What’s Your Story?
Have you ever met someone and within 20 minutes felt like you’ve known them for years? I love it when that happens. I met with a new Stage Manager today, for our New York sessions, and we hit it off famously. After quick site visit for a new space, we skipped across the street to Ollie’s Chinese and within a few warm-up questions she started sharing her story.
That’s always where the magic happens.
From the beginning of time, humans have been sharing themselves through story. There is no better way to get to know someone. Sharing personal stories requires vulnerability, which lowers barriers and helps to establish trust. Story makes connection possible.
Often in our work lives we’re so busy talking data and details that we forget the stories behind the the purpose of our projects and the people making them happen. And we wonder why we don’t feel connected.
We tell ourselves we don’t have time. We’re all so busy going from one fire to the next. But we pay a price.
Most every session I lead, the room is filled with strangers. A mixed group of leaders from different backgrounds and experience-levels who have come together to learn, grow, and share an experience. I’ve been doing this for six year now and not a session has passed in which, by the end, those strangers haven’t become friends. They’ve shared their story.
That’s where the magic happens.
This isn’t something reserved for people attending a full-day leadership program, this is something accessible to all of us. Any day. If we but have the courage to share our story, the sincere curiosity to ask others about theirs, and the commitment to really be present in the conversation, that kind of connection is there for the taking.
And that’s where the magic happens.
What’s your story?
3 Comments
Pam Venne
January 14, 2014Kimberly, you have the magic to bring people’s stories out. Too many have them trapped inside and don’t quite know how or where to begin telling our stories. So when we do they become long, boring, rambling or too intimate that our audience disconnects. Any tips on how and where to start?
Pam
Kimberly
January 16, 2014What a great question, Pam, thank you! I think one of the most important things I’ve learned is that you need to know the point of your story (why you’re telling it, what you’ve learned, why it matters) before you begin telling. Like anything, when we know our direction, it’s much easier to get where we want to go when we’re not blindly fumbling around in the dark, hoping to arrive at our destination!
OnStage Leadership » Blog Archive A Little Perspective » OnStage Leadership
March 17, 2014[…] the side of the lake feeling so small. Recognizing, perhaps for the first time in my life, that my story was just one of the hundreds of other stories unfolding around the lake that day. And that every […]