Stories come in different sizes and shapes, a bit like people – but more so. People are, after all, at least broadly symmetrical and have no more than two legs etc. Stories? Not so much.
The shape of stories is a topic for another day. Today is a day for talking about how “big” stories are. Let’s invent some terminology here and draw a graph of frequency (on the Y-axis) and and “Awesomeness” on the X-axis. Pretty much by definition things at the “epic” end of the awesome scale happen very rarely. If things there they were common we’d all be doing them and they wouldn’t be epic at all.
Epic things are the stuff of legend, like climbing a mountain solo for the the very first time, or having been raised by giant ants on Mars. At the trivial end Awesomeness are the everyday wins, such as a pint of beer after work.
So far so good… but all is not as simple as it seems. Is it ever? Again, pretty much by definition, the more anything scores for Awesomeness, the less it scores for “Emotional Accessibility”. Thin of that as something a bit like how relatable or do-able the thing is. “Epic” events aren’t very relatable for ordinary people. I can relate to a story of someone training for a half marathon far more than an iron-man-ultra-marathon.
It’s theoretically possible for me to train myself up for the former – but even if my life depended on it I couldn’t run a desert marathon!
In fact, there’s a growing body of research to suggest that the people who can train and push themselves to do these ultra-elite-things are almost always doing so after having suffered a significant childhood trauma. For example, a study of British Olympians who got medals compared to those who don’t (and matched for physical ability etc) showed that every one who got a medal was trauma-ed and those who didn’t, weren’t. Every. Single. One!
In fact if we create another graph, this time of Awesomeness along the X-axis still but now putting “Emotional Distance” on the Y-axis we get a very different shape to the curve – more or less the direct opposite. If something is into the Epic range, we feel “I could never do that” or “That’s not for me”.
The story ends up being de-motiving… the opposite of what’s intended.
In the worst-case scenario of course, someone
- gets inspired by high-awesomeness-stories
- tries to emulate them
- fails (because they’re normal!)
- feels like a failure
- and end ends up worse than the were before!
So there’s the problem – we need to trade off Awesomeness, to keep things Emotionally Accessible. Let’s put the two graphs together and add some silly phrases (for fun) that might be what people say when they hear a story from that part of the graph.
Don’t get too hooked up on the text there… your world is going to be different from mine, but in my head I can hear friends voices saying those things! ????
We can see where the graphs cross. I think that is the point at which we’ve traded off Awesomeness enough to be Emotionally Accessible, while still being sufficiently Awesome. The question of course is how we recognise that in real life.
Your thoughts here are going to be different mine, I guess, because your message and your audiences are different – but my “working model” is that the intersection of the graphs happens at the point when the story is big enough to be told in a wedding speech or a birthday party for a significant age – 60 or 90 or something (or a funeral eulogy). I don’t mean that they should necessarily be the kind of story to tell at those times of course – just that size of story is about right at that point.
Want some examples?
Yeah, so would I 😉
I’m often shy of giving specific examples, because it’s too easy to say “My circumstances are different” and not really think about the principles, but here goes… keep an open mind…
- When XXX was working a refugee camp in Haiti as a doctor, she got into a row with a Military Police Officer…
- It was as they pulled a knife I realised I probably should have run for backup instead of charging in to help. Now there were two of us in trouble instead of one…
- My friend XXX decided she was going to fight to keep her job, as well as bringing up her children, even though her chemo-therapy was taking its toll…
- That £5000 fundraiser was astonishing. Can you imagine what it took to run all those marathons in a month… No, neither can I, because I’ve got too much sense to get out of bed at 04:45 every morning to train before doing a shift at work…
- Raising a kid is hard. Raising two is very hard. Raising 24 kids is – something else. But as a foster carer, that’s what XXX did. 24 kid, many of them damaged, over eight years!…
See what I mean? They’re not automatically wedding/funeral stories, but they’re the same size as they are… and so they fit perfectly into your presentations.
