When I read the following quote by Peter Guber in an article called “Four Truths of the Storyteller” in Harvard Business Review, I immediately thought of my mother:
… many people assume that storytelling is somehow in conflict with authenticity. The great storyteller, in this view, is a spinner of yarns that amuse without being rooted in truth.
Similarly, Casey Quinlan of Mighty Casey Media Mighty Mouth Blog writes here:
The word “story” and the word “lie” — or, less in-your-face, “prevaricate” — are often thought to be synonymous.
They often ARE synonymous.
These thoughts reminded me of trying to explain my dissertation topic to my mother. “Storytelling in the job search” was the shorthand I used to describe the complex document. “What do you mean, storytelling — you mean making things up, telling fibs?” She could not grasp that storytelling could be anything but inauthentic. Clearly my mother is the kind of story skeptic to which Guber refers.
How odd a worldview when story can so beautifully convey a person’s authenticity.
Wally Lamb writes in an article in O magazine (about teaching women in prison to write autobiographically): “Your uniqueness- – your authenticity — is your strength.”