THE POWER IN STORYTELLING

I was recently watching Brene Brown’s Netflix Special, “ The Call To Courage” and one thing that she shared that stuck with me was how our brain LOVES narratives, a story to make sense of all the information being processed at one time. And it’s true, you can find me easily swept away by a moving story and inspired by a powerful story teller.

At the moment, I am loving 3 shows because of their powerful storytelling. The Shop, by Lebron James maybe I got sold because the first episode spoke of how important meditation was to take mental care of the athlete mind. But what really got me are stories such as Mary J. Blige’s passion to break old patterns of seeing abuse in women; Drake sharing his story of taking a real pause to respond in a way that aligned with him. To see the essence of what we practice in meditation show up in stories is fascinating. Beauty Mark, a shopify series created by Rachel and Jess Sanchez, the two travel the world to bring honest and raw storytelling of 5 inspiring female entrepreneurs. What I love is the undercurrent of the healing that occurs in beauty rituals and accepting truth in beauty. This hits a warm note with my time as a Makeup Artist and knowing that my work was beyond just slapping makeup on, and it was a joy and privilege to bring out true beauty in others. The last show I am obsessed with is Street Food; what’s interesting about the few of the episodes I have watched is this commonality of the strength in resilience in the stories and humans behind streetfood. Every episode is a story of a Phoenix rising from the ashes.

I reflect on these shows and how emotionally invested I am when a story is presented in a powerful way. And at the same time I reflect on all the stories I tell myself everyday. Stories that I don’t even realize I tell myself in so many ways, it’s like buying a movie ticket and sneaking into the next theatre one after the next but the same movie plays over and over again. I think about how much emotional attachment I must have from this re-looping of stories in contrast to how emotionally attached I get to one single encounter of a story.

All this to say there is an art to powerful story telling. We are inspired by the stories in the pages of our books and the stories we see on the screen as entertainment. But more powerful is the story telling within us that can help connect, inspire and spark our own change.

Takeaway: Take 5 minutes to re-write a story that you know deep in your heart that is re-looping in your mind that doesn’t support the best version of you.