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WORKSHEET TELLING YOUR PUBLIC STORY Self, Us, Now By Marshall Ganz
Stories not only teach us how to act – they inspire us to act. Stories communicate our values through the language of the heart, our emotions. And it is what we feel – our hopes, our cares, our obligations – not simply what we know that can inspire us with the courage to act.
A plot is structured with a beginning, movement toward a desired goal, an unexpected event, a crisis that engages our curiosity, choices made in response to the crisis, and an outcome. Our ability to empathetically identify with a protagonist allows us to enter into the story, feel what s/he feels, see things through his or her eyes. And the moral, revealed through the resolution, brings understanding. From stories we learn how to manage ourselves, how to face difficult choices, unfamiliar situations, and uncertain outcomes because each of us is the protagonist in our own life story, facing everyday challenges, authoring our own choices, and learning from the outcomes.
By telling our personal stories of challenges we have faced, choices we have made, and what we learned from the outcomes we can inspire others and share our own wisdom. Because stories allow us to express our values not as abstract principles, but as lived experience, they have the power to move others.
Stories are specific – they evoke a very particular time, place, setting, mood, color, sound, texture, taste. The more you can communicate this specificity, the more power your story will have to engage others. This may seem like a paradox, but like a poem or a painting or a piece of music, it is the specificity of the experience that can give us access to the universal sentiment or insight they contain.
You may think that your story doesn’t matter, that people aren’t interested, that you shouldn’t be talking about yourself. But when you do public work, you have a responsibility to offer a public account of who you are, why you do what you do, and where you hope to lead. The thing about it is that if you don’t author your public story, others will, and they may not tell it in the way that you like - as many recent examples show.
A good story public story is drawn from the series of choice points that have structured the “plot” of your life – the challenges you faced, choices you made, and outcomes you experienced. Challenge: Why did you feel it was a challenge? What was so challenging about it? Why was it your challenge?
Choice: Why did you make the choice you did? Where did you get the courage – or not? Where did you get the hope – or not? How did it feel? Outcome: How did the outcome feel? Why did it feel that way? What did it teach you? What do you want to teach us? How do you want us to feel? The story you tell of why you sought to lead allows others insight into your values, why you have chosen to act on them in this way, what they can expect from you, and what they can learn from you.
A public story includes three elements: * A story of self: why you were called to what you have been called to. * A story of us: what your constituency, community, organization has been called to its shared purposes, goals, vision. * A story of now: the challenge this community now faces, the choices it must make, and the hope to which “we” can aspire.
In this worksheet, we focus on the “story of self”, but we also offer some suggestions on getting to a story of us and a story of now. Remember the art of story telling is in the telling, not in the writing. In other words, story telling is interactive, a form of social transaction, and can therefore only be learned by telling, and listening, and telling, and listening.
© Marshall Ganz, Kennedy School of Government, 2007
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