Hey,
“It’s like I have nothing in my pockets.”
When I was first developing Story of You, I told my younger brother about the idea. I was delivering my first talk on the topic and assumed he wouldn’t care. He surprised me by saying how much it resonated with him.
As someone on the spectrum, he is pretty introverted and can find large social situations difficult. He described the problem to me in a way I’ve never forgotten. (And yes, he gave me permission to tell you this.)
If he couldn’t work out what he had that he could share with someone he didn’t know, he said, it felt as though he had nothing in his pockets. He kept pretend-reaching into them and showing me empty hands.
Ta dah! I thought. Of course.
Story functions as a kind of essential human currency: something we don’t just own, but exchange.
Later, I came across a line from the writer Tahir Shah describing stories as “a communal currency of humanity.”
A story gives another person somewhere to meet us. It doesn’t have to contain everything about who we are.
It couldn’t. It simply needs to offer something true and meaningful of ourselves.
You are allowed more than one story.
Story of You isn’t about excavating The Big Story that explains you once and for all. There isn’t one. Your story should be fluid, moving along with your life.
Often, the reason we feel stuck is that the way we’ve learned to communicate who we are has become inflexible. It no longer reflects who we are now.
Story of You makes room for that movement. The point is to develop greater access to what’s there, learn to see it from different angles, including what may still be in flux, and become more intentional about what you choose to share.
That’s a very different proposition from finding the perfect pitch.
Your stories hold evidence.
You can know that you’re capable, thoughtful, experienced and good at what you do. And still wobble.
Sometimes that wobble follows a change in role or circumstance. But it can also happen slowly, through an accumulation of moments in which we are overlooked, diminished, passed over, underpaid, taken for granted, or made to feel that our contribution matters less than we thought it did.
Those moments of “anti-mattering” can erode our confidence without us noticing. Eventually, what we know about our own value can become harder to access.
In Story of You, we go inside and back: inside ourselves and our experience, and back through time. We revisit what we’ve lived and explore the meaning held there, including meaning we may never have recognised before.
And there, in the choices we made, what we contributed, what mattered to us and what moved us, we begin to see our values.
The story becomes the proof.
My work, at its heart, is an exploration of self-expression, communication, meaning, and worth.
You can’t give someone the whole of you. But you can learn to access more of what’s there, recognise what matters to you, and choose what you want to share.
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