Q&A with a Story Guru: Jane Freese: The Stories We Tell about Ourselves Guide Our Course through Life

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See a photo of Jane, her bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

Q&A with Jane Freese, Question 2:

Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/narrative? What attracted you to this field? What do you love about it?

A: I became involved in story through a storytelling course for information professionals taught by Elizabeth Figa at the University of North Texas School of Library and Information Science. Her course has won several awards, so I enrolled thinking it would be fun. It was more challenging than I expected.

Most of the other students were interested in how to use storytelling in their work as school librarians or in youth library services. I was interested in applying it to finding a job after graduation. Libraries are being hard hit financially, so I needed to expand my job search to information careers outside of libraries. I expected that I would need to market myself, and storytelling presented a method to do it. I didn’t expect to find as much information about storytelling in business as I did. Delighted to find your book, Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get Jobs and Propel Your Career, and other books about personal branding that stress the importance of storytelling in the job hunting and interview process, I wanted to share what I learned. Consequently, I formed the Storytelling for Job Seekers Workshop.

What interests me most is how storytelling impacts our inner lives. Once I became attuned to stories, I realized how the stories we tell to ourselves about ourselves guide our course through life. Our stories tell us what we value and believe. What I think we don’t realize is that how we view and interpret the events in our lives is a choice. It is our story, unique to us, and how we chose to tell it to ourselves and others is under our control. For job-seekers, storytelling is a powerful tool to highlight skills, experience, character, and values. Armed with self-knowledge, we can target employment we are best suited for and communicate authentically what we have to offer.

The rule of thumb for resumes is that any experience prior to 10 years ago is irrelevant. For older job-seekers, this discounts their best assets: knowledge and maturity. Storytelling offers them an opportunity to present their valuable past experience.

Image credit: California Teachers Exchange

Q&A with a Story Guru: Jane Freese: Emblematic Moments Lend Themselves to Personal Storytelling in Job Interviews

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I’m so happy to have a new Q&A to run this week. I believe I encountered Jane Freese during my usual wanderings and research for blog content and was thrilled to find yet another kindred spirit working with storytelling and career/job search. I am most excited to have her join the Q&A series. This Q&A will run over the next five days.

Bio: Jane Freese guides job-seekers in storytelling techniques through her “Storytelling for Job Seekers” workshop in Las Vegas. A former journalist and retail manager, Freese formed the workshop after completing her master’s degree in library and information science. Eager to put her knowledge of business storytelling techniques to work, Freese created a way for people to help one another compete in a tight job market. In addition to facilitating the workshop, she operates her own writing and research business. Her blog about job hunting, personal branding, and storytelling can be found at www.TellingAboutYourself.com.

Q&A with Jane Freese, Question 1:

Q: In this essay, you write about “emblematic moments in telling a story. Can you talk more about what you mean by emblematic moments?

A: An emblematic moment is a holographic event. It can be a pivotal moment in a person’s life or an event that epitomizes a greater context. A pivotal event can be a moment of realization, even when the recognition arises long after the actual experience.

For example, in the 2008 documentary, “Harlan Ellison: Dreams with Sharp Teeth,” Ellison relates a memory of standing over a bathroom sink after being beaten up by a gang of bullies. His mother is dabbing his wounds with a wet washcloth when she says to him, “Well, you must have said something.” Ellison is stunned by her remark, but he knows in that moment that he has no allies in the world except himself. This realization is sad yet liberating. It empowers him to become fiercely independent, a fiery individual, and one of our most celebrated science fiction authors.

A simple question such as, “When did you first come to the realization that you wanted to be a teacher?” can reveal an emblematic moment and lends itself to personal storytelling in a job interview.

New Job Interviewing Book Features Chapter on Telling Stories

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Eric Kramer, whose specialty is presentation interviews, has just published a huge, comprehensive interviewing book, Active Interviewing. The book offers a full chapter, “Tell Stories That Engage and Persuade.”

He notes that stories in interviews should have a plot, theme, and dramatic tension. The listener of a story in a job interview — the interviewer — should be able to say “This is a story about _______” upon listening to an interviewee’s story, Kramer says, and be able to identify the skill, accomplishment, trait, strength, or other qualification talked about. Because Kramer is a big fan of dramatic tension as a way to engage listeners in the job-seeker’s story, he touts the inclusion of barriers in interviewee’s story formulas; thus, Situation –> Barriers –> Action –> Result.

The author emphasizes a concern about interview stories that I’ve mentioned before in this space — a caution against “too much team.” “Being a good team member or leader is a critical skill in today’s companies,” Kramer writes, “However, the company is not hiring your team; it is hiring you.” The point is to give yourself sufficient credit when describing a team accomplishment, and to make your role clear.

Because I’m a bit obsessed with tracking and leveraging accomplishments, I especially appreciate Kramer’s list of “Success-Story Memory Joggers,” concise prompts that help job-seekers recall their achievements so they can craft stories about them. Here are a few from the list of 21:

  • Accomplished more with the same/fewer resources? (How? Results?)
  • Received recognition/special awards? (What? Why?) [I always prefer to say “earned” recognition/special awards because “received” implies passivity.]
  • Increased efficiency? (How? Results?)
  • Solved difficult problems? (How? Results?)
  • Accomplished something for the first time? (What? Results?)

Kramer notes that stories provide an excellent way to answer the dreaded “What is your greatest weakness?” question because you can show the interviewer you are aware of your weakness and tell how you’re addressing it.

Kramer nicely ends the chapter with a list of why stories are effective in interviews.

Kramer’s chapter dovetails nicely into the workbook I’m releasing at the end of this week (give or take). He talks about factors that ensure good story delivery in interviews — sincerity and wholeheartedness, enthusiasm, and animation. I’ll likely give a nod to these traits in my own chapter on story delivery in interviews in Tell Me MORE About Yourself: A Workbook to Develop Better Job-Search Communication through Storytelling. The workbook is an interactive companion to my book, Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get Jobs and Propel Your Career. The workbook will have roughly 100 pages of content, encompassing 70+ hands-on exercises that job-seekers can do to develop their job-search story skills. Should also be a great tool for instructors and workshop leaders who want to teach folks how to develop stories for the job search. One chapter addresses an area I didn’t even cover in Tell Me About Yourself — using story techniques to figure out a career path. The latest iteration of the cover design is at left. I’m selling the book (which will be a downloadable PDF) for the insane price of $2.99, payable through Google Checkout. Drop me an email to be notified of the actual publication release.

A Favorite Easter Story

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Updating an Easter post from three years ago …

“Padre,” the Rev. R. Craig Burlington, our rector at St. George’s Episcopal Church when we lived in Maplewood, NJ, told a wonderful story in his Easter sermon one year. Here it is as best I can remember:

During Holy Week, the Burlingtons’ beloved family cocker spaniel (Teddy I think his name was) had gone missing. The children were bereft. On Easter, Padre heard the kids shouting ecstatically, “He’s alive, he’s alive!” Padre’s immediate thought was how deeply his offspring felt the message of Christ’s resurrection. Of course, the real reason the children were so gleeful was that the prodigal Teddy had returned home.

~~~

Meanwhile, blogger The Laughing Pastor writes stories about people in his church. “These stories tap into the joy and the awe of God’s presence.”

Describing Storytelling’s Benefits to Business People

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I’ve been running excerpts from the first and second parts of storyteller Eric James Wolf’s interview with me. In this excerpt, he asked me how I describe the benefits of storytelling to other people in the business world. My response:

I call upon the gurus who evangelized storytelling long before I did — people like Annette Simmons and Steve Denning and others, early pioneers who wrote books that have become the foundation for current business narrative/organizational storytelling.

Simmons characterizes the effectiveness of stories in business in her landmark book, The Story Factor (Chapters 2 and 5):

  • Story creates power.
  • Story is a form of mental imprint.
  • Story is a dynamic tool of influence because it gives people enough space to think for themselves.
  • In a complex environment, people listen to whomever makes the most sense — whomever tells the best story (Simmons’s followup book is titled Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins.)
  • Story makes sense of chaos and gives people a plot. People need story to organize their thoughts and make sense of things.
  • Story invites people to creatively reframe their dilemmas, while rules alienate people who want to think for themselves.
  • Change people’s stories and you change their behavior.
  • Story is like mental software that you supply so your listener can run it again using new input specific to the situation.
  • Story is uniquely equipped to touch you and help you touch others in this place that cannot be understood, explained, or reduced to a flow chart.
  • Story builds connections between you and those you wish to influence.
  • Story helps the brain remember.

And from the Australian consulting firm, Anecdote:

  • Stories reveal what’s really happening in your organisation
  • Stories inspire us to take action
  • Stories stick in your mind much better than [bulllet] points and clever arguments
  • Stories connect us to a purpose and improve our performance
  • Stories share and embed values

Marguerite Granat posted a list of rationales for story in business, which I reprinted here.

Finally, not part of my response to Eric Wolf, is a post by Mike Hamilton on Get Synchronicity entitled Core Elements of Storytelling, in which he lists these benefits (see his full post for his elaboration on each):

  • Storytelling is the great equalizer.
  • Storytelling clearly and quickly communicates complex ideas.
  • Storytelling is a powerful instrument of persuasion and influence.
  • Storytelling is your personal business card.
  • Storytelling communicates and builds value systems in organizations.
  • Storytelling encourages collaboration and unifies teams.
  • Storytelling builds community and promise.
  • Storytelling ignites action.

Stories of Economy, the Sex Trade, Cosmetics, Mortification, and More: Story Collections and Collection Points

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Some venues I’ve come across recently that either offer collections of topic-specific stories or serve as collection points for stories — or both:

    • Tales from the Tunnel is a play in New York City in which (as reported by Andrew Grossman in the Wall Street Journal, six actors perform 100 very short stories, ranging in duration from 20 seconds to seven minutes, that the playwrights collected from friends, family, and people whom they met on the subway during the last three years. “The stories are mostly light — and occasionally heavy — takes on the strange interactions that arise from being stuck in a long metal box with strangers,” Grossman reports. “One character tells of the time he gave a Tic-Tac to a hypoglycemic man suffering from low blood sugar.”
    • GDP — Measuring the human side of the Canadian economic crisis, from the National Film Board of Canada, is Canada’s “first bilingual web documentary, a pan-Canadian project that bears witness to the far-reaching effects of the crisis in our lives and communities.” You can see the stories here.
    • PenTales was created in NYC by two childhood friends passionate about connecting people through stories. The friends “instigate story experiments and experiences around the world, including storytelling events.” They “believe that everyone has a great story to tell, that telling and listening to stories connects people in meaningful ways, and that getting people together in real spaces to share real experiences can produce powerful creative connections.”
    • Story of Stuff creator Annie Leonard is back with The Story of Cosmetics. The Story of Stuff Project’s intent is to leverage and extend the impact of the first film in the series, The Story of Stuff. “We amplify public discourse on a series of environmental, social and economic concerns and facilitate the growing Story of Stuff community’s involvement in strategic efforts to build a more sustainable and just world,” the site says. Other films in the series include The Story of Bottled Water and The Story of Cap and Trade. Just released last week is The Story of Electronics.
    • The White House Project, a national, nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization, “aims to advance women’s leadership in all communities and sectors, up to the U.S. presidency. By filling the leadership pipeline with a richly diverse, critical mass of women, [the project] make[s] American institutions, businesses and government truly representative.” Part of the project is telling the stories of women leaders.
    • The Storytellers Project by New Roots for Refugees helps refugees tell their stories of resettlement.
    • During its recent two-week vacation, TEDTalks published “playlists” from among the 700+ presentations in the TED series. First up was a playlist of Life Stories, including Ben Dunlap’s “tale of a grand life, lived with passion, principle and humor,” Stefan Sagmeister’s learnings from his life so far, Deborah Scranton facilitation of three soldiers telling their own stories of conflict in Iraq in her powerful “War Tapes,” and A.J. Jacobs’s tale about about his year of living Biblically
    • My Days is a collection of stories from 25 elderly Norwegian men and women between 79 and 104 years old from their everyday lives. Filmmakers Hanne Jones and Eli Lea from the Norwegian film production company Flimmer Film went from door to door in old people’s homes in Bergen collecting stories from the residents lives. The stories were recorded, edited and vizualised with photographs from the storytellers personal photo albums.
    • Neiman Storyboard publishes a collection of what they call Notable Narratives, outstanding examples of narrative journalism drawn from newspapers, magazines, radio and television.
    • On Small Biz Stories, small-business enthusiasts can connect by sharing experiences. The site publishes the stories of entrepreneurs at least once a month.
    • The Red Umbrella Project is founded on the belief that storytelling is a building block of movement-building and solidarity. (The red umbrella is a symbol of international sex worker solidarity.) “People who have spent time in the sex industries know all too well the social and legal stigmas that prevent us from being treated with the dignity and respect we deserve,” the site says. “While researchers, the media, and myriad others fill up page after page with stories about the sex trade, the voices of people who have lived this reality are consistently denied and erased. Everyone has a story, and the people who are best equipped to tell the stories of people in the sex trade are the people who have personal experiences in the industry.”
    • The host of 100 Word Stories, who seems to go by “Mr. Crap,” says that 100-word stories, commonly known as the Drabble, “are an extremely brief form of flash-fiction. … Every Sunday, a new Weekly Challenge will be posted.” Mr. Crap continues: “I’ll offer up a topic or theme which you will use as the inspiration to write and record your own 100-word story. Then, send them to me via email so I can include them in a podcasted collection for all to enjoy.”
    • Recognize a Leader is not s storytelling site per se, but the author behind it, Steve Denning, is an organizational storytelling pioneer whose new book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management, was recently released. Visitors to the site have the opportunity to recognize leaders by writing them a note. None of the notes I saw were especially storied, but there’s no reason visitors can’t tell stories to support their leader recognitions.
    • The Purple Couch “is on a quest throughout America’s “living room” (anywhere the couch lands) seeking to be a platform for the truth about what matters, a platform for the people to speak and be heard. We believe that there is power in our stories — the power that comes with understanding. And, when it finally dawns on us that we have much in more common than that which sets us apart, we will begin to heal as a country and a planet.”
    • Mortified “is a comic excavation of the strange and extraordinary things we created as kids. Witness adults telling stories about their lives by sharing their own adolescent journals, letters, poems, lyrics, plays, home movies, and art. After all, where else can you hear grown men and women confront their past with firsthand tales of their… first kiss, first puff, worst prom, fights with mom, life at bible camp, worst hand job, best mall job, and reasons they deserved to marry Jon Bon Jovi.”
  • In mid-2009, The Inspire Foundation launched the #Manweek campaign to raise awareness of issues such as the fact that in Australia, young men commit suicide at more than three times the rate of women of the same age and mental illness and drug and alcohol dependency is severely affecting men aged 16-24. A number of Australian bloggers supported this campaign, sharing their thoughts, challenges, and experiences with their readers. As the campaign ended, the organizers felt that the campaign had only just scratched the surface; they wanted to take these stories and share them with others – with brothers, fathers and uncles. The book The Perfect Gift For a Man
    30 Stories About Reinventing Manhood     is the result. All proceeds go to The Inspire Foundation.

Convergence of Thoughts on Storytelling for Internal Communications

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Not long ago, Nishwa Ashraf asked readers of The Melcrum Blog if they prefer the communication on the left or the one on the right:

The one on the left is obviously a story, while the one on the right is essentially a platitude intended to convey a company value.

Ashraf suggests asking three questions when considering using storytelling as part of a communications strategy — but I’m inclined to turn that suggestion around and ask these questions of any communications vehicle:

  1. Would you remember it tomorrow?
  2. Could you repeat it in six months’ time?
  3. Did you understand the core message?

For example, look at the two approaches above, and ask yourself which you’d be most likely to remember tomorrow, able to repeat in six months, and which is most understandable. I’m guessing the story would win out for most people.

About the same time as Ashraf published her thoughts, Tony Quinlan, principal and chief storyteller of Narrate, set forth some guidelines for folks who want to introduce storytelling in their companies (it can be hard to get buy-in, as I discuss here):

  • Use an external practitioner
  • Use enticing language
  • Rationalize your budget
  • Form alliances with other stakeholders

For more about each guideline, see Quinlan’s full post.

U. of Glamorgan Storytelling Center Offers Science-and-Storytelling “Provocations”

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I’m not very good at updating the inside pages on this blog, such as my Events page, so I blew it when it came to publicizing a spring symposium on storytelling and science at the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling at the University of Glamorgan in Cardiff, Wales.

But the Centre is offering audio recordings of three “provocations” from the symposium. I’m not familiar with the term “provocations” in this context, but they sound intriguing. They’re given by Mark Brake, Dr Steve Killick, and Prof Hamish Fyfe, offering what the centre calls “a fascinating range of perspectives on the role of story and narrative in various fields from science fiction studies to child psychology.”

Even better, the provocations join lots of other great materials — “a wealth of resources including documentation of our previous papers and symposia, digital stories and show-reels, and suggested reading lists and further information” in the newly updated documents and downloads section of the centre’s website.

Coming Up in November: National Life Writing Month and NaNoWriMo

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I had heard the term NaNoWriMo before last year, but didn’t really know what it meant. Last year, though, my cousin, Alex Lucas, posted a number of status updates/tweets that he was participating in NaNoWriMo, so I got curious enough to look up the term and learn that it means National Novel Writing Month. Participants strive to write 50,000 words toward a novel in November.

I’ve always had “write a novel” on my bucket list, and for about four years now, I’ve had a particular novel brewing in my head. Inspired by Cousin Alex, I am participating this year. I tell you this partly because story fans might be interested in NaNoWriMo, but also just in case my commitment to the novel interrupts my daily blogging. I don’t think it will as I try to plan my blog posts ahead of time. But just in case…

Of perhaps even more interest to story fans, November also marks National Life Writing Month and Write Nonfiction in November.

Story Collections Strive for Social Change, Part 1

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Virtually every day, I see examples of storytelling in service of social change. So many examples, in fact, that it takes two postings to cover just the recent ones. Here are some that have caught me eye in recent months:

  • Brooke Dean and Levi Felix, who document their project at THIS IS THE WORLD WE LIVE IN are “traveling around the world capturing stories of leadership and heroism, learning about communities in need and conflict, and connecting them with the support of those looking to give it. The kinds of questions they are asking during these travels:
    • What is effective activism?
    • What is collaboration, sustainability and understanding?
    • How will our diverse generation of social change build a true global culture committed to one another?

    The two seek “talented photographers, writers, filmmakers, travelers, backpackers, organizers, vagabonds and volunteers to join the collective and start blogging with [them]. If you think you’d be a good fit or want to get the details about being a blogger, or know someone who might be interested, shoot us an email at BrookeSDean@gmail.com with the subject title, ‘Join The Collective.'”

  • I’m From Driftwood is an ongoing collection of true stories by gay people from all over, the intent of which is to help gay teens feel not so alone. Users can submit stories here. This site seems especially timely after the recent suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi.
  • Storytelling has emerged as an important tool for fundraising, and a timely example is The YMCA of Greater New York, which, as documented in an article by Caroline Preston, “hired a freelance journalist to spend time with Haitian teenagers at its Port-au-Prince affiliate. The reporter turned those interviews into short biographies that the charity presented to potential donors on its Web site and on Facebook.” The campaign raised about $30,000 over two and a half months. You can see the video stories here.
  • The Bay Area Video Coalition and several other organizations used digital storytelling to reduce incidences of domestic violence in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, CA. The digital storytelling initiative, called Abriendo las Cajas (Opening Boxes) is “facilitated process of sharing personal narratives for individual empowerment and social change using simple media technologies.” Here’s how an article by Jen Gilomen describes the process and its capabilities:

    It starts with the sharing of personal narrative, facilitated dialogues about violence, and participants finding commonalities of experience. … The process of expressing this narrative — of talking it through in a safe space with your peers, then owning the narrative from your own perspective — is empowering. … (One participant, Veronica, said that through her story she wanted to “tell the women they should never feel scared.”)

  • Finally, not a story collection for social change, but a call for for storytelling for social change, in this case sustainability. Noting that “storytelling is, and always has been, the antidote to information overload,” Marc Stoiber calls for storytelling about climate change, sustainability, and green innovation. I especially like this part of his argument:

    Storytelling ensures that your innovation has the momentum it needs to overcome inertia and resistance to change — both inside your organization, and out in the real world. A staggeringly large number of things have to go just right for a new idea, service or business model to ever see the light of day — and many of them involve changing or expanding consumer thinking. Without the glue, context, and inspiration of storytelling, the odds are stacked against you. Without a story, a great innovation can be reduced to a clever invention among a million clever inventions. With a story, it can help educate consumers, drive them to positive behavior change, and perhaps even inspire greater, more fervent climate action. Not bad for a new product or service.

More social-change story sites coming up later in the month.