ANDREW MELVILLE

I’m flat out writing a book about Untold Stories- The Power of Authentic Narrative in Leadership.

Mastering storytelling demands giving up fear that your story is not good enough.

Presentations and conversations that start with “I’m going to tell you a story…..” immediately warm an audience but also instantly create an expectation.

In the face of this expectation, the storyteller can often experience fear about how good their story is.

This is primal and goes way back. We have always placed great value on the ability in leadership to tell great stories; ones that transform, and come from courageous experience where an immense mountain has been climbed, a great adversary slain, a tumultuous ocean crossed. We constantly compare ourselves and our stories to others. Am I more brave, smarter, more captivating than the next guy?

Standing in the power of your own story allows you to give up the need to compete or compare through story.

There will always be someone who has climbed a higher mountain, or faced a greater hurdle.

In journalism, it was the quirky, unique and authentic stories I wrote that people remembered the most, not the ones about politics and crime. Great feats are remembered, but equally so too do human stories, no matter how great or small. Stand in the power of your delight and wonder in being alive, of observing, of loving the transformations and the little things you see in the world around you, and trust that your own story and those you choose to share can always strike a chord.

Thought Puppetry

As sure as day follows night, we will always have thousands of thoughts everyday, get thou, thou-sands, thou- ghts.

When we dream, a complex story unravels in microseconds that on waking occurs to us like an entire novel.

If we pause to think on thoughts, it is the same deal.

Think about it. Think thought. Think thousands.

We create many novels, major dramas, great feature movies, hour by hour.

It’s 7.40 am. I’ve been awake for an hour and I know if I wrote down every thought I had in the past hour it would fill a book.

Now, so what?

The trick is out of all these thoughts, which are we giving the headline to? What story line are we making to guide our day, and guide our life?

Are we really conscious?

My old habit was to grab the negative ones. No coincidence, that’s what happens in the news media. No wonder negative stories rate. They’re running at the same rate as our internal bulletins.

There is a comfort and justification and familiarity around living these ego based negatives. And then on the flipside, if we are attempting some correction of negative thoughts, we might tell ourselves we are bad for thinking them and should try to erase them.

Religion and many disciplines teach us that, we are wrong to think badly.

Well here’s a new deal.

There will always be a percentage of our thoughts that are crap, negative, boring, mundane. But we have a choice about how we weight them, how we cast them in our daily life/story/future. ( Story, stored up, store of knowledge, collected, planned calculated, saved up, regurgitated.)

We are Thought Puppeteers.

Now, who gets the lead role?

The company of thoughts are jostling for position every moment.

There is doubt, fear, worry, excitement, inspiration, creativity, happiness, playfulness, fun.

Cartoons love those little voices; the devil on the shoulder. There should be a whole cast up there.

So the practice is:

• Take the directors chair.
• Grasp the puppeteer’s strings, and have the thoughts you want dance, play, and weave a story.

Life would be flatline death if there was no light and shade. Cast your thoughts in the story you want to create.

Have them dance to your tune. There is a magic in us to cast a divine play for ourselves and others, a divine story.

We are the thought puppetry masters.

If the dark thoughts have a dominant role, release them.

Inject them with humour.

Funny how the best comedy is dark.

Naturally, there are ancient reasons we are moved by darkness and fear in stories.

Back before we separated out our intellects, when were so called ‘primitive’,

Stories were about survival. Dark stories were to teach of danger. To set guidelines for survival.

Humour was connection too. And to laugh at fear, and in the face of adversity, was also for survival.

Laughter and tears are so close, master storytellers are master thought puppeteers. Love your thoughts!

Wells, the sort you get water from, are a great metaphor for great storytelling. Imagine you are dunking a bucket into a deep dark well, wanting to get some cool fresh water.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how careful I am, and how careful many people I know are. By careful I don’t mean full of care, which is a good thing, but careful as in being really wary. So when a good idea springs up, it get squashed before it ever gets out.

I wonder if this is a tragic byproduct of our information age, we think of all the permeatations of how others might receive what we say and do, that old cliche, paralysis by analysis.

I played around for a while with a concept I called ‘blurt’ which was encouraging people to say what was on their mind, and trust that what welled up from their unconscious was useful, without sharp editing and pruning.

This runs completely counter to the useful advice to ‘think before you speak’. It depends on what the thinking is.

Being outspoken occurs as dangerous, and we can all put ‘our feet in our mouths’ from time to time.

But if our intension is not about ourselves, but for making a difference for others, ‘blurting’ something out is more honest, more compelling, more giving, and ultimately more effective that carefully engineered speaking.

Being ‘outspoken’ can be a craft, to show oneself honestly, to be authentic is soemthing we can all develop, to be heard, to be unique, and to live more fully through taking risks.

The funny thing is that sometimes these things happen anyway. Yesterday I blurted something out, and talked about ‘downlouding’ instead of ‘downloading.’ It was my head, heart and mind not quite in synch. Or may be it was because my companion thought the new term was pretty funny, and we played with the concept. I think or I ‘blurt’ that it is time for us all to be Down Loud, be heard and speak from our hearts and minds and be at risk.

How long is seven minutes? Without any context, it’s hard to say. In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t sound very long. But if you are waiting for something, it can be a very long time.

A friend recently told me about an actor acquaintance of theirs who was left hugely frustrated waiting in a supermarket checkout queue.

They were getting so annoyed with the wait time that they decided to time it. It was seven minutes.

They decided to take action with the supermarket company, and rang and talked their way through a number of gatekeepers until they got to a senior manager in the organisation.

They outlined their upset and then demanded the manager gain an experience of a seven minute wait.

The actor said ” I am holding my hand in the air, and when it comes down seven minutes will be up, then youu can experience what it is like to wait that long.”

As an actor by trade, the man had plenty of chutzpah to pull the experiment off. The manager started to protest, and the caller said ” No, no, we are starting again, you can’t speak. You need to experience the seven minutes from the top I’m raising my hand and we are starting now.”

The manager lasted about 3 and a half minutes and started to get angry and frustrated and hung up.

What a great way to illustrate when customer service goes bad.

This reminds me of working with organisations which try to justify a position and prove to a complainant or stakeholders that their experience is not all that bad, in comparison to other things.

There is nothing more infuriating than being told your experience is not valid.

To some, seven minutes is a long time, a life time. Waiting in a queue, it can be far too long, especially in a supermarket.

The manager concerned was shown a first hand experienc of waiting for several minutes doing absolutely nothing but wait.

I’d love to know whether the experience sang in, and how they will consider customer service and wait times in the future.

There is no doubt as human beings we get blocked and thwarted. The idea of being blocked, obstructed in our way forward is something I often hear. Usually, the obstacle is blamed on someone or something other than ourselves.
How often is the block simply a perception, in the realm of ‘ If only this thing or that person wasn’t in the way, I could achieve what I want!
I have an idea about how to shift that perception.
If we look at nature, at physics, at science, there is always friction. In fact we need it otherwise we would have no traction and simply slip around all over the place.
I believe the solution to feeling blocked and obstructed is to work with the friction. Our greatest invention, the wheel, does just this. It ‘shifts the friction’ so we can move forward. The wheel doesn’t eliminate it, it doesn’t counter it, it uses the friction and works with resistance to its advantage.
The wheel is perhaps mankind’s most simple, most elegant and most significant invention. What a great model for us to use when looking at solving problems.
I use the model of a wheel, it’s hub, it’s spokes and it’s rim as model for communication. Spoke is all about connection, working with the frictions of communication, of sadness, happiness, clarity and confusion to offer stories to connect and to progress.

Change Your Mind

I love reflecting on everyday turns of phrase. How often do we hear the line, he/she changed his/her mind.

How often have you said: “I’ve changed my mind.” It is a powerful statement. I hadn’t released until now how powerful this statement is, and yet I throw this sentence into conversation with out a second thought.

It is very clear. Someone when they have changed their mind has decided or chosen to change.
And change is a big deal, its a big fear.
To say you have ‘changed your mind’ is a big shift.

Changing your mind can set off strong reactions in others. They may well have to change to, to be with where you have changed to.

I read some advice today that said: Seek not to change the world, but to change your mind about the world.

That simple sentence had me reflecting and thoughtful for an hour this morning, just after dawn.

The other thing I love about the words, ‘change your mind’ is that to me they symbolise a breakthrough in trust of one’s self, the whole of one’s self, from the rational to the intuitive processes that simmer and gel in us, and to reach the point of changing our mind is to have trusted all that we are.

So many of us say and act like we are totally logical rational beings, but the give away is when we say things like ‘changing our mind’. Where is the science in that? Well maybe it is simply that there is far more going on in our conscious and unconscious ‘minds’ that we own. And maybe the really good science of the 21st century will increasingly take account of ‘what lies beneath’ in our unconscious thoughts, actions and deeds.

Now there is a flipside to everything. And I know there will be those that will react to a ‘change of mind’ as indecision, unreliable, someone being ‘all over the place’. But I wonder it these reactions are often born of fear of change.

A change of mind comes from reflection, reassessment and correction that will ultimately lead to a more well informed, considered and mindful action.