redirect your energy toward the positive. I confess I have a bias. I find negative stories more interesting than positive ones. But that's because I tend to dwell longer on the negative and consequently find more things to learn. I also focus on change in my stories, and the more negative the event, the more likely I am to experience a transformation. As for the positive ones - I may forget that it even happened. I focus on being glad it didn't turn out as bad as I thought it would be - which keeps me in my comfort zone. Yeah, I have to work on that.
• Don't tell it. Just shush! If you're going to be a storyteller, you owe the world honesty, authenticity, and vulnerability. You don't owe the world a breakdown. When will it be safe to share it? As Stevie Nicks writes in Dreams, "When the rain washes you clean, you'll know. You'll know." Just kidding. That's not helpful at all. The full incident and the needed context may never be "story-worthy," but the more you develop your storytelling skills, the easier it will be to carve out what is needed to support your overall intent.

On that note, I'll leave you with a Fleetwood Mac song with less drama behind it, Rhiannon. And, side note, if you're a fan of music from the 1970s like I am, check out The Midnight Special on YouTube. All your favorites will be there in their young, sweety, possibly inebriated glory.

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Books

Quality Management in Learning and Development (2024)

StoryTraining: Selecting and Shaping Stories That Connect (2018)

ATD's Handbook for Training and Talent Development - Chapter 16 (2022)

TD at Work Guide: Power E-Learning With Stories (2021)

TD at Work Guide: Get the Whole Picture With a Performance Assessment (2018)