Storytelling
"There’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place"
J.K. Rowling
What is storytelling?
Storytelling is an art. Actually, it is an art of showing rather than telling. For hundreds and hundreds of years, storytelling has been the way for cultures to share values, beliefs, wisdom, and illustrate how and why life changes. Through appealing characters, their context and conflict, decisions, and values, storytelling generates a structured story in which the protagonists need to dig deeper and make difficult decisions or overcome challenges. The final goal is to unite an idea with an emotion that inspires and motivates the audience to take action.
- To pass complex messages to an audience in a very simple way
- To promote, influence, or change individual or collective behavior through connecting emotion, motivation, and action in a story.
- To bring people together by evoking emotions rather than presenting facts and data
- To inspire, motivate, and drive the audience into action
To develop your story, I will guide you to define:
- The content. What do you want to convey?
- The audience. Who is your story for? What might they care about? Why is the content will be relevant for them?.
- Where will the audience read it/heard it (in social media, company brochure, in a newsletter, at a conference, other)?
- The story and its structure. Who are the characters, what conflicts arise, and how are they resolved?
- The outcome. What is its intended result, what lessons come from the story, and what is the knowledge-sharing goal?
Storytelling could help your organization convey norms and values that generate a collective understanding of the organization’s mission and vision. Storytelling might help your teams to “unlearn” and rethink why and how they are doing activities in a certain way, moving away from the taken-for-granted dimensions, and opening up to new perspectives. Finally, storytelling can generate an emotional connection with your organization’s target audience, thus expanding from the mind to the heart, which can lead them to act differently
The storyteller in me
My daughter was two months old when we arrived in Guatemala. We did not know anyone, and I was not used to being at home dealing with an adorable but non-stop crying baby. I missed my work, my friends, and my independent life. I wanted to escape. One pitch-dark Sunday evening in Guatemala City I was visiting a local bookstore just around the corner from home. Surrounded by beautiful book covers and stories by unknown authors that seemed to beg for discovery, I was feeling sorry for myself. Waiting my turn to pay, I managed to lift my eyes above the cashier. A small piece of paper on the announcements board seemed as if it had a spotlight on it. It read: “Creative writing course. March 6 from 6-9 pm.” It was the following day. I remember that instant as the “Aha moment” that marked a turning point in my life which reconnected with a childhood passion-storytelling.
Soon after, I joined a writing group called “The stories factory” which provided me the opportunity to publish my first three children’s books and gave me the freedom to choose an informal, humorous, and imaginative style to tell stories and convey educational messages.
My daughter was two months old when we arrived in Guatemala. We did not know anyone, and I was not used to being at home dealing with an adorable but non-stop crying baby. I missed my work, my friends, and my independent life. I wanted to escape. One pitch-dark Sunday evening in Guatemala City I was visiting a local bookstore just around the corner from home. Surrounded by beautiful book covers and stories by unknown authors that seemed to beg for discovery, I was feeling sorry for myself. Waiting my turn to pay, I managed to lift my eyes above the cashier. A small piece of paper on the announcements board seemed as if it had a spotlight on it. It read: “Creative writing course. March 6 from 6-9 pm.” It was the following day. I remember that instant as the “Aha moment” that marked a turning point in my life which reconnected with a childhood passion-storytelling.
Soon after, I joined a writing group called “The stories factory” which provided me the opportunity to publish my first three children’s books and gave me the freedom to choose an informal, humorous, and imaginative style to tell stories and convey educational messages.
10 years and Mexico passed between Guatemala and Sri Lanka. During this period, my storytelling was very quiet overtaken by the technical production of my doctoral studies. It seems that I have now arrived at an oasis where I have the physical and the mental space for my imagination to fly again. Inspired by the surroundings, I am ready to create adventurous characters learning about themselves and the world around them. New and old global concerns, such as climate change and children’s self-esteem are burning in my creative process.