#157 – How to Make Your Story Uniquely Your Own
The power of you in storytelling
Your Place (capital P) is essential to understand in order to tell your fullest stories.
I’ve written about place before and it’s role in helping me better contextualize and understand my own story. Where I come from, where I’ve been, where my ancestors come from and have been; All of it feeds into the stories I tell.
When I say place, I mean land, location, home and physical situation. And as we watch entire peoples struggle to survive and thrive on their own lands around the world. As we watch fights for liberation and reconciliation both home and abroad, I think it becomes even more important for us to interrogate our own places and context. And how we contribute or take away from place in our stories.
I teach many approaches in my storytelling workshops to help people uncover and express the best version of their story. My favourite though is near the end when we start to talk about the concepts that make stories uniquely your own. There are five of them: people, experience, purpose, humanity, cultural context, and PLACE. I refer to it as the circles of life in my head…though maybe I should rename them that in the workshop. Place, for me, is the one I encourage people to really spend time with, explore, and see how their stories shift as they think about place in any story they’re telling.
Whether it’s the story of your life or the story of the origin of your product, place has a unique role to play. My story would be so different and so too would the story of my business if I had been born in Jamaica like my mother, or England or New York like my cousins or Ghana like my ancestors. It influences so many of the others.
So I encourage you to look at your stories—your brand, career, and personal stories ALL of them—and ask how they might shift if you took place into context.
Share your thoughts in the comments below—I’d love to hear how place influences your story.
A Story Well Told
Any Millennial who came of age in the early aughts is probably INTIMATELY acquainted with the Spice Girls to one extent or another. AND probably also (as a result for me) football star, David Beckham, who is married to Posh Spice, Victoria Beckham. Well Netflix made a documentary for us. Mostly it’s about Beckham’s meteoric rise as a star and footballer, but there’s enough Posh in there to keep any fan happy. A fun little watch on Netflix that tells the story of football and the drama of sports in general through the lens of an amazing career. On the theme of place, the ways in which place influences his story is hard to miss. Would love to hear what you think in the comments below.
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This is so interesting because I have never had anyone ask me "Where are you from?" or "What are you?" without me answering with one swift breath, "I'm Chinese-Canadian but from Malaysia". It's never just one of those three options because I have always felt strongly that each of them are equally important and to not mention any part of it is to not acknowledge or to erase that part of my identity. I've had someone ask me why I don't just say I'm Canadian, and it's not that I'm NOT Canadian or that I feel being simply Canadian is lacking in any way. My brother for example responds with "Canadian" which I totally understand too. But for myself, it's just not complete!