To my current theme of year-end review and new-year goals, I’m adapting some ideas from an article by Ernest R. Stair in the January 2012 issue of Toastmaster magazine (to read the full article, you’ll need to return to the link later in January — unless you’re a Toastmasters member).

Stair’s thesis is that you can’t get a real sense of achievements if you look at them through the perspectives of others. An example of a particular telling question that reveals the wrong way to look at achievements (and a question I can see myself asking) is: “How will my job title sound at a high-school reunion?”

Instead, Stair suggests a set of the “right” questions to ask. I’m adapting them here, not as questions, but as prompts to apply to the year we’ve nearly completed:

Thinking about the year just completed, give one or more storied examples of:

• Times you’ve learned from your mistakes.
• Times you’ve refused to quit.
• Times you’ve let someone else have all the glory
• Times you’ve taken criticism gracefully
• Times you’ve made someone’s day

Your responses to these prompts, says Stair, “succeed in highlighting the true you, as you rise to great heights turning ordinary moments of your everyday life into events of extraordinary significance.”

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

My colleague Darrell Gurney has conducted an annual process for more than eight years in which he “powerfully wrap[s] up the passing year before going on to design my coming year.”

He offers his exercise to subscribers and friends at the end of each year.

While the end of the year is typically time for goal-setting for the next year, Darrell believes the process needs another component:

At this time in December, everyone gets on the bandwagon of designing goals for the coming year. But I believe that taking on more challenges without acknowledging and appreciating from whence we have come lacks the HUGE spark of energy that we can get from that kind of self-inventory.

You can get Darrell’s MILESTONES & MEMORABLE MOMENTS worksheet by submitting your first name and email address.

I recommend you take the exercise a step further and, wherever possible, craft your responses to the prompts in story form. Doing so will help you remember them better and help you express them in your professional life — say, in job interviews or meetings with your boss in which you make a pitch for a raise or promotion.

The prompts cover such areas as accomplishments, motivations, obstacles, surprises, mistakes, disappointments, and more.

Darrell’s even offering a four-part series of tele-calls to guide folks through the Milestones and Memorable Moments and goal-setting process over four Wednesdays:

4 Consecutive Wednesdays
Dec. 21 through Jan. 11
5-6pm PST
Dial-in: 218-936-7999
Access Code: 840504#

If you’d prefer not to give your name and email to get the worksheet, you can access a Web version here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Today is World Aids Day.

In this short (2:49) video, HIV-positive people tell hopeful stories. It’s from the Clinton Foundation, whose Prevention of Mother-To-Child Transmission (PMTCT) initiative has changed the way PMTCT programs are managed, resulting in a 40 percent drop in transmission rates across six focus countries from 2008-2010.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I think I’ve posted most of the entries in the Story of Stuff series; yesterday, I started seeing The Story of Broke being shared. When I went to view it on YouTube, I noted that it many critical comments were posted. I’m sure at least some of them are from folks who disagree politically with the video’s message; I don’t know enough about economics to question the facts presented.

Notice I said facts. I don’t think the Story of Broke actually tells a story. What do you think?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The tally is in for Sunday’s Blog Action Day: 2,710 bloggers from 109 countries registered to take part in Blog Action Day 2011.

Go here to see the range of bloggers from different cultures, countries, and languages who committed to blog about food for Blog Action Day, October 16, 2011.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

For the fourth year, I am participating in Blog Action Day. This year’s topic is food.

As a blogger about applied storytelling, my goal with Blog Action Day is to explore the ways food and story intersect.

We can tell something of a visual story with food. Food is is the center of many of our cultural traditions — the stories we regularly enact. A PBS series, for example, The Meaning of Food explored “our relationships to food and reveals the connection food has to our identity: personal, cultural, and familial. Everything about eating — including what we consume, how we acquire it, who prepares it, who’s at the table, and who eats first — is a form of communication that is rich with meaning.” When the series site states, “Our attitudes, practices, and rituals surrounding food are a window into our most basic beliefs about our world and ourselves,” it could just as easily be saying that attitudes, practices, and rituals surrounding food are a window into our stories.

Similarly, Earthbound Farms supports its brand by offering a Web site section of Food Stories, about how “the stories of our food adventures are the stuff of rich family traditions and deep friendships.” Doesn’t look like the site has been updated since 2009, however.

The blogger behind Victual Storytelling asserts that a story to tell exists behind every meal. “I hope to show you something new about food,” she writes, “through the meals I eat, the people who feed me, those I cook for and the stories behind the food.”

Much of the narrative about food in recent years has concerned the unhealthful and inhumane aspects of the Western diet, the industrial food system, and factory farming. Author Michael Pollan(The Omniivore’s Dilemma and several other titles) is well-known for telling the harrowing stories of our food system. A Canadian effort that has gained significant buzz is The Story of Food, a 5:40 video intended to get people thinking “about our broken food system and what’s gone wrong!” The film is embedded at the end of this post.

How did our system get this way? The book, The Hungry World “tells multiple stories about people and institutions that played major roles in the 20th century struggle to ‘modernize’ the production of food, an intrinsically non-modern activity.

In From Factory Farm to Vegan, Angie Hammond tells her story of growing up on a chicken factory farm but later evolving into a vegan.

The flip side is of the farming system is the relationship of food to sustainable living, a subject covered in Cooking Up a Story, which offers “unique documentary stories about farmers and ranchers, food artisans, and others whose lives center around sustainable food and agriculture.”

Consumers are increasingly concerned about the story of where their food comes from. In the curriculum guide, Nourish, “Each story includes when, where, why, and how a certain food gets from the farm to your plate and who is involved in getting it there.”

In Food Curated, Liza DiGuia hopes to share stories of where good food comes from through short documentaries. “I believe food is a shared experience,” she writes, “and there is so much to the process that I find so beautiful and so compelling to film and capture.”

Perhaps the most significant way that Blog Action Day can raise awareness of food issues is by addressing hunger. As with any sort of cause, stories are a powerful way bring the issue to life. Three sites that tell stories about hunger are:

• The Real Stories section of Feeding America
• The Stories section of the Austin Food Bank’s site
• The Hunger Stories section of World Vision’s site.
• Hunger Map 2011, which tells a visual story of worldwide hunger.

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.

I am deeply ashamed that I am not remotely well-read in classic literature.

Before I read Annette Gordon-Reed’s review of David S. Reynolds’s Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America (abstract here), I knew very little about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic.

Gordon-Reed several times in her article credits the book with crystallizing anti-slavery sentiment sufficiently to precipitate the Civil War. She writes:

Stowe … understood how influential narrative could be, and with Uncle Tom’s Cabin she achieved what endless speeches in the halls of Congress, political tracts, harangues, and newspaper, and newspaper articles failed to do: she made the reality of slavery palpable to the American public. As one Southern commentator notes, “Thousands will peruse an interesting story, and thus gradually imbibe the author’s views, that would not read ten lines of a mere argumentative volume on the same theme.”

While we might have wished that slavery could have been ended without the bloodiest war in US history, the ability of Stowe’s writing to galvanize the citizenry is testimony once again to the power of story.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I do not support the death penalty. I do not believe mere mortals possess the moral authority to sit in judgment of other mortals to the extent of sentencing them to death. And the emergence of DNA testing shows it is too easy to put an innocent person to death; the Innocence Project has resulted in the release of 17 death-row inmates based on DNA evidence. I will admit that in the case of people like Ted Bundy, Timothy McVeigh, and, indeed, Osama Bin Laden, my opposition to the death penalty is difficult to sustain, just as it would be if a loved one were the victim of a capital crime.

It seems death sentences and executions have been decreasing in the US. In “The Mitigator” in The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin writes about one reason — the increasing use of mitigation, “a strategy that aims to tell the defendant’s life story.” (You can read the intro to the article, but the rest is behind a paywall.)

Toobin notes:

For a long time, defense lawyers didn’t know how to use [the mitigation] option to their advantage, and many largely ignored the penalty phase. In the nineteen-eighties, some death-penalty activists started taking a more systematic approach. The key figures in the change were not lawyers but anthropologists, ex-journalists, and even recent college graduates. The idea was to use the mitigation process to tell the life story of the defendant in a way that explained the conduct that brought him into court. The work was closer to biography than criminal investigation …

Toobin quotes Scharlette Holdman, a pioneer in the mitigation field:

As we in local communities began to look for mitigation, we saw it as pesenting the narrative of someone’s life, and we became acutely aware that is was a very specialized, complex undertaking. … That narrative is not there for the asking. … It requires not just knowledge and skill but experience in how you search for identity, locate, recognize, and preserve the information.

While Toobin notes that “it’s not easy to draw out those stories, much less present them in court,” but “in recent years the practice has been refined and systematized.”

Before that, though, was “a heartbreaking time,” in the words of the focus of Toobin’s article, Danalynn Recer, executive director of the Gulf Region Advocacy Center (GRACE). Back then, Recer recalled thinking, “Surely the courts will listen to someone’s life story before killing them.” Well, they didn’t.”

Recer’s summation in a case in which this story-based mitigation resulted in a life-without-parole sentence rather than the death penalty captures my feelings about capital punishment:

… the only question remaining is whether [the defendant] is going to die by the hand of God or by the hand of man, and that’s the bottom-line question we’re considering …

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Louise L. Hay (whom I mentioned here) among her many activities, disseminates affirmations. I see them almost daily on Facebook. I appreciate her affirmations, but never has one resonated with me as much as this one did. I had to share it:

Life is sacred. I hold in my heart all the parts of myself — the infant, the child, the teenager, the young adult, the adult, and my present and future self. My story includes every success and every failure, every error and every truthful insight, and all of it is valuable. I have compassion for me, and I also feel compassion for others. I create a life of acceptance and understanding.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.