I did my best. Moving between a PowerPoint, a computer camera, and breakout rooms, I tried to answer the question, “Where is a good place to find a personal story?” About a week ago, I did a workshop for the District 29 Toastmasters Conference titled “Small Story, Big Impact” (Click here for the workshop)  Over the course of an hour, I navigated as quickly as possible in our Zoom meeting on what I understand about story structure, and were I find stories I tell. Anyone that tells stories can look at the workshop and see there was a lot I left out.

One of the best things I have found about telling stories is reliving memories. Moments that would have come and gone out of my life. Some of those memories are just a joy to see again. Others are more painful, but remind me of how I became the person I am. And now that I pay attention to these moments, I appreciate life so much more. I find that it also helps me to untangle my thoughts. Writing (typing) out stories, saying them to others, connecting to others. It becomes a great way to journey through life together, especially if it’s a difficult part.

I wasn’t fully aware that others, some storytellers, some not, had trouble finding stories from their life to talk about. So for this next series of blog post, I plan to explain how I find the stores I use. Not because I have an infinite about of storytelling knowledge to pass on to others. Instead, I feel compelled to share these ideas because many people are going through some hard times, and probably need others to go on a journey with them. Or perhaps during these crazy times, you found one good thing and you want to hold on to that memory forever.

I’ll be talking about the ways I find stories from workshops and classes I have taken, the books I have read, and my favorite ones, the ways that my mentors have guided me in finding important, funny, life changing moments to share with others. All I ask is of you is to follow me on by blog and social media as we take a storytelling journey to tell your story on purpose.

Published by Nick Baskerville

After years of being an instructor in the military and the and the fire service, I realized I needed to improve my delivery. My students needed me to improve delivery. But how do I improve my delivery? Simple. I finally took a member of Toastmasters up on the invitation to come to a meeting. It wasn't long until I joined. Along the way of improving my skills at delivering a message, I came to understand that of all the ways to get a point across, telling stories is the best way to get it done. Around this time, another friend from Toastmasters told me about The Moth monthly story telling shows. What better way to test out my theories on storytelling. It's in my travels there to the shows that I found more and more shows, and classes, and events centered around storytelling. Despite how many people know about the storytelling world, not many people know about the storytelling world. So now, I'm out to tell the world about storytelling.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s