My admiration for the contributions of the company Narativ and its founder Murray Nossel (pictured) spans past, present, and future. I first wrote about Narativ and Nossel in 2008. Later, I learned that career practitioners I admired were taking Narativ workshops and integrating storytelling into their work in career marketing and communication.

One practitioner, Barb Safani, shared her Narativ learnings in a blog post. For another, Judy Rosemarin, a one-day Narativ workshop was such an epiphany that storytelling became a significant focus of her coaching practice. I am confident that my admiration for the company will extend into the future; one reason is that another practitioner, Chandlee Bryan, will deliver a presentation, “Stick the Landing — The Art of Storytelling in Interviews” at the April conference of the Career Management Alliance. Chandlee, who will also participate on a storytelling and career panel I’m moderating at the conference, is a disciple of Narativ, and I’m sure her presentation will include material she learned from the Narativ folks.

In the recent past, I had my closest exposure yet to Murray Nossel and Narativ, thanks to a webinar put on by Jullien Gordon of Career Change Challenge. I had to love the webinar’s title, Creating A Storied Career: How To Tell Your Career Transition Story. (By the way, even though the webinar is over, if you click the preceding link and register, Jullien will send you a link for the recording — in which case read no further lest you learn all the spoilers!)

My overriding impression while listening to the webinar was one of richness — the richness of the stories Nossel told, the richness of his ideas, and the richness of his voice and his South African accent (listen for yourself in the video clip at the bottom of this post).

Here’s a summary of the webinar:

On how Nossel discovered the power of stories:

Nossel tells the story of being a clinical psychologist in 1986 in South Africa and being asked by a doctor to visit a blind AIDS patient at home. Nossel didn’t want to do it; at that time, people feared catching the AIDS virus from casual contact. Nossel reluctantly went to see the pale patient, whose skin hung on his bones. Nossel wouldn’t shake the hand of the man, who also couldn’t talk because AIDS had damaged his brain. Nossel went home and washed everything with Pine Sol.

Two years later, Nossel went to New York City to become a playwright but eventually had to support himself with a paying job. Remembering his revulsion over the South African AIDS patient, the one thing he didn’t want to do was work with anyone in AIDS. But the only job he could find in 1994 in New York City was with an AIDS day program. Wondering how he should talk to the patients, Nossel was told to encourage the patients to explore their feelings. That modality proved unsuccessful; patients retorted with responses like: “How would you feel if you were dying of AIDS?”

So Nossel sought a different approach. He noticed that when the patients died, all their possessions were placed in large garbage bags that no one claimed. “They had no one,” Nossel said, “they had nothing to leave.” Then Nossel realized that the one thing we can leave when we die is our stories. He encouraged the patients to tell their stories, and the storytelling became quite popular. One woman wanted to videotape her story for her 3-year-old daughter. So Nossel started to videotape all the stories. When New York legislators were planning cutbacks in AIDS programs, Nossel and some of the patients went to Albany and left tapes on desks of legislators. The cutbacks didn’t happen. Nossel had discovered the transformative power of stories for the patients, as well as the way stories can change minds.

On the kinds of stories people can tell

People often feel as though they don’t have a story to tell, Nossel noted. He teaches them the classic storytelling structure — the hero’s journey, in which the hero encounters an obstacle, surmounts obstacle, and attains resolution. “How the hero gets around the obstacle tell us so much about the character of the teller,” Nossel said. He pointed out that stories of how people overcome obstacles is significant in job search and career because employers want to know how their employees will deal with challenges and solve problems. “Take the risk of revealing things about yourself that you are not totally comfortable with,” Nossel advised. Struggle and failure, he said, can be very powerful.

On using listening skills in telling stories to employers (such as in a job interview)

Nossel cited Peter Guber’s forthcoming book, Tell to Win, which asserts that what persuades us is visceral, immediate connection by sharing something authentic that shares and connects humanity. You have to let the person to whom you’re telling your story know you are, Nossel noted. You don’t know how the person will be listening. For a job interview, for example, prepare as much as possible to know the person that will interview you — for example, by studying the company Website. Observe the interviewer’s language and values to calculate which story you’ll tell. Not everyone will take great risks with their stories, but Nossel himself prefers to takes high risks to convey his “authentic, genuine experiences.” Job-seekers need a bank of stories to draw from to show they can be of use to employers.

Storytelling is a reciprocal relationship, Nossel emphasized (this reciprocity is the topic of the video below). Listening creates telling, and telling creates listening. Tell your story, Nossel advised, and then acknowledge the listener and thank him or her for listening. Then let go and listen when the listener starts talking.

Stories prompt the listener to ask “What happened? Then what happened?,” Nossel said. “One of Narativ’s hallmark tools is a story map in which the storyteller first plots the end of the story, then the beginning, and then the salient turning points in between,” Nossel said (the quote is actually from Narativ’s Web site because my note-taking in the webinar did not adequately capture his point about beginnings, middles and ends). “The end of my story is this very moment,” he said. When a job-seeker says to an interviewer, “I want to tell you what happened,” he or she gets attention. Stories, Nossel asserted, are not open to interpretations, opinions, or judgments because they simply tell what happened.

Keep reading in the extended entry.