Why do we storyteller

While we can share stories in many different forms these days, there's still a lot to be said for gathering together to hear someone weave a tale.

The interaction between teller and listener creates something unique for both. The listener isn't a passive person just sitting there; they're creating along with the teller.

Catherine Wright — a storyteller, multidisciplinary artist, and the current president of the St. John's Storytelling Festival — says she enjoys the relationship between storytellers and their listeners. The communal experience of storytelling can extend beyond the event and the story itself — because the empathy that stories create carries over into the community as a whole. While we don't all share the same experiences, we do all share a similar array of emotions, fears and hopes.

When those emotions, fears and hopes are presented to us as part of a personal story, a folktale or a myth, they create a connection between the listener, the characters and the teller. That connection, the one that recognizes the ways that we're the same and promotes understanding despite our differences, is the foundation of building stronger communities. King-Campbell agrees. I have focused my whole professional life around the concepts that connecting to other people makes the world better.

Whether sharing a story involves conveying important information, creating a communal experience, or building community connections, a story's most important function is to remind us that we are not alone in the world. Everyone else came up with elaborate narratives to explain what the movements were about.

Typically, the participants viewed the triangles as two men fighting and the circle as a woman trying to escape the bigger, bullying triangle.

Instead of registering inanimate shapes, they imagined humans with vivid inner lives. The circle was "worried. But if stories themselves are universal, the way we tell them changes with the technology at hand.

Every new medium has given rise to a new form of narrative. In Europe, the invention of the printing press and movable type around led to the emergence of periodicals and the novel. The invention of the motion picture camera around set off an era of feverish experimentation that led to the development of feature films by Television, invented around , gave rise a quarter-century later to I Love Lucy and the highly stylized form of comedy that became known as the sitcom.

As each of these media achieved production and distribution on an industrial scale, we saw the emergence of 20th-century mass media: newspapers, magazines, movies, music, TV. And with that, there was no role left for the consumer except to consume. Then, just as we'd gotten used to consuming sequential narratives in a carefully prescribed, point-by-point fashion, came the internet.

The internet is the first medium that can act like all media -- it can be text, or audio or video, or all of the above. Our minds are relatively open, but we guard our hearts with zeal, knowing their power to move us. To reach it, the visionary manager crafting his story must first display his own open heart. Listeners give the storyteller their time, with the understanding that he will spend it wisely for them.

To meet the terms of this contract—and ideally even over deliver on it—the great storyteller takes time to understand what his listeners know about, care about, and want to hear. Then he crafts the essential elements of the story so that they elegantly resonate with those needs, starting where the listeners are and bringing them along on a satisfying emotional journey.

This journey, resulting in an altered psychological state on the part of the listener, is the essence of storytelling. I study their reactions and then, even more important, study my reaction to them. What I must follow is my own deepest instinct, and this is best revealed to me as I see how I respond to the feelings and thoughts of other people.

Business leaders too need to be in touch with their listeners—not slavish or patronizing, but receptive—in order to know how to lead them. Getting your story right for your listeners means working past a series of culs-de-sac and speed bumps to find the best path.

Every storyteller is in the expectations-management business and must take responsibility for leading listeners effectively through the story experience, incorporating both surprise and fulfillment. This requires a willingness to surrender ownership of the story. Business leaders need to tap into this drive by using storytelling to place their listeners at the center of the action.

She often tells her life story in a way that anyone can identify with, recalling how she felt like an outcast at her all-girls school as a teenager—with glasses, braces, and corrective shoes—and how that prepared her for the rigors of her professional life.

When you hear Krawcheck describe her journey in these terms, you know exactly how she feels. Perhaps of equal import, business leaders must recognize that how the audience physically responds to the storyteller is an integral part of the story and its telling. Communal emotional response—hoots of laughter, shrieks of fear, gasps of dismay, cries of anger—is a binding force that the storyteller must learn how to orchestrate through appeals to the senses and the emotions. Getting the audience to cheer, rise, and vocalize in response to a dramatic, rousing conclusion creates positive emotional contagion, produces a strong emotional takeaway, and fuels the call to action by the business leader.

The ending of a great narrative is the first thing the audience remembers. The litmus test for a good story is not whether listeners walk away happy or sad. Orchestrate emotional responses effectively, and you actually transfer proprietorship of the story to the listener, making him an advocate who will power the viral marketing of your message. A great storyteller never tells a story the same way twice.

Instead, she sees what is unique in each storytelling experience and responds fully to what is demanded. A story involving your company should sound different each time. Whether you tell it to 2, customers at a convention, salespeople at a marketing meeting, ten stock analysts in a conference call, or three CEOs over drinks, you should tailor it to the situation. The context of the telling is always a part of the story. And it did, though the information had been gathered in advance.

There is a paradox here. Great storytellers prepare obsessively. They think about, rethink, work, and rework their stories. When we help companies sell themselves to Wall Street, we often see the CEO and his team present their story 10, 20, 30 times. And usually each telling is better and more compelling than the one before. At the same time, the great storyteller is flexible enough to drop the script and improvise when the situation calls for it.

Actually, intensive preparation and improvising are two sides of the same coin. If you know your story well, you can riff on it without losing the thread or the focus. At the storytelling dinner, scientist and science fiction writer Gentry Lee told us about appearing on a public panel about alien abductions.

Many people may not agree that this is storytelling, but it is where many of us begin to learn the power our own memory and imagination. Stories told within a family or in a culture become even more powerful as they are shared year after year. They become part of who we are, what we believe, and how we see our future. When we preserve stories in some static form like a book or a recording or a movie, people from different times and places can share that story.

Many of these stories guide whole populations in learning how to live their lives e. Using our imaginations to modify an existing story or create a fictional world allows us to create solutions to existing problems or imagine places where other challenges exist. For example, think of the different real-life devices that reflect the long-ago creations of Jules Verne in his stories, such as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea or From the Earth to the Moon.

Stories also help us to solve problems by providing opportunities to try out different actions that might lead to different outcomes. This is especially true if another person is helping to co-create the story. When someone is creating a story with us, he or she might suggest a different action than we would suggest.

What will be the outcome of the story with this new twist? What might I learn from their suggestion or solution? We can often work through a problem or situation by writing about it or creating a story. When we find ourselves sitting in an airport or waiting to see the dentist, reading a magazine or book engages our attention and helps to make time pass more easily. For many of us, there is no better form of escape than to stick our noses in a book and vanish into the story.

With the advent of audiobooks and podcasts, many of us listen to stories as we jog or walk or ride in a car or airplane. For many of us, reading or listening to stories is our favorite form of recreation. Stories have the ability to help us learn about others and to find understanding and empathy for them and their situations. Whether we actually know the individual or not, hearing their story evokes feelings within us. Learning to relate to others and empathize with them is so important in developing social skills and making friends.

Stories serve so many purposes in our lives.