The Power of Stories

Sent by Lauren Jane Heller    |   October 20, 2020

New shiny things!

I know! It's been a while. Life got a bit strange and I couldn't bring myself to keep writing about curiosities. Then I left my job and took a bunch of time off and suddenly it's October and I find myself living a hugely exciting and different life right at the edge of my comfort zone. I dived headfirst into supporting others in this crazy adventure and realized that I'm ready to jump back into writing now that I'm building storytelling programs. Hence, today's essay! 

I'm also going to take a moment to do a bit of shameless self-promotion. I'm having a lot of fun building coaching programs for leaders who want to dive into purpose, find their stories and really take responsibility in shaping the future they desire (i.e. win big!). I just announced the first storytelling programs which will be fully virtual, incredibly fun and very likely life-changing. I would LOVE to have my friends join in these first groups. If you're keen, let me know and I'll send you the details.


Have a wonderful rest of your week! 

Love,
LJ

 

The Power of Stories

Last night, when I learned of the utterly unexpected and tragic death of a friend, I immediately wanted to know what had happened. I didn’t just want to know — I needed to know. My mind needed to fill in the details and make sense of something unbelievable.

Humans are wired for stories. We need stories. Stories help us remember important information. Stories help us connect with other people. Stories help us make sense of the world.

Although I was looking for facts last night — Was it a brain aneurysm? Cancer he didn’t tell me about? A car crash? A freak accident? — what my mind really wanted was data to weave into my version of the story of his life. I knew that his story was a tragedy — it ended with an untimely death. But without the details, I felt marooned in the sea of my mind. I could fill in infinite blanks and still not get the closure I needed. I was missing the final chapter that would enable me to close the book and file it away as something that was absolutely freaking horrible but made sense. 

This is a terrible example of what I had planned to write about today but it illustrates it brilliantly. Homo sapiens, the storytelling animal, weaves narratives of every input, every experience, every new piece of information to form a picture of the world that our minds can make sense of. That’s not to say that our views of the world are actually sensible. We, in fact, have incredibly distorted views of reality: each of us with our own slightly warped and embellished picture. 

As Jonathan Gottschall notes in The Storytelling Animal, “we misremember the past in a way that allows us to maintain protagonist status in the stories of our own lives.” He argues that “fiction is a powerful and ancient virtual reality technology that simulates the big dilemmas of human life.” We share stories in the form of novels and movies, but also in our conversations about ourselves. We dream in stories — omitting the mundane details and prioritizing the sensational. Most dreams feature at least one threatening event, just like the TV shows and even the sporting events we watch. 

All of these stories, all of these crises, all of these interpretations, coalesce in our minds to form overarching narratives that are invisible to most of us. Not only do we love to tell stories, but in many ways, our human existences are stories. Our identities are based on stories. Most of our childhood memories are, in fact, stories. And despite what we would like to believe, most of us don’t have the ability to separate fact from fiction in our minds. 

Facts don’t cause suffering. Stories do. The fact of my friend’s death is only tragic because I make it so. All people die. I feel sad because I think about his family, I think about not being able to see or speak with him again. I think about the fun we’ve had together. I create stories about other versions of his life that could have become reality had he not gone out on Saturday night. In other words, I leave the present moment — what’s happening right here and now — and move off into the Neverland of my mind, confabulating and concocting narratives that impact my emotions and my views of the world. 

This is incredibly powerful because the recognition of our masterful confabulating abilities can help people to genuinely change minds and lives. By setting our life stories straight, by revising our interpretations of past experiences and beliefs, we can live happier, more balanced lives. Moreover, by learning to tell impactful, resonant stories, we can also encourage others to join us in our missions to do good in the world: we can enroll others in our vision, build incredible, society-shaping businesses and reimagine the systems and paradigms of human civilization. 

Of course, there’s a dark side to all of this too: the stories of competition and scarcity that pervade our societies have caused humans to do all sorts of unimaginably cruel and evil things to other living beings. Some people like to say things like “that’s human nature” but I believe otherwise. I believe that by learning to tell the difference between stories and facts, people can live beautiful, connected, joyful lives no matter what comes their way. And by harnessing the power of storytelling for good, we can change the way we do business, interact as societies, educate ourselves and our children, and shift from scarcity to abundance, from compromise to win for all. 

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