Share Your Stories

Teach, Inspire, Motivate and Learn by Telling and Listening

“Storytelling is the oldest form of education.” - Terry Tempest Williams

One minute, Jennifer C. King, Founder and Director, BioSpace.com, Inc., was leading a company. The next minute, she was no longer in charge. After raising $14 million, the venture capitalists who invested in Jennifer C. King’s company asked her to step down as co-CEO. A month later, she was invited to speak to a group of men and women attending a motivational program.

“Sharing my personal experience with other women has been significant in my healing process after being forced to step down as CEO of the company I started fifteen years ago,” says Jennifer. “The experience was a major step at the beginning of my healing process. I don’t know if I’ll start another company or simply learn to be the best board member I can be,” continues Jennifer.

Although she was still in the process of dealing with her professional setback, Jennifer acknowledged that by sharing her experiences, she was gaining just as much, if not more, than her audience. That is the power of Sharing Your Stories.

STORYTELLING AS MY CATALYST

In 1998, while attending a national women’s business conference, I ran into Jenai Lane, an award-winning entrepreneur and someone who I had met the previous year at the same event. I was interested in her business Respect Inc., a socially responsible product innovation company, and was eager to hear how things were going for her. I also wanted to find out how her documentary film about women entrepreneurs was coming along. I admired how Jenai seemed to honour two sides of herself - her professional and her creative sides.

At this particular conference, we decided to sit together at lunch. Very quickly, our small talk turned into telling stories about our businesses. I can’t remember which one of us started the discussion, but we soon realised that each of us seemed to be at the exact place with our companies. We spent the rest of lunch rapidly comparing and contrasting experiences.

We were both involved in negative business situations that were threatening our continued involvement in our own companies. Because of the business woes, our personal happiness and fulfillment was at an all-time low. As we each told our very painful and private professional stories, we instantly shared a bond. By the end of our conversation, we had encouraged the other to make a major change in order to improve the situation. We each walked away from that lunch empowered to make the necessary changes, no matter how difficult, in order to get our lives back on track. Even if it meant leaving our companies.

Since Jenai and I were based on opposite coasts, we used email and an occasional phone call to stay in touch and to give each other updates and pep talks. We both ended up making similar drastic changes in our professional lives, each with the underlying goal of finding inner peace, something that meant more to us than money. Jenai sold one of her brands and dissolved the rest of her business of six years, and I turned my business of five years over to my business partner to embark on a journey of personal growth and to better understand what I should be doing professionally.

Today, Jenai has a new business - Zeal Co. - which develops innovative product ideas for companies, and she couldn’t be happier.

I’ve begun to live my lifelong dream of being a fulltime writer - just a writer - and to let everything else revolve around my writing instead of letting my love of writing always take a secondary position in my life.

Looking back, I realise that the very act of telling my story over lunch one day to another woman was a turning point for me. Telling my story was a tremendous relief. Almost equally as important was hearing Jenai’s story and getting a reassuring feeling that I was not the only woman going through a difficult and emotional time with her business. Not that I would wish a bad time on anyone else, but it was so validating to hear that someone else had been through something similar to me. Don’t we all find comfort when we discover that we are not alone?

What did Jenai think of our afternoon of storytelling? “We were the token Gen Xers at that conference so we were naturally drawn to each other. The meeting that day was synchronistic. Here we were, on opposite ends of the country, thinking that we were alone in our unique situations. Surely no one our own age could possibly understand the business predicaments that we were simultaneously in. And there we were, sharing our stories and finding strength from each other.”

Continues Jenai, “I believe there are no coincidences. Maybe our meeting helped us to stay true to our authentic selves, to hold on to our personal vision even if that meant our company’s vision might not survive. At the very least, we became friends and confidantes which has proven invaluable. As a documentary filmmaker, I believe stories heal. In some way, our meeting helped start the healing process after the death of our first companies and the birth of our new visions.”

WHY TELL YOUR STORIES?

I am a firm believer that women learn most readily when they hear the stories of other people’s experiences. I could have started out this article by telling you that women’s stories are valuable. I could have said how important it is to share your stories with other women. I could have observed that women often learn so much more by hearing other women’s stories. But isn’t it more compelling to actually hear a story and to be able to relate to that story rather than simply hearing me tell you what I think?

When we are told what we should do, isn’t that that information we often choose to ignore almost automatically? I don’t think that is a ‘woman thing’ - I think it is human nature to rebel against what others tell us to do, whether it is pertaining to our business or our life. Perhaps we are stubborn or we’re convinced we know what we should be doing, never mind the fact that we aren’t doing it. We certainly don’t want to hear what we should be doing from someone else, no matter how close they are to us or how right their advice.

Even if we do ask for help, we often get defensive when we realise that the advice suggests we need to change something about ourselves or change our situation. We might not feel comfortable changing, at least not at someone else’s request. Yet if we hear a story of someone else’s experience of change, we tend to listen. If we listen closely and hear the message in the story, we learn. Sometimes, we are motivated to action by hearing someone else’s story. Other times, we are simply motivated to tell our own stories, an act that can be just as powerful. When we tell our own stories, we often do it because we think we are helping others, but more often than not, we end up helping ourselves.

PERSONAL PROJECT: PLAN A GATHERING FOR STORYTELLING

When we were younger, we had so many opportunities to spend time with our friends in a non-threatening and non-competitive environment. We played games that ‘forced’ us to reveal our deepest secrets, our innermost thoughts. We seemed to express ourselves without censoring our true feelings. We told our stories freely.

Now we’re all ‘grown up’ and don’t always seem to have the time to gather with a group of our friends and talk openly about our lives.

I highly recommend organising a gathering with half a dozen entrepreneurial women you know. Since this is about business, I’m not recommending that you talk about the personal, intimate details of your life. The idea is to create a comfortable atmosphere where everyone can feel safe about sharing their business experiences with one another.

Before you begin, have everyone agree (pledge, swear) to keep everything they hear at the gathering confidential. You can even have mock ‘non-disclosure agreements’ for everyone to sign just to get into the ‘no-tell’ mood.

To get the conversation going, bring index cards with questions written on them that the women can pick from like a deck of cards.

Here are some sample questions for the cards to get the stories flowing:

Why did you start your business?

What about your business keeps you up at night and how do you deal with it?

What has been your proudest moment in business?

When was the last time your business made you cry and why?

What is the best business advice anyone has ever given you?

What drives you crazy about your business and what can you do about it?

You can have each woman answer her own question or have the woman who picks a question start with her story, then go around the table to get responses from the others. The key is to listen to one another and not to comment on or judge another person’s story.

There is no doubt that you’ll have enthusiastic requests for another gathering. Everyone will walk away from the experience feeling inspired and motivated by what they have heard, or at least feeling like they are not alone. Women in business tend to be very isolated from others who know what they are going through. Sometimes it takes extra effort to find the people who are having similar experiences and then take the time to share the stories.

CHECK LIST - SHARE YOUR STORIES

o Be honest about where you have been and what you have learned and share your experiences with other people.

o Don’t leave out your mistakes and foibles when you tell your stories because those are where the most powerful lessons are learned.

o Honour other women’s stories. When a woman has the courage to stand up and talk about her experiences, thank her for it.

o Buy and read books about women’s stories, then pass them on to other women you know.

o Consider writing your own story, either for yourself or others (or both), and publish it on a blog or as a book.

(And join flokka.com to create your blog or link your existing blog to share your story!)

Aliza Pilar Sherman is author of “PowerTools for Women in Business: 10 Ways to Succeed in Life and Work” (Entrepreneur). Read about her work at www.mediaegg.com.

Originally published in Her Business magazine.