Bo: “People’s businesses, does their story have to line up with their business?”
Mary: My opinion is if you are on your life journey, if you have discovered that place where you’re doing the work that you want to continue doing—it may grow, shift and change, as you grow, shift and change—but you feel like you’ve found the people who you’re here to serve, the talents you’ve been given and this is how you’re supposed to help people. If you feel like you’re on that path, then I believe you have been gifted the stories of your life in order to serve that work. That means the story will align with your work in some way, shape or form. We will be able to find how that story you lived is able to serve the work you’re doing today. And the more people I work with, the more I see that over and over again.
So it doesn’t have to align. Sometimes, depending on where you are on your life path, you may find that another story serves you. Here’s the other thing, I have a client who was telling a story and then experienced something this past year that is a perfect story for the business, and it didn’t happen until this past year. But they’ve been doing their work for the past decade.
So you use the stories you have. They may shift and change. I highly recommend you keep track of the stories that are happening in your life today because the stories you’re living today are stories you’re going to be telling five or ten years from now. If you’re keeping track of them in a journal now, it’s going to be a lot easier to develop them when it’s time to tell them down the road.
Bo: That’s really good. That happens to me all the time. Dawn and I will go out to dinner with friends and someone will ask me a question that I start answering with a story. And Dawn, who I’ve known since she was 19, will say, “I’ve never heard that story,” and ask me why I haven’t told it at one of our events. I didn’t even think to tell it. So I have to go through these things and write them down in a list so I can look at them and figure out which stories make the point I want to make.
When Mary and I first started together, we were one of the only ones talking about story. It was so exciting and new. Now, it’s everywhere I look. People are always sending me articles about the value of story. And, yeah, we all know that; we’ve known it since we were cavemen. We told stories. That’s how we teach, but we don’t really teach like that anymore. We teach with information, and no one can fit any more inside their brain. You can fit it in here, though, in your heart.
