The Power and Depth of Story telling.

I’ve had some wonderful comments to this new blog. One came from Bob in Durango. He emailed it to me and I copied and posted it as a comment. You can see it below my last posting. More comments would be wonderful and welcome. I know a couple of you told me you had great thoughts but not the time to organize and then post them. So, do something short but sweet and see what others may have to say.



Today I want to offer what may be a new idea for some of you, but very timely since we are thinking of Christmas gifting.


Jan and I discovered and tried out a new on-line survey called Your Flagpage designed to tell us all what motivates us in life. This is a Christian based outfit, and very relevant to today’s world. We ended up giving the opportunity to our kids and to two of our older grandkids as Christmas gifts. If you’re interested in hearing more about that, check out www.laughyourway.com

More to the point, though, we also spent some time last week in a pricelessConversation™ called the Meaning of Success which we are also gifting to our kids this Christmas. The pricelessConversation™ technique (which I’m now calling RealConversations™) is exactly the same as I used in my new book, Success…Swimming in a sea of, which, incidentally, has just been released.


The idea is to use focused questions to discover and then capture a series of life stories of your own, of your parents’, your grandparents’, or even your children’s. The stories elicited using this technique grab and hold a listeners’ interest better than a recitation of a chronological history, and lead directly to a discovery of the most deeply held values. Additionally, of course, the stories themselves are fascinating, precious and absolutely priceless. You don’t need me or any other professional to help you do this. You just need two people, a “question asker” (aka an interviewer) and a story teller.


When I first began studying the idea, I was deeply moved by the recognition that I didn’t even know my own parents’ life stories, except just superficially. Both of my parents, their siblings and cousins, and all four of my grandparents (and their siblings and cousins) are gone! My dad and his father before him had put some of their history on paper. Not much, but enough to tell me there is much, much more there, most of which now lies hidden in the minds of deceased folk.


My other grandfather, my mom’s dad, was born and raised in the hill country of Tennessee. He was, I understand, a first cousin of Chet Atkins (who was likely not even born then). He left Tennessee to “seek his fortune” before 1900 and made his way to a life near his older brother who was farming in southwest Nebraska. He became a farmer, a school teacher, a superintendent of schools, a grocer and a retired person who played a pretty mean banjo. That’s about all I know. So, can you imagine the stories he held in his mind’s library? If they were shared, it was not in a format that I can see or hear. I do know (we learned after his death) that he was much older than my grandmother and had hidden that from her. I wonder why. I wonder why he left Tennessee, and what the relationship was with the Atkins family. What would I give today to know those stories? In his day, the best we could hope for was that he, or someone close to him, might have written them down. Today, were he still here, I could actually sit at his feet and listen to him tell me those stories; I could record them; I could transcribe them to paper; I could burn them to a CD.


My granddad’s library is gone as though it just burned down and nobody cared. The same can be said for lots and lots of other libraries that you know of.


I have become keenly aware of the deep, meaningful value we can offer to people, and to ourselves, by providing the opportunity for them to tell life stories. Aren’t you excited by the thoughts of the stories held in your loved ones’ libraries? Wouldn’t you like to discover them, to capture and preserve them in voice and content, and then to pass them on “down the line.”


As I said, there’s a striking difference between focused story telling and oral histories. There’s a high level of excitement in refraining from guiding the conversation in any particular direction; in embracing it when your person takes “rabbit trail” digressions; and in finding the person’s values exposed as threads woven into her tapestry of life.


It’s not rocket science; it just takes an interest in mom’s stories and a basic understanding of the techniques.