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Proverbs Punch Above Their Weight

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The Most Common Words in English Proverbs

A great story can be incredibly short. Just one sentence can say it all.
James Geary in his great book about metaphors, I Is An Other says the proverb, and its close relation the aphorism, are the world’s oldest written art forms. In 3500 BC, proverb collections were used as textbooks.  Sumerian students copied out proverbs as school spelling assignments and exercises in moral education.
Proverbs are quite simply metaphors, with layers of depth. They are the most compressed form of story, and are common to countries and cultures across the world. They are universal and good ones are understood by everyone and make people stop and think.
The funny thing is we use them frequently without stopping to think about it. I often say it’s great to ‘kill two birds with one stone.’
Many proverbs actually boil down to the same key principles.
Geary gives several examples such as the Dutch with Fill The Well After the Calf Has Drowned, for Shut the Barn Door After the Horse Has Bolted.
If you want to make a clear point, have jour communication land powerfully with others, especially if it is a complex message, Google a Proverb.

Bring Back the Verb

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I just kicked myself. I have been scratching my head, banging my head against the wall, wracking my brains for what is missing in communication today.

And then Pow! I was reading Simon Sinek’s wonderful book Start With Why and it dawned on me: Story is all about The Verb.  
So much communication we deliver and receive today is not about ‘doing’ anything. And of course verbs are totally about ‘doing.’  So when we see a great film, read a great book, see a great speaker, devour a great clip on You Tube, it is all about the ‘doing.’ There are verbs galor in the content.
Sinek gives the great example of what can only be described as ‘dumb’ values statements, you know the ones that go: We stand for Integrity, Honesty and Innovation.  Well there is no doing going on in those three words.
He says Integrity could be Doing the Right Thing, and Innovation could be Thinking About Things From a Different Angle. Then there is something for people TO DO.  People doing things are at the heart of every great story.
And if we need scientific evidence, as many do, the researchers using MRI scan technology to look at what happens in the brain when people consumer stories, the area that lights up when people are deeply engaged in a story is the same area that governs our motor skills, kicking, jumping,  walking etc
 (doing things)
It strikes me that what is missing in many organisations today is a connection between the strategic thinkers and the people who do ‘stuff.’
The connection is grounding our language in action, and taking the actions accordingly.
Business and community leaders struggle endlessly with execution, strategies and ideas die in the ditch because they are often far to short on actions, and verbs to carry them out.
So now I will HIT  send, BOIL the kettle, DRINK a cup of tea, and WRITE more content for my clients!

BTW, aren’t the

Winning With Personal Story

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I’ve been watching the sharpest most compelling videos I have ever seen on story and the power of telling them.  The videos are produced and fronted by Bo Eason, a former US NFL player.

He is the master of telling a personal story powerfully to achieve what ever success you want in the world.

Bo says ‘the more personal your story the more universal it becomes’. Such a simple statement, but so powerful.

When you know, own, and tell your personal story, it will have you achieve what ever you want.  And the key thing is, you don’t have to be a super hero to have a great story to tell. Look at the unsung heroes that are being discovered almost weekly on talent shows from Idol to the X Factor.

How many times have we all been moved and surprised by the almighty voice and presence coming from bodies and people we would least expect ?

Bo Eason says forget the proudest moment in your life, and look at the moment when you have been most embarrassed, or most humiliated. What did you learn? What did you not learn?

Our personal story is always with us, whether we speak it aloud or not. It shows up in our body language and the things that go on in between the lines of the words we use.

When we own our story, incorporate it, then we start to become increasingly effective in the goals we want to achieve, and the things we wish to succeed at.

Take a moment to look at what your personal story is, the lows as well as the highs. Write it, share it, incorporate it.

Reinvent the Story of What You Do

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I reckon we often default to a stereotype explanation of what we do for a living.

I’ve always found it tricky to explain what I do.  If I name a profession, it only tells part of the story.

In social and professional settings, you can watch eyes glaze over very quickly if you launch into a complex or dull explanation about what you do. Or else if you are ‘on song’ people can get really engaged and enthused.

When I was a journalist, people always believed they knew what that was. And for many, if they didn’t have a big hate going on for the paparazzi or the media in general, they would say, ‘wow that must be a really interesting life.’

But what is journalism? Is it a profession? Is it a craft? People know how to categorise roles like doctor or plumber, but a journalist is to most people some sort of a writer.

My point is we stereotype and categorise the jobs we do, and it creates separations, making teams and workplaces less efficient and communities more segregated.

I came across some really interesting ethnographic research into chefs and cooks and how they viewed their work. Researcher Gary Alan Fine was working on Occupational Rhetoric Theory, in other words the stories we tell ourselves and others about our work.

Fine found chefs could describe themselves as a professional, an artist, a businessman and a manual labourer. As in fact what they did was made up of all of these descriptions. As a professional they might use an analogy and say they prepare food like a surgeon, as an artist they produce creative results, as a businessman they are conscious of profitability, and as a labourer they have to complete some repetitive physical tasks.

Eric Stromberg used this research to look at why US online retail company Zappos has become incredibly successful through excellent customer service.

The Zappos training is so successful because employees learn to be a professional, to be creative and to do the hard yards of manual tasks so they understand the company as a whole, and support a powerful culture.

If we reinvent the stories we tell about what we do it can produce some remarkable results.

Story With Depth

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Stories are a dime a dozen today. Well that’s wrong for a start. You could say via google that stories by the million are free. Quite a difference. So how do we navigate all this content in a useful way? Are we conscious about the information we choose to consume? I think stories with depth stick longer. And they do so when people have  a strong and a powerful intention for telling them. We are much better at reading between the lines that we often think. And it is what is between the lines that tells of our intention, our values, what we care about and why we are telling a story.

This blog is going to be about the welling of stories and the way they are spoken.. The Story Well. And

This picture is of a well dressing in Cheshire. Its an ancient ritual to honour water and its source. These dressings are mde up of thousands of flower petals and seeds to make a mural about a current day theme.

When in doubt…tell a story!

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Sometimes an indirect or illogical or apparently irrelevant story can make a powerful point.

I was watching a rerun of an old TV show I used to love, Boston Legal, in my hotel room the other night. Alan, one of the main characters told a young lawyer struggling to win a case that when he gets stuck for how to close his case, he simply tells the jury a story, about anything, about something in his life. And so she took his advice.


My hotel room in Skopje Macedonia

She told the jury about how once as a teenager her pet chocolate Labrador had turned up in the kitchen with the neighbour’s pet dead rabbit in her mouth. Horrified, she had washed and cleaned the dead rabbit and placed it back in its cage at the neighbours home hoping they would think it died of natural causes. The next day her parents told her how the neighbours had come to visit, dreadfully upset that an apparent ‘nutcase’ had dug up their rabbit that had passed away from old age from a place where they had buried it in the woods. It had been cleaned up they said, and put back in its cage.

The lawyer was making her point in the defence of someone accused of theft where the logical answer was that the accused man was guilty, but she wanted to assert that perhaps the illogical version of events was true, and question whether there was reasonable doubt in the jury’s mind. She won the case.

She knew her why behind telling the story,  that was actually fictional and an urban legend, but she told it to show how the truth really can be stranger than fiction. And that our assumptions are not always correct.
It had me thinking as  I was travelling about the stories I would tell about my adventures. Sometimes this is confronting to me. I want to look good, have the most amazing adventures, face down danger, go where no man has gone before. But sometimes I simply want a holiday. I need to know the why in the stories I will tell to achieve an end for others. 

As it happened apart from the odd inevitable meltdown on the road travelling alone,  I had an awesome time ! And my stories are many and varied, unexpected, and at times adventures occurred where you would least expect them.

Finding Your Story Sweet Spot

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When people come to share a story they most often fall into two camps; those that say they have nothing to say, and others that have too much to say. We often don’t trust that there is a sweet spot in the story of our lives that has value for others.
What is THAT all about?
As Mark Twain once said, he never met a person who did not have a story to tell.
So the nothing to say, or can’t think of anything group need a couple of activating prompts.  They have to start with firstly believing that their experience and their self is worth sharing about for the benefit of others.
The prompt then needs to be an interactive conversation, either with oneself or with another.  There is no right place to start. Just get talking, get sharing, without concern about whether it is Good Enough, or whether it is As Good As Someone Else. Erase those thoughts.
And always remember, this is not all about you. It is about your audience and what they will get from your story. Be a bit vulnerable, have  a go.
The other camp is the too much to say, ‘burbling on’ group.  Again this comes from a lack of self belief or self worth. They are trying to convince you that their story is valuable.
In this case, slash and burn. Try halving the story and seeing if you can still have it make sense. Most often you can. We can over-tell a story very easily with overdoing the detail. 
An example is giving good directions of how to get somewhere. The best directions give key landmarks, and turns, not a description of every house on  a street, just the ones that stand out. Like, look out for the roundabout with a big oak tree on it, then turn right. Not, there are about 17 oak trees outside 23 houses, when you pass those, then turn right in exactly 29.5 metres. Well  a set of instructions like the latter is going to be a real mission.
The Checklist Manifesto is a brilliant book about how even those in highly technical and life and death situations need to use a sharply edited down set of instructions to succeed.


You’ll find the sweet spot of your story by road-testing it and sharing it with others and checking into what the little one liners are that people remember from what you tell them. It always boils down to just one or two sentences. Get hungry for finding out what they are, and be ready to have them be unexpected.

Story The Shapeshifter

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I’m travelling around England, a country saturated in story at every turn.
There are patterns to the stories as they go back so many many centuries, and the stories layer one over another with such a deep and long history.
The patterns create many juxtapositions.


And there are always so many versions, efforts to verify, to prove, to disprove.
It is a great pursuit, but you do wonder when people will arrive at the absolute truth about moments in history.
And meanwhile, generations create and recreate their own history.
The story of a place and of people can shift shape over time.
There will always be room for the people who focus on the detail, seeking accuracy and accounts of a story. And then there are those that are moved by the feel of a place, of people. For them, the accuracy of account is not critical.
As a story teller, I must work to serve all those ways of receiving story and information.
Studying film making I learnt that even the most abstract films had a clear structure, and interestingly Robert McKee, film script expert says fantasy is the genre that has the most precise story structure.
Otherwise if the story is not plausible people will switch off.
So the great craft of the story is to serve those that want the facts and figures, however they might be manipulated, and to serve those that want the more emotive and primal elements that affect the senses.
There will always be multiple storylines, but the reason for sharing them will always be the most important element.

Story Hiccups

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A story that is too slick is here today gone tomorrow.

A story that shows human flaws, the good and the bad of people and life, and their journey through it sticks. I had a stark reminder of this the other evening. I gave a presentation where I included outlining 5 key elements of a great story. Trouble was I only spoke about 4. One person noticed and came up to me at the end of the presentation. What was the 5th point, she asked.

 Mortified, I froze and couldn’t remember. I felt ridiculous, but emailed her the next day with the fifth point. It was: make sure there are twists and turns in a story, some surprise, some suspense. She and I saw the humour in the potential meaning that I had left the fifth point out as a test, surprise or element of suspense.

 Great stories have set ups and pay offs, they have great architecture. I wish I had designed my presentation that way. I always work to improve the architecture of my story.

I thought I had ruined the presentation, but the feedback has been great, so the flaws and my ‘being myself’ won out.

 The other funny aspect to this is that a story I share is about freezing on stage in front a huge school audience when I was a teenager. In little ways today, I can still freeze. I’ve told lots of friends and family about my messing up the fifth point in my presentation. They laugh and nod knowingly. Owning it and getting over it has become part of the story.

I have to admit fairly and squarely, I am not a numeric person particularly. Following a linear structure is not easy for me. When I speak, I go with the flow and weave together stories. But I will always work at structure, to serve those that need it.

Everyone’s Got a Story

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As a young journalist in the late 1970s if I was sent out on a story, coming back with nothing was unforgivable.  Newsrooms were tough environments in those days, and coming back empty handed from an assignment was a terrifying thought as editors would tear a strip off you.
I developed a powerful muscle to believe there was always a story to be found.
Mark Twain once wrote: “There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.”
Social media has taken us to a new crossroads. There are now compelling opportunities to share our own and other stories where and when we like.
We no longer have to rely on traditional media like the news, the movies and TV to be the sole creators and distributors of stories.
In life, and in business, we are now all story creators, it is not just the business of the marketing or PR department, or clever actors and writers.
But let’s be honest, storytelling comes easier to some than to others. However,  great stories and storytellers are now just about the gregarious, charismatic loud people. Often it is the quiet ones that have the most powerful stories to tell and then can come in a few stuttered words, and a few images a few actions that touch hearts and minds.
It is all about finding our natural storytelling mode. It might be holding up cards with text in front of a camera, it might be speaking, it might be mime, who knows.
The point is to start exploring your storytelling mode. We all have one.
Here are three key tips to get the ball rolling.
1.     Record your observations; with a pen, with a mic, or with a doodle. But stop, look, listen, and record, even if it is simply watching the traffic pass on a street.
2.     Explore your storytelling modes. If you are confronted by a blank page, use another medium, or ask someone to interview you.
3.     Share your story. Speak it out. To a friend, to someone online, to the dog, to the wall, but get it out.
 “ There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. “
Maya Angelo