Join & Connect

Every moment of each day we are engaged with the creation of self - our identity, character, personality and soul. To do this we tell our story, the tale of how we accrue and shed attributes over the course of our life. This story connects us to our past and provides glimpses of our future, in turn creating our unique selves. Our story evolves with us, like an adaptive foundation we build ourselves upon.

Taking this a step further, the philosopher Descartes famous ‘problem of knowing’ culminated in the fundamental element of Western thought, ’I think therefore I am’. This proposition enables a person to recognise they are real. There must be a thinking entity to have thought. But how do others recognise you’re real unless you share these thoughts, the stories shaping your life holding your unique being together?

We exist only by the stories that make us, the stories we’re a part of, the stories that we chose or indeed choose us. To say we have self is to give ourselves a story. To say our self is unique is to say our story is unique. And telling our self story gives it life. It is the most powerful vehicle ‘to put ideas into the world today’ (Robert McKee). Especially today here in 2017 as the digital world likes to pigeonhole us; to fix us between certain marketing crosshairs. Through our life online we live in a world that reads us and plays us back ourselves. It creates personalised life zones that leave us comfortably numbed to other stories.

Storytelling takes us out of ourselves, out of our comfort zone and connects us to our humanity. It literally connects us to our humanity because the ideas, thoughts and emotions shared through storytelling creates a physical connection through the insular, the region of the brain responsible for emotion, between a storyteller and listener. This is why politicians create campaign stories, because how you say something is just as important as what you are saying, and it is not facts that are the most persuasive pieces of content, we are biologically programmed towards storytelling and listening to inspire action. Margaret Atwood said: ‘You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it’. And in these words lies the power within our ‘Once upon a time’. Whether we know it or not, we are all storytellers. The power to inspire action is within.

Quite Simply Claire for Hub Dot