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.

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