BiographyWriter.net is offering a nice five-page PDF download, INITIAL AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL QUESTIONNAIRE, that can get you started with self-exploration for autobiographical work, memoir, or just getting to know yourself better.
It’s certainly not the most comprehensive set of prompts I’ve seen, but for a free download, I’m not complaining! The site offers other resources as well.
Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.
My 24-year-old son John has been living in Bellingham, WA, for about a year now and has really struggled. Apparently the job market is particularly terrible in Bellingham. Despite some odd jobs here and there, he has yet to find fulfilling and sustaining employment.
He is also a struggling artist, and he recently hit upon the idea of creating a resume in comic/zine form (see it, page by page, here). It’s a little booklet, about 4” x 5”. He’s having a bit of success with the resume, certainly more than he’s had with a conventional document.
I have written copiously on this blog about the elusive idea of the storied resume — how I’ve never actually seen a resume that I truly consider to be storied even though I don’t know what a storied resume would look like.
John’s resume comic/zine style certainly wouldn’t work for everyone, and it contains a few things that might turn employers off, but it sure does tell his story. I am completely biased, but I find his resume brilliant. It’s attention-getting and even funny in places, such as when he says he felt body odor was appropriate for his stint in what he thought was a French restaurant. I also love his drawing.
In a week in which I’ve been celebrating creativity, I applaud my son’s highly creative storied resume.
Oh, and if any employers in Bellingham are reading this, please consider giving John a shot.
Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.
I am somewhat in denial that I will ever have to care for my elderly mother. At nearly 81, she is hardly ailment-free but is in relatively good health and living independently. Her own mother died 21 hours shy of her 95th birthday but was healthy in her last years until she went into decline in her final year after a stroke.
I don’t believe I know any peer baby boomers who are caring for elderly parents or family members. But maybe my not knowing any is because they aren’t sharing their stories. Maybe they are part of what Jonathan Rauch calls “the Quiet (or Hidden) Crisis.”
Last year, Rauch wrote poignantly in The Atlantic about caring for his elderly father, and this month, the article appears in Reader’s Digest. The article, Letting Go of My Father, is also on Rauch’s Web site. Rauch notes that 50 million Americans are providing some care for an adult family member, but few are talking about their experiences. When Rauch began to seek advice and talk about his situation …
Above all, I got stories. Some were in the past tense, but a surprising number were in the present, and they gushed forth with the same kind of pent-up pressure that I felt. Washington is a city of middle-aged careerists like me, proper and dignified and all business. Yet time and again the professional exteriors would crack open to reveal bewildering ordeals. … So many stories. So much experience. So much need for help! Yet until I volunteered my own story, usually in a socially inappropriate setting, it stayed quiet, “personal.” It was as if we were being graded on coping stoically. Broaching the subject and confessing desperation was like uttering the password to a secret brotherhood of beleaguered, overwhelmed, weary, or sometimes just resigned adult caregivers. But the sect seemed ashamed to be seen.
Rauch thus believes that a cultural shift is in order, akin to what Betty Friedan precipitated with The Feminine Mystique. Call it consciousness-raising about caring for the elderly … or call it “sharing stories,” but as Rauch says, “There should be no need for anyone to go through this alone, and no glory in trying.”
Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.
Earlier this month, one of my cousins unearthed a letter our grandmother wrote to our grandfather in 1930.
The letter chronicled the beginning of the family’s annual trip from New Jersey to their vacation cottage on a very small lake in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. My grandfather was apparently to join them later but was probably working when my grandmother, her five children, and the family’s hired help, Edna and Raymond, left on the sojourn.
Much of the letter deals with navigating the car trip to Massachusetts, and the family’s activities once they arrived.
Toward the end of the letter, a name jumped out at me and made me flinch: Malcolm McKinney. The McKinneys owned a farm at the lake that housed a tiny general store, where vacationers bought supplies. Malcolm must have been about 13 when my grandmother wrote the letter.
Thirty-seven years later, I worked in that general store at the farm for two summers and lived in the McKinneys’ house. I was only 12 the first summer I worked there; in retrospect, it’s stunning that my parents let me do that.
During the second summer, Malcolm, who was now 50 and the farm’s owner, began to get inappropriate with me. There was a bit of minor inappropriate touching. He wanted me to pose for nude photos. Probably his most startling move was showing me a 1960s version of a porn film — black and white, shown on a movie projector. Malcolm called it a “human relations” film. Afterwards, he wanted to know if I was “aroused,” but I ran away from his parents’ house (where he’d shown me the film) before he took it any further. That was the last time he tried anything.
Back then, I thought of Malcolm as a “dirty old man.” Today, he would be characterized as a pedophile. (I should probably disguise names, but everyone in this story has passed on, so I’m risking it).
Just to add a bit of soap-opera-like intrigue to the story … One day Malcolm’s wife was on an all-day shopping trip to a nearby city, so I started playing with her box of makeup. I opened her powder compact and found a note to the wife from a tenant who lived in an apartment building situated on the farm — actually constructed in an old barn. The note made it obvious that Malcolm’s wife was having an affair with the tenant. Even more startling was that the paramours seemed to have knowledge of Malcolm’s inappropriate interest in me and somehow found that fact advantageous to their affair. Or perhaps they felt it justified the affair.
My grandmother never imagined she would have a granddaughter who would, many decades later, experience minor sexual abuse at the hands of the then-13-year-old she wrote about in the letter. Interesting that I was the same age when Malcolm messed with me that Malcolm had been in 1930. It’s hard to describe how remarkable I find it to have my story connect to my grandmother’s across the decades, even if my story was rather sordid.
Another connection in the letter didn’t have quite the same full-circle effect but was poignant and remarkable in its own way. My grandmother told the story of her two youngest children walking from the cottage to the McKinney farm, a distance of maybe three-quarters of a mile. Peggy was 6 and Billy was 4 (Billy was the youngest, but my grandmother was pregnant with her last-born child at the time of the letter). Apparently Peggy returned to the cottage without Billy, leaving him to walk back by himself. My grandmother, no doubt a bit concerned about a 4-year-old making this trek alone, went to meet him, finding him with a marshmallow in one hand and, tightly clenched in the other hand, two fish hooks he and Peggy had bought at the store. “Dear little boy,” my grandmother wrote.
That dear little boy Billy was my father. In photos taken of him that same summer, I see more of myself at the same age than I have ever seen in photos.
Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.
While researching my recent discussion with Annette Simmons about creativity, I was stunned to stumble across a piece she crafted — that I’d never seen — about story in the job search. This PDF of just over two pages is full of creative approaches, addressing issues of story in the job search that I’d never seen addressed before. This document, which focuses on stories in job interviews, could not have come at a better time for me since I am currently producing a workbook to accompany my book, Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get Jobs and Propel Your Career.
The ideas in this handout are so innovative that it’s hard not to just paste the whole thing in here. But a few highlights …
One of the dilemmas I’ve wrestled with is how many stories a job-seeker needs going into an interview. I’ve seen and recommended a range of numbers — up to 20. Annette says at least three. She uses her six stories (see graphic) as a framework for stories an interviewee could use. The “Who I am” story is a must, especially for questions like “Tell me about yourself.” The values-in-action story is perfect for questions about strengths and weaknesses. In a global sense, a job-seeker can develop stories by asking…
What qualities do you bring above and beyond your resume? Why will they be glad they hired you two years down the track? Once you have discerned your best qualities you can look for a story that showcases those qualities.
Much of the handout offers “what if” questions, such as, what if the interviewer doesn’t ask a question for which the interviewee has prepared a story? My advice has always been to have an arsenal of stories but be prepared to do some mental juggling so that each story can fit a variety of questions. Annette’s twist is to think about how PR flacks are trained to develop a particular message and to mold their responses to media questions to fit whatever question is asked.
A couple of related what-ifs — won’t the interviewer be irritated if the job-seeker responds to a question with a story and what about people who want me to cut to the chase — represent real issues. I was asked about similar issues when I spoke this spring about story in the job search at a conference. Some people don’t want to hear stories (or at least claim they don’t); they just want the facts; what do you do in that case. Annette’s solutions are brilliant. The interviewer will not want to hear a story that feels like a waste of his or her time, so the story needs to be concise and well-told.
The job-seeker also needs to be attuned to the interviewer. If he or she seems like the type who does not want to hear a story, Annette recommends starting with a teaser:
“I prefer to lead in a collaborative manner. But if a group needs it I can be directive enough to go fast. Like the time my group’s budget was cut 30% and we had one day to decide how to deal with it.”
Most interviewers will at that point say, “Tell me how you handled that” or the like.
Annette talks about the importance of testing stories to be used in interviews “because you can’t really hear your own story without looking the eyes of a delighted listener.”
I hadn’t thought about stories in interviews as a two-way street until I read (and wrote about) a brilliant post by Walter Akana about the job interview as shared narrative. Annette addresses that idea, too, suggesting that the interviewee try to get the interviewer to tell a story when the job-seeker …
How do you get the interviewer to tell a story?
Ask an open-ended question and if they give a one-word answer, encourage them “Can you tell me more about that?” Ask about a detail. “What happened when…X did X?” Who, what when where…ask for specific details to help them remember an the experience so they can narrate it for you.
In summary …
Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.
Continuing my conversation with story guru Annette Simmons about creativity …
I asked Annette if she saw her painting developing into something more — selling her work, perhaps establishing a new career.
She marveled that she sold a painting the first time she ever showed her work. The show featured the work of Annette’s painting teacher and all her students, and the painting was the baptism painting shown in yesterday’s post — only the fifth painting she’d ever created.
“Someone bought it,” she says. “I wanted that to happen. I love it when my painting is in someone else’s house. That’s gratifying for me.”
Annette, doesn’t think she will get rich from painting, however, “because I am way too slow painting.” She notes that her fibromyalgia keeps her from sitting too long.
Her creativity again intersected with commerce when the buyer of the baptism painting contacted her and asked if she would do a commissioned painting. In a tone that seems (to me) to combine self-mocking, bemusement, and a dash of genuine pride, Annette muses, “I am just so impressed with myself because my painting sold. I’m just so talented.”
She pauses before emphatically intoning, “And I’ll never do it again as long as I live.” The commissioned painting took her forever, she says, and it lacked the flow the first painting had. She felt bad for the buyer, she recalls.
The commission experience “brought the profit thing back into it,” Annette says, “which stripped it of its purity and joy.” Her teacher noted that when an artist takes a commission, “someone wants you to be the artist, but they’re acting like the artist because they’re telling you what to paint.” With a commissioned work, “I’m the storyteller except they’re making me be a puppet,” she laments.
“I will paint things that could go for sale,” she says. “I would love for them to go places. My paintings aren’t pretty things, so if they went places, it would be because other people found the meaning in them, and they’re not always easy meanings. That would make me happy if they went somewhere else to make a statement or tell a story. I love it when important stories travel.” For that reason, Annette makes gifts of many of her paintings.
“But noooooo, I will not be taking commissions,” she concludes.
Meanwhile, I heard from Lisa Rossetti after I launched this creativity series on Sunday. A textile designer and fine artist before rediscovering her passion for writing and stories, she says she hasn’t “touched a brush in nearly 30 years.”
Her creativity dilemmas sound somewhat like mine — “giving oneself permission for ‘non-productive’ (i.e., non-income earning) activities in a household where work is dominant and praised.”
I can really relate to that one. I am convinced that my husband’s work ethic has no equal on earth, and I live in terror that he thinks I’m lazy or am shirking more important work than crafts projects. (He’s actually quite supportive of my hobby, but his oversized work ethic will always make me feel inadequate.) And in my case, when I decided to pursue a summer of crafting, I was choosing between one creative non-income-earning passion (daily posts in this blog) and another (the crafts). The crafts may ultimately produce revenue, but given how much I spent to create them, I will probably end up in the red.
Lisa also said: “Some of this is about identity and integration of ‘parts.’ If I am a coach, writer, and story practitioner then where would painting fit in?” I hear that, too, though I’d like to think there’s room for all those roles. I’m interested in the premise that creative people need to express creativity in different ways. For me, the call to do furniture painting had to do with a need to do something creative with my hands, not just my mind, and to visualize a finished piece and figure out how to make it turn out that way.
Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.
Annette Simmons, story consultant and author of the seminal The Story Factor, has drawn all her life. She always has a journal with her. “Sketches are part of how I see,” she explains. “When I travel, I have to draw something because that’s how I see it, and I’m going to interact with it more and enjoy it all the more.”
I had asked Annette about the roots of her current painting avocation as part of an exploration of creativity, how creative people express themselves, the relationship between creativity and storytelling, and more. My curiosity was prompted by my own experimental creative pursuit this summer.
Annette’s introduction to painting also came early in life when her mom took painting classes and brought Annette with her. “It was a gift,” Annette recalls. “I got a chance to play around with paint, and that was a lot of fun.” Back then, Annette didn’t get a chance to do much else with painting and didn’t have any paints at home.
Rediscovering painting resulted from wanting “to spend more time being mindful and spending time with people,” Annette says.
A couple of fortuitous occurrences pointed to painting as the key to fulfilling those desires. She found a great teacher and realized that an 800-square-foot house behind her house would be perfect for a studio. (See photos of her studio above).
And the studio is not just for Annette’s use. Her teacher, Robin, runs painting classes there on Monday mornings. All Annette has to do to go to painting class is walk out her back door and into the studio.
I asked her about the connection between painting and storytelling. “All of my paintings are stories,” she notes. Contrasting her paintings with “pretty pictures,” she says, “I hope mine are pretty, [but] I don’t paint flowers and landscapes just because because they’re pretty; everything I paint is a story. It’s meant to communicate some kind of meaning.” Sometimes that’s a metaphor; in the lemon painting above, Annette notes that the “obvious far from subtle metaphor is a bit of fun.”
A painting of an “old-fashioned, dunking-in-the-water baptism,” at right, had special meaning for her because she has been ill with fibromyalgia. “Righteous waters,” she says. “The idea of being washed in the waters. It was symbolic for me.”
Annette’s health has been such an issue, in fact, that she has decided to take a sabbatical — for healing. She will refrain from consulting work “for as long as it takes.” She says she’s currently planning on a year away from consulting. “Painting is part of the healing,” she says.
She quickly clarifies that during the sabbatical, she offers inquirers alternatives when they call about her services, for example, suggesting teaching them how to conduct storytelling workshops/courses rather than conducting them herself.
In fact, Annette will offer a training session on “How to Facilitate a Storytelling Workshop” in July 2012 in Dallas, TX, for $2,500 plus hotel and other travel, for a maximum of 10 attendees. “Most people want in-person training,” she notes.
“A lot of my consulting has been the expresson of creativity,” Annette says, “[but] it went downhill when it got to be too stressful.”
For Annette, painting is not stressful. “Painting gives me that wonderful sense of expressing creativity, and hopefully sharing that sense of meaning and storytelling with someone else. But it doesn’t have the problems that for-profit selling has with it.” In a later communication, she noted that for-profit issues made storytelling less generous, creative, warm, and rejuvenating, “but really what it was is this push to leverage storytelling. I got caught up in that. I don’t want to ‘leverage.’ I intend to — after my sabbatical — return to teaching people how to tell personal stories and frame presentations/ideas with stories. I don’t say leverage is negative. It is just not for me.”
Creativity is for her, however. “I would just die with the expression of creativity,” she says.
In the next part of the interview, Annette expands on the ideas of creativity and commerce — selling creative works, exhibiting her work, and producing a commissioned painting.
Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.
Sigh … another uncomfortably long period between posts …
Several years back, my husband and I discussed an old piece of furniture we had. It was a hutch that had been in his family for many years — not an antique by any means, but a piece with sentimental value. Yet a piece that didn’t fit in with our decor and we didn’t have space for.
I’m not sure what inspired me, but I decided to paint the hutch and see what use might be suggested by the transformed piece. The project took me a long time, the better part of an autumn, as I recall. But I was enthralled with it. I fell in love with the idea of using creative paint techniques on furniture. I bought a big stack of books on furniture painting. I wanted to make this craft my new hobby.
I was in my PhD program at the time, and I horrified a couple of my classmates by suggesting that after I earned my doctorate, I might just like to dedicate myself to crafts. That’s how much I was in love with this work — that I would consider setting aside a degree that cost me $80,000 … to paint furniture.
Stuff happened. I got a teaching job I wasn’t really expecting. I rededicated myself to this blog. I got involved in a couple of book projects. I didn’t have time for furniture painting. After the hutch, I did only one other project. I utterly underwhelmed my husband by painting a tiny chairside table for him for Christmas. I thought my work on it was absolutely brilliant, but the piece was not very structurally sound to begin with, and the carpenter in Randall disdained the wobbliness of the table.
Still, I always had it in mind that I would return to crafting in a big way. Even before we moved from our Florida home, I set up a crafts room.
When we purged two-thirds of our belongings before moving to Washington state, I sold both the hutch and the wobbly table. I attained a tiny modicum of validation as an “artist” because I had sold my work.
Here in Washington, I set up a crafts studio in our guest house. I knew I would be able to do the furniture painting only in the summer because it requires lots of messy sanding and painting that needs to be done outside. I have a lovely deck right off my studio.
And so it came to pass that I would dedicate much of summer 2011 to my grand crafting experiment — see if I really had the passion for it that I believed I did. The end of the story remains unwritten, but I’ve learned a few things so far.
Furniture painting is a very expensive hobby. I can acquire thrift-store and flea-market pieces fairly cheaply, but even the equipment and materials needed to remove old paints and finishes are expensive, let alone paint and polyurethane sealers. I started out believing that if I sold any pieces, I might make a little profit. Then I felt I might just break even. I now know that any proceeds will only put a dent in recouping what I spent.
About two-thirds of the time, I do feel the same sense of passion and enthrallment I did those years ago working on that hutch. The other third, I feel horribly inept. However, from ineptitude springs, I hope, learning and improvement.
Because I rehab and repurpose old pieces of furniture, it’s fun to imagine the stories behind the pieces — what kind of life did they have before I got my hands on them? Were they loved and enjoyed? Why would anyone get rid of the clever, all-in-one child’s desk and chair pictured above — other than the fact that it was painted a hideous brown? It’s also fun to think of the new stories I’m creating by transforming the pieces.
The end of the story, or at least the end of this chapter, will come in mid-September. One of our neighbors opens his wholesale nursery to the public during a fall plant sale, and I hope to capitalize on his traffic by having a craft sale the same weekend. Maybe I’ll sell my pieces and feel more like an artist. Maybe I won’t sell them but can use them in our guest house.
So where am I going with all this, and what does it have to do with storytelling?
At some point during my summer crafting adventure, it occurred to me that storytelling author and luminary Annette Simmons was on a similar trajectory. She had been showing on Facebook some beautiful pictures she had painted. I wanted to interview her and write a piece about creativity and its relationship to storytelling. When one person is phobic about using the phone, and the other person has physical discomfort when typing, arranging an interview is not easy, but thanks to the wonders of technology, we finally pulled it off.
Annette’s thoughts about her painting, creativity, and how it all fits into her storytelling life is the subject of an upcoming post.
My foray into a different kind of creativity than I’m used to has some similarities with Annette’s, as well as some differences. Creativity is important to both of us. Every assessment I’ve ever taken has emphasized creativity as one of my central characteristics.
For more than three years, this blog has been my main creative outlet. My desire to express my creativity in a less virtual way led me to my experimental summer — though also to blogging less frequently. I hope you’ll join me this week in exploring Annette’s creativity journey and what it means in her current life.
Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.
While doing some research yesterday for my workbook to accompany my book, Tell Me About Yourself, I came across some unfinished business.
Nearly two years ago, I wrote about a post from Rusty Rueff, How to Tell the ‘Story of You’ in A Job Interview: Part 1, and noted that I was looking forward to the subsequent parts in the series. But apparently I forgot to check back with the blog and never came across the later posts.
Since I’m on a roll with posts about story and job search/career, this seems like a good time to discuss the series.
The ideas in the series aren’t revolutionary, but they are valuable for coming from the perspective of a former recruiter:
As a long-time talent recruiter, the ones who got the job were the ones where I could sit with a hiring manager and say, “you gotta hear the story of this person.” If I was excited about telling their story to someone else the chances of their getting hired went up exponentially.
In How To Tell The ‘Story of You’ In A Job Interview: Part 2 — Plots, Rueff borrowed “plots” from nonprofit story expert Andy Goodman. Here’s my take on them:
His focus is on the protagonist, who is compelling when the listener “gain[s] just enough detail that offers insights into that person’s history or motivation.” Protagonist traits that make good stories, he says, include:
What You Can Overcome In The Career “Story Of You” During An Interview: Part 3 — Act II deals with the barriers and obstacles to be overcome. Noting that “the more great barriers and challenges that build up the suspense and give the protagonist the chance to show how she/he overcomes them, the better,” Rueff offers some excellent examples:
Finally, in Completing The Career “Story of You” During An Interview: Part 3 — Act III, Rueff notes that the story’s resolution should inspire the interviewer to complete the story by offering the candidate the job:
In my experience, hearing thousands of career stories, the ones I want to complete are the ones where the dreams, the aspirations, the training and the experience all converge [with my] visualiz[ing] the person across the table from me, sitting in my company, putting it all together to make themselves and the company better.
Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.
In discussing in yesterday’s post various reasons “Great Stories” came in dead last in a survey about what interviewers look for in interviewees, I left out a huge one.
A comment in a peripheral discussion about the post on Facebook alerted me to the omission.
A large number of employers these days conduct behavioral interviews. It’s nearly impossible to respond to a behavioral question without telling a story (see this post).
Thus, interviewers are definitely listening to and seeking stories, even though they may not think of behavioral responses as stories.
Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.
I stumbled across a post from my friend Tim Tyrell-Smith from last December in which he had conducted a survey asking:
As you can see from the graphic, “Great stories” was dead last.
I do not believe this finding means interviewers don’t want to hear stories in interviews. I can think of a number of reasons for this survey result.
In an earlier post, Tim talked about his methodology and its limitations. Survey participant targets were former or current hiring managers but were not vetted to confirm their current or former role as a hiring manager. Tim promoted the survey via his blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and via members of his network; thus, “a healthy number of survey participants are looking for work or have recently been in transition,” so results may have been affected by their transition experience.
Further, I just don’t believe employers are conditioned to think of “great stories” as a criterion for what they seek in interviewees. Enthusiasm for this response might have been greater had it been phrased: “Great examples of skills, accomplishments, and results.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that they don’t like to hear interview responses in story form. They just don’t necessarily think of them as stories when they’re hearing them.
Juxtaposed with all the other possible responses to this question, “great stories” might sound like tall tales, rambling responses, or stretching the truth. If I’m an interviewer (who isn’t familiar with any of the research on using stories in interviews), and I see “great stories” as one of the choices in response to “When interviewing someone for a job, I am primarily looking for …,” I may worry that “stories” is the opposite of concise. Or maybe I have the mentality of my mother, who equates “telling stories” with “lying.”
In addition, the choices of response to the survey question aren’t parallel. Some of them are content responses, while others are process responses. The responses about confidence, engagement, physical energy, and great stories are process responses. An interviewee can convey any of the content responses in combination with any of the process characteristics; they’re not mutually exclusive.
In other words, an interviewee could effectively communicate fit with the culture of the hiring organization while displaying confidence, energy, engagement, and in story form. Same with the other content responses.
In my PhD research, interviewers were presented with responses in story form and in unstoried form, and they preferred the stories. I will grant that the preference wasn’t overwhelming, and some interviewers do lean toward “just the facts.”
If anything, though, this survey does point to the need in job interviews to tell stories succinctly and well, along with the imperative to keep in mind the content priorities that that interviewers want to hear about.
So, when composing stories for use in interviews, think about stories that can communicate content goals in the second column of this table:
In fact, I would assert that it’s virtually impossible to meet some of these content goals without telling stories. The best (only?) way for the job-seeker to communicate the ability to make an immediate impact, for example, is to tell a story of how he or she did just that for a previous employer.
Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.
My story-practitioner friends are at it again — creating and offering wonderful resources to story fans like me. Here are three from this week:
In the magazine The Executive, Lori Silverman and Karen Dietz have published Let it Grow, Let it Grow, Let it Grow: Gaining Members Through Telling Stories, about how associations can use stories to add members. On Facebook, Lori indicated a willingness to provide the article as a PDF.
Two more of my story buds have converged in a podcast this week on Blog Talk Radio, Storytelling with StoryMojo Michael Margolis, hosted by Trey Pennington. Here’s the description:
Michael Margolis helps entrepreneurs tell powerful stories. We’ll be talking about his newest educational, transformational program The New About Me.
Learn How to Transform Your Bio Into a Distinctive Story
The New About Me is an Online Toolkit that teaches you step-by-step how to tell and share your personal story online without the need for bragging, boasting, or hiding. You’ll emerge with a new bio story that you can use on your “About” page, LinkedIn, Facebook, and all the places where you need to talk about yourself.
Every successful person and every successful business has an amazing story — we always remember their story, don’t we? You too have a story that is the key to attracting clients, making money, and getting the recognition you deserve. I know the power of your story and I want to help you find that story so you can create the real impact you’re here to make. It’s time to play big, isn’t it?
The episode is embedded below:
The third goodie isn’t new — it’s from 2009 — but Karen Dietz newly brought it to my attention. It’s a white paper, Project Management & Stories by Camper Bull of Armiger International and Terrence Gargiulo on Scribd. As sometimes happens with Scribd, the site wanted me to either upload something of my own or pay for the privilege of downloading this paper; however, one can easily read it onscreen. Here’s what Karen said about it:
OK — you are working on a project with others, whether it be in a company you are working in, or as a business owner with other colleagues. How do you keep the project flowing? Knowing how to use stories in the various stages of project management is key. Read the complete guide here (it’s even downloadable).
Thanks to friend and colleague Terrence Garguilo for putting this article together and so generously sharing it with us.
Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.
Periodically, I like to publish a roundup of items about story in visual form. In the past, I would have referred to this categorization as “visual storytelling.” I am opening my mind, however, and being more respectful to those who believe a visual image cannot fit into the definition of storytelling.
We might question whether a visual image (or set of images) can be synonymous with story. Certainly an image can suggest or prompt a story, but it will likely be a slightly different story for every beholder. One of the visual artists I reviewed for this roundup was teenage photographer Chrissie White, whom I read about in Oprah’s magazine. A section of White’s Web site is entitled A Million Different Stories. “I think of the pictures as movie cels,” White says ” — a moment in a narrative.” Perhaps that’s what a lot of what is touted to be visual storytelling is — not so much a story as a moment in a story and yes, I realize here we’re also getting into the difference between story and narrative. (See one of her photos, above right).
It is therefore with a slightly more analytical eye that I present my latest roundup on visual story.
Modern weddings are productions. There are dresses, shoes, flowers, limos, gifts…expenses…stuff. Me? I’ve always been a sucker for a great story. I think that this dates back to my freshman year in college or so when I’d spend hours on Pulitzer.org reading all the winning entries for feature writing … So, with that in mind, I want to hear your stories. Tell me how you met, tell my why your wedding is going to be a great story, tell me how you fell in love, tell me your great aunt is going to do a Lady Gaga dance at your wedding…just tell me your story.Levy announced the winner in March, a couple whose first date involved plunges over waterfalls and led to a proposal. The wedding is in September.
We ended up with a gallery in the museum … It’s in a good location, but it’s also kind of a pass-through space to other galleries. It has a recording booth that you sign up in advance to use, and you go in and tell a story about an object that is meaningful to you. The other parts of the gallery are for experiencing the stories, and for connecting with the Museum collection. We have cases with museum objects that people told stories about, with large images of those storytellers adjacent to the object, and in the middle of the gallery is a long rectangular table with touchscreens where people can access all the stories that have been recorded.In a similar but somewhat less storied project, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) asked visitors to share their MoMA stories. “I went to MoMA and …” is the result.
Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.
As I’ve looked back at pop-culture forms I loved as a child — anecdotes in Reader’s Digest, serialized comic strips, romance comics, soap operas (many of which are dying forms and all of which I’ve touched on in this blog), I am, of course, no longer surprised that the common denominator in all of them has been story.
The same is true of another form I’ve loved since age 7 and continue to love today — the advice column. Growing up in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia, I had access to two major newspapers, The Evening Bulletin and The Philadelphia Inquirer. My family subscribed to the Bulletin, which published Dear Abby. I’ve written a couple of times about how I learned about Santa Claus through Dear Abby.
After high school, I lived with my uncle for a year and began reading Abby’s twin, Ann Landers, because my uncle subscribed the other paper, The Inquirer. I learned to like Ann better because I felt Abby would often make a pun or joke at her advice-seekers’ expense.
That these and all advice columns are storied forms can barely be disputed. Most people when asking for advice have to set up their question with a story explaining the background of their need for advice. They are often hoping the advice columnist will write the ending to their stories.
I have been known to read advice columns about topics I’m not that interested in — car repair, home improvements, personal finances — just to read the stories in the questions.
Today, I consume the “advice columnist I love to hate,” Carolyn Hax, who, without warning, will sometimes lash out at her advice-seekers and imply that they are stupid, selfish, or just plain wrong.
I don’t believe, however, I ever read a storied response to a question in an advice column — until this week.
Writing in Lifewriters Forum in a post title “Tears Streaming Down My Face,” my friend Sharon Lippincott said:
If any of you have the slightest question in your mind about the Power of Story, reading this rather lengthy blog post should put it to rest … The rugged Truth in this story cracked my heart in pieces, but like a crocus coming through coal dust, hope peers up at the end.
The post in question is in an advice column I’d never heard of called Dear Sugar. As stated in The Sun, “SUGAR is the pseudonym of an advice columnist for The Rumpus, an online literary and culture magazine (www.therumpus.net). A new “Dear Sugar” column is posted most Thursday afternoons. She has two children and also writes fiction and memoir under her real name.”
The advice-seeker can’t seem to recover from a miscarriage. Naturally she tells the story of the miscarriage and what her life has been like since.
As Sharon pointed out, Sugar’s response is uber-long — for me, 10 pages when printed out — but well worth reading.
When we don’t have the same experiences as others — when we don’t live the same stories, Sugar points out, we can’t understand what another is going through:
The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you’re talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be over-estimated.
After giving some sage advice, including the above, Sugar begins the long story that encompasses most of her response. Why? Because “every now and then one of the questions I get seeps its way into my mind in the same way characters or scenes or situations in the other sorts of writing I do seep into my mind and I am haunted by it,” Sugar writes.
She tells of having been a youth advocate to a group of middle-school-aged girls for a year. The girls were all from the most miserable of family and socioeconomic circumstances. Their lives were, Sugar says, “unspeakably harrowing crap stew.”
Every time one of them would suffer some terrible abuse, Sugar would report it to the authorities, to child protective services, and ask for help. Not one agency ever helped one girl. There was no money, and children under 12 were the priority.
Finally coming to grips with the fact that no one would help, Sugar faced one of the girls and yet another heart-wrenching narrative of abuse:
She sat down in the chair near my desk where all the girls sat narrating their horrible stories and she told me another horrible story and I told her something different this time.
I told her it was not okay, that it was unacceptable, that it was illegal and that I would call and report this latest, horrible thing. But I did not tell her it would stop. I did not promise that anyone would intervene. I told her it would likely go on and she’d have to survive it. That she’d have to find a way within herself to not only escape the shit, but to transcend it, and if she wasn’t able to do that, then her whole life would be shit, forever and ever and ever. I told her that escaping the shit would be hard, but that if she wanted to not make her mother’s life her destiny, she had to be the one to make it happen. She had to do more than hold on. She had to reach. She had to want it more than she’d ever wanted anything. She had to grab like a drowning girl for every good thing that came her way and she had to swim like fuck away from every bad thing. She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal.
Here’s where Sugar’s advice finally comes full circle and we understand what Sugar’s story of being a youth advocate has to do with the advice-seeker who can’t recover from her miscarriage. Nothing can right the wrong of a dead baby, but we can transcend, and endure, and hold onto the desire to heal.
Please don’t be satisfied with my summary. Please read Sugar’s response for yourself.
Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.
My friend Sean Buvala has a new book out, Measures of Story: How to Create a Story from Floats and Anecdotes, and is offering a number of goodies — $42 worth, Sean says — for those who purchase it through Aug. 10.
The goodies include:
You can also download excerpts of the book, as I did, along with the table of contents. What I read in Chapter 1 is consistent with Sean’s evangelism of strict definitions of story and storytelling:
Story is getting a lot of attention of late. With that comes a jubilant, yet incorrect, promise that “everything is storytelling.” As a professional storyteller, I am delighted to see so many people excited about stories. Come to the table, the tent, the stage and let us see where story takes us. When I am teaching about storytelling in the midst of this jubilance, I often hear or see questions like these:
“Why do we need definitions about story anyway? Aren’t stories supposed to be free and unfettered in order to have powers to change my business or family?”
After telling a story rooted in family lore, Sean concludes the chapter:
I’m excited to read the full book. I want to know what “floats” are!
Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.
I’ve been quite scarce in this space this week — perhaps my longest-ever hiatus from blogging. My preoccupation this week has been, you guessed it, Toastmasters. I gave my eighth speech Tuesday, which required the use of visual aids. I’ve also been preparing materials so our club can promote itself to the community at an event this weekend.
I have long wanted to explore the intersection between intuition and storytelling, and this week’s speech allowed me to do that to a small extent. I also wanted to challenge myself to deliver the visual-aids speech in pecha kucha form, the presentation style that originated in Japan in 2003 and consists of minimalist slides. The presenter spends no more than 20 seconds on each slide, for a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds — perfect for Toastmasters (where the outside limit for many speeches is 7:30).
Confession: A couple of my slides were a little longer than 20 seconds, but many were well under, so I felt it all balanced out. In fact, my presentation timed out at 6:18. Except for the first slide, all slides advanced automatically, so I had to time my speaking perfectly; I probably worked harder on this speech than any other.
Not all of it was storied; the presentation contained about six slides that comprised brief stories or story fragments. It’s a start.
I centered the presentation around a set of intuitive skills proposed by Daniel Cappon in the article The Anatomy of Intuition from back in 1993.
I’m sharing here a PDF of the slides, which will be rather meaningless by themselves since they comprise virtually all images, so I’m also sharing the script and handout.
I look forward to further evolving my thinking on intuition and storytelling.
Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.
 |
Subscribe to A Storied Career in a Reader |
 |
Subscribe to A Storied Career by Email |
|
EBooks
Free:
Storied Careers: 40+ Story Practitioners Talk about Applied Storytelling.
|
| $2.99: Tell Me MORE About Yourself: A
Workbook to Develop Better Job-Search Communication through Storytelling. Also $2.99 for Kindle edition |
The New About Me: The Ultimate Course on Reinventing Your Bio Into A Story: A program for people in the business of relationships, who need a better bio for today's hyper-connected world.
The following are sections of A Storied Career where I maintain regularly updated running lists of various items of interest to followers of storytelling:
Links below are to Q&A interviews with story practitioners.
The pages below relate to learning from my PhD program focusing on a specific storytelling seminar in 2005. These are not updated but still may be of interest:
 |
My
personal Twitter account: @kat_hansen Tweets below are from my personal account. |
 |
My storytelling Twitter account: @AStoriedCareer |
|
My careers Twitter account: @KatCareerGal |
View my page on
Geeky Speaky: Submit Your Site!
