Module 5 – Storytelling is Resilience

Life can be difficult. Some of the most challenging things in your life can be the most defining moments in your life. When you learn to interpret and tell your stories, you can begin to create resilience.
 

 

 

 

 

 

Throughout this course you have been practicing the discipline of being present, looking at your life with different sets of awareness and perspective, you have filled your  life with more characters and adventures, and begun to cultivate your true character.  By now, you might have begun to notice a universal truth: the most personal things, can have universal meaning. This module is about how the telling of great stories builds resilience and how inviting people into a context, through stories, can help them to understand you and the world.  This is how storytelling can become your superpower.

Learning to tell the story is literally learning to be more resilient.

 

Making meaning of your life, through the stories of your life, will bring you into more wholeness and integration. We literally help our brain integrate itself from the fragments of traumatic and challenging experiences, when we start to tell and shape a coherent story of our self.

When you work on a story, you are forced into reflection. Through reflection you will start to identify layers of understanding, and you will find meaning. 

If you can do this for yourself, you will be able to do it for others. 

 

In this story, told on The Tim Ferris Show, I share an experience that, at the time, was life-threatening and traumatic.  This is one example of how storytelling can – through meaning, understanding and, in this case, humour – build resilience.

 

Joseph Campbell, author of Hero with a Thousand Faces said:

“We tell stories to search for meaning and significance in our lives. We all need to understand death and to cope with death, and we all need help in our passages from birth to life and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are.”

 

Storytelling is context creating.

5.1 - Be a context creator