Brilliant autumn sunrise driving North of Auckland, nature is always a wonder.
Uncategorized
See Through World
Talk about transparency, these days you can get right to the guts, see how someone’s heart beats, their inner most thoughts, their private lives, even lives we don’t even know we have.
It takes a bit of getting used to at times, but really with everything from surveillance cameras, to GPS, to facebook and twitter, everyone is watching everyone and everyone can pretty well find out just about anything about anyone.
It’s all packed there deep in the history of your computer anyway.
And my point is….
There is no use having a careful strategy about h ow you occur in the world, a planned out persona, a presence online, in your marketing, or where ever. It has to be you, through and through. As a 40 something, and someone who likes to think they are pretty open, baring my soul, or at least chatting about my soul, good and bad, sure does take some getting used to.
Honest and open communication? It does take a bit of getting used to. I’ve just read What Would Google Do? Here Jeff Jarvis talks about how making mistakes and being public about it is where we head today. Truth is a work in progress in this collaborative world.
I like the idea, but it still takes some getting used to. But today when truth and fiction blur constantly and we can always see the strings of the puppets, and are used to that, then it is more than time to give up getting it right. There is an art to getting it wrong. This guy Chris, a blogging expert, and excuse my clumsiness writing around links, reckons we have to break through ‘feedback fear’.
So its time to create a great story around yourself, warts and all, the beauty of your flaws, but being visible and transparent, is not really an option anymore, it’s a necessity.
Double Double Speak Speak
Call a spade a spade, and not an ‘excavation implement’!
Sometimes we get a bit too clever for our own good with language.
I’m reminded of a friend’s young child talking about her older brother and saying: “I can see your lips moving but all I can hear is Blah Blah Blah.”
Politicians, business leaders and the news media have trained us to listen and talk in Double Speak, and use meaningless jargon.
We let people in power drone on. Language should be loved and treasured. Story telling can be so rich and powerful for learning and taking action in life.
Observation is a key attribute to great storytelling. Observe when people use jargon, and see if you can find more colourful and interesting ways to convey information. It’s not hard. Tell a story to illustrate a point. Sure facts, figures and graphs are important, and accuracy is critical. But the greatest communicators rap serious messages in a story, and weave in the stats, data and critical information.
The story will be remembered.
So sharpen your spade and dig for gold in language and in story telling. If you are going to call a spade anything but a spade, make sure its got a great story attached to it, and not soul less and meaningless terminology that does not connect.
The Fourth Wall
I’m flat out writing a book about Untold Stories- The Power of Authentic Narrative in Leadership.
I’m just loving researching it, and every day strike a rich vein through searching on Google or browsing in my local library.( I love both hard and soft copies of stuff!)
So this morning I was trawling around stories online about a favourite TV Show of mine, Boston Legal. It’s ended now, but I loved its stories, and I really liked how one of the main characters, Denny, the actor William Shatner, had lines that referred to his old character in Star Trek, Captain Kirk. In one episode his cellphone rang, it had the same ring tone as his phone in Star Trek, which was very futuristic in its time, and long before we even had cellphones.
What I like about this is not simply is it funny, but it is honest in the way it reminds us in what you might call a ‘post modern’ way that fact and fiction blur all over the place, and that Shatner is simply playing a character in a drama and none of it is real.
In theatre this is called breaking the fourth wall. In other words, the drama is not totally enclosed in four walls of fiction, one wall is open to the audience, and for interaction between the players and the audience.
I think this allows for real authenticity and interaction. We all know its a story and fiction is fun, but we also know that we are really all playing around and it allows performers to be real and interact in a real way with audiences.
This is where the true power of great story lies. They take us some place else, but well told they allow us to reflect back on our own realities and lives. Fact and fiction merge to increase our understanding.
Breaking Through Story Fear
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
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!
Well
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.
Our unconscious works like that. It seems dark and unseen but has some cool and fresh ideas floating around in there. It’s great when we let that rise to the surface, allow our untold stories to be voiced. They are the most powerful and the most compelling.
When you stop and think about it, when we speak we do this all the time. We don’t really spend a lot of time reciting things verbatim from memory. Sure this is a skill and one that can be honed. But in conversation, we basically wing it.
Eloquence comes from a freedom to associate story elements juxtaposed in a fresh, cool way.
Eloquence comes from a wellspring, where a beautiful combination of mineral content and context is organically smooth.
Eloquence comes from a wish to serve, to give and to provide clear, fresh sweet stories to make a difference to another.
Stories that Tip
I just spent an amazing ten days on a silent meditation retreat, Vipassana. It rates as one of the most valuable experiences of my life. But that is another story. What I wanted to write about today is the story that had me go there, to do something I had never done before, have me head off way out of the useful comfort zones.
I had been told about the course many times over the years by friends, but their stories put me off more than inspired me to go. It sounded confronting, challenging, something I might do one day, but I wasn’t compelled to go.
It was a story from my barber, a young fully creatively tattooed guy, who said he was going, wouldn’t drink and party for New Year, and he was keen because his Dad went. His Dad had been an army man, and the barber told me his dad came back from Vipassana and hugged him for the first time and has never been angry ever again.
That tipped the balance for me and I enrolled. It wasn’t the young guy’s intention to get me to go at all. It is the sharing of heart felt stories without an attachment to a forced outcome that are the most compelling and that lead to action. It ‘s also when something is unusual that it strikes you. Likewise the story I tell about being at Vipassana that people like most is not about the strings of benefits I got, or the routines and what happens in silence. But the story about my neighbour there, a man with a purple goatee beard, bald head, a biker, from Somerset in England, there getting over the grief of losing a daughter in a road accident. He was not typical of who you would expect to go to a silent meditation retreat. He got all he needed out of it, couldn’t wait to go home have a big meat fry up after ten days of vegetables. But his story sticks, because its real, its honest, its a bit unusual, and ultimately strikes a chord.
Risky Storytelling
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.
Seven Minutes is a Lifetime
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.