When we are inundated with negative emotion and uncertainty, we often find ourselves reacting instinctively — fight, flight, freeze. None of these responses are ideal in the long-term. How can we counter these primal responses so that we can make more informed and nuanced decisions? Leadership storytelling.
Storytelling is so powerful because it serves as a tool for rebalancing. This doesn’t mean ignoring the challenges or fears. Rather, it’s the willingness to recognize all the good things we have and the true opportunities before us.
If we aren’t careful to pay attention to these positives, the negative can overwhelm us. Canadian lawyer and author Harold R. Johnsons puts it this way, “We are the stories we are told and we are the stories we tell ourselves. To change our circumstances, we need to change our story: edit it, modify it, or completely rewrite it.” So what stories are you telling yourself?
Leadership Storytelling Promotes Happiness
In the article Does Happiness Promote Career Success? psychologists Lisa Walsh, Julia Boehm, and Sonya Lyubomirsky question a common assumption. Instead of assuming people with successful careers are happy due to their success, they ask if happiness contributes to their success. And what they find is striking: “the evidence suggests that happiness is not only correlated with workplace success but that happiness often precedes measures of success and that induction of positive affect leads to improved workplace outcomes.” In other words, creating situations where we feel happiness, joy, connection and other positive emotions improves what a team can achieve at work.
We can induce authentic positive emotions through leadership storytelling. Neurologists have learned that storytelling has a direct link to the emotional centers of the brain. Princeton neurology professor Uri Hasson has studied brain activity of storytellers and listeners. What he found was that “the same brain patterns that you see in the speaker’s brain start to emerge in the listener’s brain…During the communication, our brains become coupled.” In other words, as explained by neuroscientist Paula Croxton, “Storytelling is very persuasive because of the way that it draws us in and transports us into the narrative experience of the speaker.”
So if you want to effectively create a positive work environment where teams connect, experience happiness, and achieve more together, storytelling is your go-to tool.
Here are three examples of how storytelling has influenced leaders to produce positive outcomes in their colleagues, clients, and students.
Leadership Storytelling Helps Us Ask The Discerning Questions.
“What is enough?” This question is starkly at odds with the widely accepted assumption that more is always better. In corporate speak “more” is growth, which is hard to argue against. However, Authors and family philanthropy advisors Elaine Gast Fawcett and Sue Schwartzman found themes of enough or feelings of being trapped by the drive to accomplish more overwhelming the donors and ultra high-net worth families they worked with. To help their clients understand their own experiences better, Fawcett and Schwartzman came up with the “What’s Your Enough” tool to thoughtfully guide their clients through questions to help them define “enough.”
Fawcett said, “Once people can clearly define their ‘enough’ whether it’s money, time, material goods, connection, etc., they feel more clarity and freedom to make choices, and have confidence in what they can give to others.”
What the “What’s Your Enough” tool does is ask the right questions. Asking crazy good questions is one of the best tools leaders can use to uncover stories that help us reflect on positive emotions. When we can tell our “enough” story our perceptions change and influence our attitudes and behaviors.
Leadership Storytelling Authentically Connects People
When Chuck’s dad got remarried when Chuck was a child, he suddenly felt like an outsider at a family get-togethers. He didn’t know how to relate to these strangers or what to talk about. But everything changed when he started playing Skip-bo with them. Through games, they suddenly had a way to connect, have fun and laugh together. Chuck is now a tabletop game expert. passionate about helping others find fun and connected through games.
Chuck shared this story during a Certified Story Facilitator Level 1 with five of his colleagues. “In telling that story,” said Chuck. “I was able to connect to my history, but also how people can strengthen relationships by using board games.” What came next surprised him. His colleagues wanted to know what games they should play. “I felt like a matchmaker. It was very powerful.” He helped them find games to help them relate, connect and have fun. “It was magical,” he recalled.
Soon after this experience, Chuck led the roll out of a huge organizational shift at his work. He knew just what to do. As part of the transition, he created a place for his team members to play board games together and have a chance to build what community-building expert Diana Leafe Christian calls “community glue,” group experiences that promote a sense of connection and gratitude.
Through storytelling Chuck realized that his authentic passion for games could help him and his team connect with each other. What passions can you share with your team to build community glue?
Leadership Storytelling Helps You Stay Engaged
Stories help us create meaningful context for the work we are doing. In the Hidden Brain episode, “When It’s All Too Much” Sarah Jaquette Ray, the chair of the Environmental Studies Department at CalPoly Humboldt described the challenge she faced as an environmental studies professor. Her students were coming to her classes hopeless, racked by guilt, and experiencing profound burnout — unable to function in the face of the existential threat of climate change. Unable to see how they could make meaningful change, students became depressed and sometimes even suicidal. She started to research how she could better support her students through this experience to overcome the burnout and depression.
Through her research she finds that “collective efficacy” is the most effective way to overcome feelings of overwhelm and burnout. She used the metaphor of a choir to explain this concept.
“Start to see yourself in this broader collective, start to plug in to a collective, because a collective actually has kind of the effects that are, the sum is greater than the parts,” Ray explained. “When you’re in a choir, and you’re lots of people singing, and you need to catch your breath… you can take a moment out and kind of settle your body again, get your voice back, knowing that the rest of the choir is carrying that song.”
This is a powerful story that changes the experience of the listener, even though the facts don’t change. She doesn’t diminish or undermine the reality of climate change, rather uses a story to help her students see themselves as a collective and find connection and purpose in that group. The story creates a context where her students have an opportunity to experience positive emotions and connect with a larger group.
How do I become successful in leadership storytelling and facilitating?
If you want to become a successful storyteller and facilitator, practice the skills highlighted in the three examples above:
- Ask crazy good questions. What questions will help your team discover their own stories?
- Be curious. What stories can help you and your team connect? What are your passions? What are their passions?
- Practice empathy. What is your team experiencing? How can you reframe their experiences using a metaphor, analogy or a story to help them shift their perspective?
Leadership storytelling is something that can be learned. When you practice these three skills you will be on your way to becoming a master storyteller and story facilitator on your team.