A story-spotting habit.
Start with nurturing a story-spotting habit. Keep your eyes and ears open. Look for moments of insight and transformation.
You can come to a new insight yourself, or you can spot someone else gaining an insight. Look at what led to that insight, and explain what happened and what happened next, before revealing the insight.
A moment of transformation is when someone … either yourself or someone else … changes their mind on something, learns a new skill, or improves life in some way so they become more creative, more productive. In another way a learning “aha” occurs. Describe what the situation was before the transformation, what created the change, and what the situation is after the transformation.
Also, remember you can use stories from outside your field of expertise as Metaphoric Stories. You draw a parallel between a lesson outside your field of expertise with a lesson inside your field of expertise.
Lastly, you can also retell stories that you read or hear about. Pay attention to the stories that attract your attention or that surprise you. Next retell these stories in your own words and with your own characters.
So, there are many opportunities for spotting stories:
- Pay attention to moments of insight
- Spot (mini) transformations
- Find parallel lessons outside your field of expertise
- Retell stories you come across.
Start with a training objective, find the story:
You can also look for parallel lessons in a field outside your expertise. When I wanted to share a story on redundant phrases in a training narrative, I thought of words as ballast that you have to get rid of. That made me think of when we changed our yacht from cruising to racing mode. We removed everything that was not part of making the yacht go faster. You can see how that story backed up the main narrative.
Lastly, you can also make up a story.
As we’ve seen Imagination Stories are made-up stories in which we ask our learners to imagine being in a specific situation and imagine what would happen in that situation and how that would make them feel.
So, if you need a story for a training narrative, you have three options:
- Go back in time to retrieve the story of when you or someone else learned this lesson
- Find a parallel lesson in a field outside your expertise
- Make up a story
Activity: For the next few days, pay attention to the stories around you. Which stories attract your attention? Remember, your stories can be about your clients or yourself, or they can be stories you’ve heard or read about.