This week NPR presented a two-part piece on “Our Storied Lives.” The text of the story (part 1 and part 2), written by Jon Hamilton, engagingly juxtaposes a preview of an upcoming book by Antonio Damasio with the story of a storyteller trying to make it in Los Angeles after many delays in reaching for his dreams.

The Damasio book, Self Comes to Mind, Hamilton writes, is about “how our sense of story influences our lives.” Hamilton characterizes the views of Damasio, a behavioral neurologist at the University of California: “… although we may not be aware of it, each of us thinks of our life as if it were a story in the making. … [W]e use stories to gain a perspective on our own lives.”

The way Hamilton structured the piece inspired me to juxtapose my life/story with Damasio’s research about story. Not because I think my story is fascinating but because I think this kind of analysis is useful for anyone, especially anyone interested in how story influences our lives. Here are some of Damasio’s findings (in italics) and my responses.

… we frequently model our own life stories on a story we’ve seen on stage or at the movies.

I don’t think so in my case. My favorite movies are achingly romantic, and I definitely wanted romance in my life, but I don’t believe I modeled my life after any one fictional story. Possibly the biggest pop-culture influence of my youth was comic strips. Perhaps I did model my story a bit after the life of Brenda Starr, the beautiful reporter whose story was filled with romance, intrigue, and adventure. But she was a working gal, and more specifically, a writer. That’s what I wanted to be.

My parents’ stories, however, influenced me more than those of pop culture. I decided early on to be a writer, in large part because my father was a writer. But I had a parallel ambition: I was rather obsessed with being a mother. Also the idea of being pregnant. As a child, I voraciously and precociously read reams of material about pregnancy and parenting, writing the story in my head of what a wonderful mother I would be. In 1964 (I think), the Ladies Home Journal ran a story about the Fischer quintuplets of Aberdeen, SD. This was back before fertility drugs, so quints were very rare; in fact, the Fischers were the first American quints to survive. I cannot tell you how many times I read that article.

My mothering fantasies were fed by my perception that my mother was a perfect mom completely dedicated to mothering. It wasn’t until I had children of my own that I learned my mother was not living the story she wanted; one day, she loudly and emphatically exclaimed that she had never wanted children. She had played the role of devoted mother to the hilt because she considered it her job, and she always gave 100 percent to her jobs. But the story she really wanted probably involved horses and being outdoors in nature. The saddest part is that I turned out much the same way. I believed my story would be one of fulfilling and nurturing motherhood but was shocked to discover — as much as I adore my children and do not in any way regret having them — that I was much more fulfilled by the Brenda Starr side of my life than by the Fischer quints side.

Setbacks aren’t unique to humans, but … our response to them probably is. We see them as changing the plot line of the life story we thought we were writing, and we cope by coming up with a new narrative.

The biggest setback in my life, the one that shaped my story for many years, was discovering — at the last possible moment — that my father had used my college money to start a PR firm specializing in petroleum companies — during the energy crisis of the 1970s. Needless to say, that venture was doomed to failure. I had been accepted at three great colleges, including Boston University, my dream school. But my dad told me there was no money to send me. I had grown up never having one shred of doubt that I would go to college. I had earned good grades so I would be accepted at a good school. My parents’ expectation for me was that I would go to college. If I had known they wouldn’t be able to finance my education, I would have approached going to college differently. And that’s what I ended up doing. I rewrote the narrative so that I alone was responsible for my education. I worked for a year after high school to save money, apply to cheaper state schools, and line up loans, grants, and scholarships. But my college self-sufficiency plan derailed after just over a year at a state university. I dropped out for reasons I didn’t understand then, but that I now recognize as depression. I’m sure my money struggles played a role, but they were not the entire cause. And I had to rewrite my story again. During the next 18 years, I worked my way up through a series of retail and clerical jobs, always looking for a chance to go back to school. I made a couple of false starts but managed to sabotage myself. I finally finished my undergrad degree at age 39. My setback story is not unlike that of Shaun Parker, the protagonist of Hamilton’s story on NPR. He, too, postponed his goal for nearly 20 years. Both of our stories turned out the way we hoped. But I know I can’t help wondering whether my story would have contained more success and prosperity if I had finished college at a more traditional age.

Humans never stop looking ahead to something better. … Because we know our own life is a story, we are able to look ahead to the part we haven’t lived yet and start writing those chapters.

Today, my next-chapter story is influenced by my mother, but in the opposite way from the way it shaped the story of my younger years. Hers is the story I don’t want. I love my mother dearly, but I do not want to be the lonely, bitter, pessimistic bigot she is. She has given to everyone else at the expense of living her own story. As selfish as I sometimes feel, I can’t be like that.

I’m happier than I’ve been in a long time. Life is very, very good. But, yes, I still have chapters to write, including literal ones. I have at least a couple more books in me, including a novel. I would love my story to include teaching again. I want to pursue creative avenues like crafts projects. And perhaps play a small role in guiding my children to fulfilling stories for their lives.

Humans have a unique awareness that our lives are stories that begin when we’re born and end when we die. And because we know we’re going to die, … we are not satisfied with merely surviving day to day. We want our personal story to mean something.

I want to be remembered. Many aspects of my story have pointed to the meaning I have sought, this desire to be a memory. It’s why I’ve written books, though none (yet) timeless enough to be propel my memory for very long after my death. I have left many artifacts — writing and more — all over the Internet in the hope of leaving a bit of a legacy. I was a teacher. Some of my students from 15 years ago remember me, and I hope some will after I’m gone.

How has your life been influenced by awareness that you are living your story?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Gabriella Evelina Britth, who offers expertise in concepts, design, and storytelling, has declared in her Twitter profile that she plans to produce “50 tweets in 5 days. A Storytelling Experiment where I will share myself n [sic] my resume. Manifesto: Honest. Ironic. Sarcastic.” (I’m not sure if that’s meant to be “in my resume,” “and my resume,” or something else.) She started tweeting two days ago.

Britth had posted nearly two dozen tweets at the time of this writing. Most are creative ways of showing glimpses of her story, her lifestream, if you will. The first tweet, for example, is on PinintheMap and shows where in Stockholm, Sweden, Britth was born. In other tweets, she links to her LinkedIn profile, samples of her work, pictures of schools she’s attended and companies at which she’s worked, a video of a song she likes to sing while in the car, snapshots, a flowchart of how she likes to work (pictured), the Facebook profile of fictional Hollywood agent Ari Gold, a Lady Gaga video with art direction Britth admires, a blog she admires, a Survey Monkey quiz about herself, a Google street-view map of where she lives now, and a clip from Pineapple Express, the movie she considers the funniest ever.

The tweeted story/resume is clever and whimsical, and it does provide a good glimpse of Britth’s story. I’m not sure it work for employment (at least not in the U.S.) because it contains a few mildly risque elements.

I’d love to see job-seekers adopt some of Britth’s ideas for artifacts to link to as they seek to tell their stories. But tweeting the story doesn’t do much for me. I’d like to see some of these elements integrated into some other form of online resume.

[Thanks to Gregg Morris for alerting me to this tweeted resume.]

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I recently read of someone’s passion for writing, and it gave me pause. Writing is integral to my existence, but do I have a passion for it? When people ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a writer. I have wanted to be a writer since third grade, when I wrote a story that was published in the school paper. The fact that my father was a writer was a key influence. Since I moved out of the retail and clerical realm, virtually all my jobs have had writing as a key element. I’ve written eight books and countless articles. But do I have a passion for writing?

I would have to say that my relationship with writing goes beyond passion. It’s simply part of my identity, part of who I am, something that is in my DNA. I often say writing is like breathing for me; it’s just something I have to do.

And that brings me to time management. Ever since our big move to Washington state, I’ve had a barometer of how “busy” I am. It’s an e-mail list I belong to that contains queries by reporters. Expert sources can publicize and promote their expertise by responding to appropriate queries. I receive e-mails three times a day from this list. Since we left Florida, I have deleted every one of these e-mails without reading it.

As I wrote about here, I’ve also often felt too busy to give this blog my best effort. I could rationalize by saying I come nowhere near making a living from this blog; the money I earn from the advertising it carries amounts to pocket change. Yet, if I truly had my druthers, I would spend the bulk of my days researching material for and writing for this blog.

My best friend is an expert at time management, and her favorite rule on this subject is “Do what you love. Don’t do what you hate.” What could comprise better time management than spending our time doing what we’re passionate about and avoiding what doesn’t make us happy?

Still, living in a rural woodland is pretty labor-intensive. My husband does a lot more work here than I do simply because he has skills I don’t have. But I have plenty of regular chores, as well as house-finishing activities that are within my skillset. The beauty of nature here also beckons, saying, “Come outside. Enjoy the beauty. Go for a bike ride or hike.”

In the end though, applied storytelling is my passion. Writing about it goes beyond passion. I must constantly strive to balance the have-tos of my life with the activities that stoke my passions. Today, I rededicate myself to doing what I love.

What’s your passion, and do you spend as much time on it as you want to?

PS: NPR recently ran a story on why writers write.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve been fascinated for awhile about whether we construct our stories (identities, personas) differently online than we do offline.

Back in the spring at the conference Digital Storytelling ‘10, Molly Flatt of the agency 1000Heads looked at “look at how — and if — social media is changing the way we tell our own stories, brands tell their stories, and how the two collide.”

Here are some highlights of her exploration:

I think social media encourages a architectural, multi-media way of storytelling similar to graphic novelists. I find this most powerful when fewer words are used (we’re all fighting for space and attention in the online world, after all), but they are deepened and complexified by their link-rich context.

I’m not a comics geek as Flatt says she is, so I’m not sure I agree with the graphic-novel analogy. I resist the “fewer words” prescription simply because I tend to be verbose, but I agree that in the online world, the fewer words we use, the more likely we will be to get read. I find it really fun to figure out how to edit down to a certain word limit — a 100-word bio, for example, such as the one I have here. Twitter provides the ultimate 140-character discipline. (Here, Flatt went on to talk about augmented reality, but I won’t get into that because I have not educated myself about augmented reality.)

In social media, we’re all the heroes of our own stories, and we’re uploading fragments of our stories all the time.

This fragmentary quality challenges the sensibilities of storytelling purists. Because these fragments generally lack beginnings, middles, and ends, we do not often see them as stories. But taken in the aggregate, do they successfully tell our stories? They certainly become building blocks in constructing our identities.

We constantly and shamelessly use brands to express our identity online — the general has become the specific.

I hadn’t thought before about this aspect, but it’s certainly true in my case. My fierce allegiance to, for example, Apple products, is surely part of my story, and I’m certain I could come up with lots of other brands that I regularly integrate into my online story.

When we don’t have face-to-face instincts to rely on when building trust, only digital words and images, what do we rely on to capture our attention or empathy? Stories.

Stories build trust even when we are face to face, so their power when we aren’t is a given.

Flatt, who uses Isobella Jade as an example of an online storyteller/identity constructor who has integrated all the above themes into her online story, has nicely characterized some aspects of our online stories.

Meanwhile, I learned a new term — IRL (in real life) — in a post by Alexandra Samuel entitled 10 Reasons to Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life. Samuels essentially asserts there is no difference between our online and offline lives:

If we still refer to the offline world as “real life,” it’s only a sign of deep denial — or unwarranted shame — about what reality looks like in the 21st century. The Internet’s impact on our daily lives, experiences and relationships is real. Our world is deeply affected by networks. From the moment you wake up to news that was gathered online to the minute you fall asleep listening to a podcast, the Internet shapes how you experience the world around you.

In giving her 10 reasons to stop apologizing, Samuels hits on several that relate directly to our need to tell stories [my comments in brackets]:

It’s time to start living in 21st century reality: a reality that is both on- and offline.

Acknowledge online life as real, and the Internet’s transformative potential opens up.

When you commit to being your real self online, you discover parts of yourself you never dared to share offline. [Telling your story is one way to be your real self.]

When you take the idea of online presence literally, you can experience your online disembodiment as a journey into your mind rather than out of your body.[Online presence and online story = synonymous?]

When you focus on creating real meaning with your time online, your online footprint makes a deeper impression.[Stories are the best way to create meaning.]

When you spend your online time on what really matters to you, you experience your time online as an authentic reflection of your values. [Stories are an excellent medium for authentically reflecting values.]

I am interested in conducting research — yes, probably of the academic ilk — on more differences in the ways we use stories to construct our online identities versus our offline identities. I haven’t seen much, if any, scholarship on this topic. If you’re aware of research on this theme, I’d love to hear about it.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

My earliest and most sustained ambition was to be a dancer — specifically a ballerina. After five years of childhood dance lessons, I realized I was no good at learning steps. Many years later, I identified my disability as a very poor capacity for kinesthetic learning; my brain simply could not observe a teacher doing dance steps and translate the same movements to my own body.

My inability to learn dance steps has always seemed like a cruel joke of nature, and there’s still a tiny part of me that feels as though I was meant to be a dancer, but my body and brain won’t cooperate. I probably could have confronted my disability; after all, I’ve seen auditions and performances of dancers who are deaf, who are amputees, who have scoliosis. But I didn’t, so it seems unlikely at my advancing age that I will ever be a dancer.

But I love dance and gravitate toward watching dance as entertainment. I’ve written before about my love of the reality dance competition “So You Think You Can Dance” (in fact, now that I look back, I see I also wrote about my dance ambitions and kinesthetic learning deficiencies). This show has a level of heart and authenticity that separates it from many other reality competition shows.

One indicator of how special this show is: Its personnel have initiated today’s National Dance Day, a day to get people moving and appreciating dance. Popular show choreographers Tabitha and Napoleon (a.k.a., NappyTabs) even designed a dance number that the masses could learn and perform for today’s celebration.

So what does all this have to do with story? Most of the dance numbers choreographers give contestants to perform on the show have a story behind them, and the judges to a large extent evaluate the numbers based on how successfully the contestants communicate the story. When the numbers have no story behind them, they are, in my opinion, less successful and memorable. Last night, show judge Adam Shankman, a director and choreographer, told one contestant to let the story drive the dance — that keeping the story in mind as he danced would inform and enhance his dancing.

The stories behind the contestants — and how much the audience knows about those stories — often play a strong role in how successful they are in the competition. This year’s most popular dancer, for example, is Kent, a hayseed from a tiny Ohio farming town — who dances like a god. Two winners in recent years have been street dancers with little formal training. A contestant who is a favorite with the judges and a wonderful dancer is less popular with viewers because we learned very little about his backstory during the audition phase of the competition.

Today I celebrate National Dance Day and the show that inspired it, as well as the dancer deep within me — and all the stories that propel dance into the dazzling art form it is.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

NPR and Flickr have added more scanned pages from girls’ diaries, as part of the project I reported on here. I also belatedly realized that this diary project is connected with the Hidden Life of Girls project I wrote about here. I wish the connection were more clear on these sites.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I made several attempts to keep a diary when I was young, but none of them lasted.

My most interesting effort was in junior high, when I fashioned my diary (a spiral-bound notebook) into a sort of newsletter with an audience of — who? I don’t quite remember if I intended to share the newsletter with others. The publication was called The Reader’s Raisin. As I recall, The Reader’s Raisin contained drawings and other doo-dads not typical of diaries.

In that way, it was perhaps typical of the project NPR has launched on Flickr, The Hidden World of Girls and the page shown here from Theresa Anderson’s diary.

I wish I knew more about the purpose of this project and what inspired it. Neither the Flickr site nor the NPR page on the project say very much beyond this on the NPR site:

With enough of them, they could form a comprehensive tapestry — from elation to depression — of life experiences.

The NPR page also offers interesting comments on folks’ experiences with diaries.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

One of my occasional forays into my own story…

I am extremely uncomfortable — nay, phobic — when it comes to talking on the phone. I dread making phone calls and very rarely answer the phone.

Many people find my problem very weird. Some even disdain me. I don’t think my issue is any stranger than the phobia my mother and sister have about driving over bridges. (Neither can do so, and they have to plot out intricate routes when they drive to ensure they won’t encounter any bridges.)

I wasn’t always this way. I would not say I went out of my way to talk on the phone, but I had people in my circle that I would have regular, long phone conversations with. I don’t remember having my current dread of the phone in my earlier years.

Two things happened in the 1990s that gradually made me anti-phone. The first was the Internet. I first went on the Internet in 1993, and I think I came to a subconscious realization that, for the most part, I didn’t have to talk on the phone anymore. I used to have at least monthly long conversations with my best friend, who for years has lived far away from me, but once she went on the ‘Net a month after I did, we carried out virtually all our conversations online. We’ve had personal phone calls only twice in these last 17 years — once to discuss the OJ Simpson verdict and once when my father died.

Which brings me to the second influence on my phone issues. When my dad died in 1997, I learned that he, too, had hated the phone. Somehow that made my quirk OK. I was validated. It was genetic.

It’s usually not that hard to work around my discomfort. In my role as associate publisher for Quintessential Careers, I get a fair number of requests from media for interviews. I either ask to do them via e-mail or pass them off on my partner.

Some phone interaction is unavoidable, though. Some people press me to communicate by phone. I did a number of phone interviews when I was actively pursuing a college-teaching position. My phobia made me absolutely awful at these interviews, but I did learn to get somewhat better (my husband suggested pacing while on the phone to channel nervous energy; that helps a lot). I do monthly conference calls for an executive board I serve on. I am capable of making phone calls if I absolutely have to. I generally have to psych myself up for days. My greatest triumph in confronting my fear was the teleconference I did last fall for Worldwide Story Work.

I know there are ways to get over phobias, and some friends have even suggested methods. But I’m not sure I want to get over it. If my phobia does not greatly impede my personal and professional lives, do I really need to get over it?

The same best friend with whom I no longer have phone conversations has a simple rule for life: Do what you love. Don’t do what you hate. I feel as though I have earned the right at my age to not have to do what I hate.

What do you think? Am I selfish, inflexible, and bizarre for refusing most phone contact and being unwilling to get past my fear?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

One of the recent podcast interviews in Michael Margolis’s The New Storytellers series featured the wonderful Christina Baldwin, author of one of the seminal books in the current storytelling movement, Storycatcher.

I was particularly fascinated by the part of the conversation about introverted vs. extroverted storytelling. Storytelling on social-media venues like Facebook is an example of extroverted storytelling, Baldwin says, and it’s often incomplete and unsatisfying storytelling. Baldwin uses a status-update example, “Just ate a hamburger,” that leaves the audience hungering (my pun intended) for more, or leaves them asking, “So?” and “What happened next?”

Baldwin says that if people aren’t attached to their interior stories, they get addicted to feedback. Although I would have considered myself attached to my interior story, I also recognize a social-media feedback addiction in myself. I’m always curious about what kinds of comments that my, for example, Facebook status updates, have generated.

People are longing for a deeper conversation, Baldwin says. We need to push technology aside and just talk slowly face-to-face in a social space that creates connection. Her prescription for such a space is the circle conversation, the subject of her newest book, The Circle Way.

It’s a very worthwhile and thought-provoking conversation. Give it a listen.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The third annual International Day for Sharing Life Stories is a week from Sunday — on May 16. The day’s Web site notes that last year more than 200 organizations in 20 countries around the world held activities to celebrate the day, and to call attention to countless life story organizations and projects.

To be honest, I find the event’s Web site not well designed and frustratingly hard to navigate. The site makes the statement: “Through hundreds of reports, audios, and videos that were posted on the website, we saw many practical examples of how life story expands the process of democratization and transformation of culture,” but I cannot find these “hundreds of reports, audios, and videos.” It also refers to a mysterious blog where this year’s events will be posted, but I can’t find it. Perhaps one has to be a member of the site to find that information.

Among the types of activities that have been part of the past two events and are encouraged for this year are:

• Story Circles in schools, community centers, homes, and churches
• Public open-microphone performances of stories
• Exhibitions of stories in public venues as image, text, and audio-visual materials
• Celebratory events to honor local storytellers, practitioners and organizations
• Open houses for organizations with a life-story sharing component
• Online simultaneous gatherings, postings, and story exchanges
• Print, radio and television broadcast programming on life stories, and documentaries that feature oral histories and story exchanges

The event is a collaboration between the International Network of Museums of the Person (Brazil, Portugal, USA and Canada) and the Center for Digital Storytelling (USA, Canada, Denmark, South Africa), the founder and director of which, Joe Lambert, said of International Day for Sharing Life Stories:

The interest and excitement in life story work continues to grow. Everywhere our organization has traveled in the last year, China, Guatemala, Korea, and India, from the frozen tundra of the Canadian Arctic to the tropical forests of the Congo, we are seeing greater and greater interest in our methods of practice. We are also witnessing the development of new methods of capturing and sharing stories, and new approaches to using the stories to promote social change and democracy. Despite the struggle of working through this period of the international financial crisis, people are coming to see that listening to each others’ life stories is central to the development of cohesive societies.

Organizers note that the day is “an opportunity for you and your organization to meet to share stories with others from around the world.”

Will you be participating in International Day for Sharing Life Stories, and if so, how?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.