Part 1_Episode_7: A story apart


In any situation I find myself in, I always ask a simple and important question: what's the leverage point here? Leverage can be defined as to use something to maximum advantage, and I don't think of this as a capitalistic advantage. No, I'm more interested in leverage as optimizing the energetic gain for all. For me, a good story has always been leverage. 


When I was working as a safari guide, I would notice that, whether the safari was going well or badly, a story could always shift the group's energetic momentum towards you, which is important when you're guiding. It was a tool that I came to rely on. A well-crafted story was not just a momentum shifter. It could, in the right light, at the right moment in the safari infused with moonlight and wood smoke, be profoundly transcendent. When I started training young safari guides, we added a module to their training called Story Lab. They would tell a story and then we would work on that story together with the understanding that a good story can be made even greater with some creative workshopping. 


Sometimes a single word can change the impact of a sentence. Suddenly, the buffalo was very close versus the buffalo was adjacent, changes things. Subtly, we would play with the story, changing words, adding details, bringing core themes and threads, developing the characters and creating a universal personal. Sometimes the best stories happen in the moment or off the cuff, but mostly a story that has been worked on will develop layers of quality. Without fail, guides who develop stories set their experience apart. I'm telling you this because being a brilliant storyteller will set you apart in almost any setting. In entrepreneurship, you need storytelling. In leadership, you need storytelling. In fundraising, you need storytelling. As a guide, you need storytelling. At a party, you need storytelling. 




Morgan Housel writes: recognizing that the best story wins, not the best answer, not the most accurate answer, not the answer people need to hear. The winner is just whoever gets the people to pay attention, and nod their heads in agreement. If you're merely intelligent, you might focus all of your effort on finding precise truth. If you're smart, you'll focus just as much effort on delivering an effective message around the truth, realising that the most powerful truth does no good if people can't pay attention to it. A doctor once told me there's a difference between an expert in medicine and an expert in healthcare. An expert in medicine knows all the right answers out of the textbook. They can diagnose with precision and are up to date on the latest trends. An expert in healthcare understands that medicine from the patient's view is intimidating, confusing, expensive and time-consuming. Nothing you diagnose or prescribe matters until you address the reality with patients, because even a perfect solution makes no difference to the patient who doesn't follow it. You have to be a storyteller. 


Taking the time to develop your capacity to tell stories will give you radical leverage through multiple fields. And if ever there was a man who leveraged his capacity for storytelling, it was the legendary South African storyteller, David Ratray. Ratray had a superb voice and had grown up in the hills of Zululand in South Africa. There he had learnt the stories of the Anglo-Zulu war. 


Ratray could take you onto a forgotten hillside on a hot day and there he would stand with his signature stick and with his voice as his art, he would tell you the stories of the battle that had raged. The experience was profoundly low-tech and sacred in its simplicity. As you sat there, enthralled by David's storytelling, the empty land you stare at would come alive with the battle. David became world-famous for his story of these obscure battles fought in obscure parts of Africa. Simply because he told the story so well, people would come from all over the world to listen to this master standing alone on a hillside. What magnetism a story can have. David had found a single story that gripped in a way that would forever set him apart. 


David Ratray: Story 


In some ways, so much of life is micro stories. Imagine how many times in your life you will be asked the proverbial question so what do you do? Many people who I coach, who are in transitions out of traditional careers into life and work that feels more aligned, hate this question during the transition phase. They suddenly feel themselves in narrative no man's land, without a defined what I do box to tick. In fact, I know quite a few people who hate this question for multiple reasons. 


So often we find ourselves fumbling with our own shame or fear of grandiosity as we answer in staccato, vague terms. And it's not just those who are developing a path. I've heard multi-millionaires underplay themselves, saying things like I work in a bank when they own a bank. Imagine if, instead of hating the question, what do you do? We worked on our response, understanding that we'll be asked it all through our lives, and each time we answer could be a moment to set ourselves apart with an answer that profiled our work while creating intrigue and connection to the person asking us. That's a very short story worth working on. That's leverage. I don't think of leverage as getting ahead. I think of it as an opportunity to deepen connection. So, Boyd, what do you do? I'm a writer and a coach. I do some tracking in Africa, blah blah. It's too many things and this answer will need more explanation. Versus: I create transformational encounters for people in nature and I'm on a mission to reconnect as many people as possible to the truest, most essential parts of themselves. I do this through multiple avenues of storytelling, coaching and retreat spaces. Thank you for asking. What makes you feel most alive?


In some ways, this is a silly example, but imagine the impact of working on the narrative of your mission, your work, how you think about what's important to you. When you work on a story, you are forced into a reflection. In some ways, you deepen what that experience means and has meant to you. You find layers inside of it, layers of understanding. There is this idea in writing that you should work in the book and then at other times, you should work on the book. Working in the book, you are actually writing. Working on the book, you step back to examine it: arcs, character development, how themes emerge and tie together. Your work on the book gives you more context so that when you go back to writing and working in the book, you're in a different headspace. In some ways any kind of life coaching relationship is stepping back to work on your life so you can live in your life with more awareness. And this is what I'm proposing here. 


As a Story Hunter, so much of the best of my life has come out of stepping back to work on the multiple stories that make up my life and developing these stories. I believe that this is work that you should take time to do and I believe that it will radically leverage your life and impact in almost any setting. If you are cultivating your capacity as a storyteller, you cultivate your life. If you are becoming a storyteller, you are working on your life as much as you are working in it. 


Humans are narrative creatures. This has been true since the first people told stories around the fire. Become a master of narrative and you are a world maker. You set yourself a story apart from everyone else. This story that follows is by a friend of mine, Andreas Sitole. Andreas has had an interesting life, to say the least. He's a superb tracker, safari guide and storyteller. He lives in the village of Justicia, west of the Londolozi Game Reserve. How he found his way to becoming a safari guide is a story worth hearing. I will leave you with Andreas’s story that we worked on together in a story lab. This is Andreas in his second language, telling his story into the unknown. 


Andreas Sithole: Story