Stories linger

My communication style has mostly Storytelling, even when I did the Your Communication style test 7th times. I do believe, and many others do with me, that Storytelling is in our blood, and not only from our own childhood but stone ages. 

I tell in public the stories of my Great grandmother Paula, even now. It was also my Icebreaker for Leadership Development path. First, I heard her stories she was 92 and I (or me?) only 12. I was telling her stories also on stage, and playing it out even. We both survived Holocaust, in different ways but that is yet another story.

What I did not yet tell, were the circumstances around her storytelling and how much she helped me then, not only all my life. 

My mother language is Hungarian, but the Transylvanian town we lived become Romanian after the WW2, and my parents decided I have to learn the language, sending me to a Romanian school. I knew only a few words Romanian, and two girls of my class begin to bully me, mock me, succeeded to put me aside in our class. 

Not only did I have to fight to understand what the teachers said, learn some French translated to Romanian when I did not understand either language yet, and keep my head out of the water, study harder then ever in my life just to pass, but with time I understood that the name they called me  in my class and what it meant. It was ugly and I was very upset. But the name remained for all the two years I was there, stuck to me.

My great grand mother, blind now for 20 years was living at that time in a hospital room, a hospital my mother worked, and on the way from school to home I passed by and visited her. She did tell me stories from her own childhood, from later when with 7 children, the last one still only 2 years old, she lost her husband, and then other family stories. She told them so well that I see them still in my mind's eyes. 

Each story finished "so you see, Julie, how from something bad, something good came."

What good come for me for those two difficult years? 

Perhaps I learned to study in very difficult conditions. And of course, the stories I was told remained in me and my deep believe of their message, even if each had more then one morale in it, that if I wait enough, something good will arrive from any very bad situation. 

Each time, I got in another place where I was different, it was easier.  

After two years in the Romanian Lycée  I said to my parents "enough" I want to continue in a Hungarian school. Of course, learning in my mother language was easy, and getting almost on top of the class too. This time, it took a lot longer to realize, I am not really accepted there either. I was almost everywhere a "fish out of water". 

Today, I tell "happy we are so many fish out of water in London!" We are even more "fish out of water in online clubs" : members from all over the world in fact. Telling each other our different stories made us realize, how similar we are in fact. 

I opened yesterday, my Level 3 Storytelling project.

Even if not many of us can attain Dananjaya storytelling mastery, who is in the video following this screen, we all can learn to tell stories better every day. Adding dialogue, different voices, descriptions that light up - enough but not too much, so the audience adds their own experience and embeds thus even more in his mind. We can do it using different voices, pitch and pauses, we can do it expressing with our body. Using other projects from Level 3 to improve each time our story, our stories.

Introduction and end can be very short in a story, the project writes even only a sentence to ground the story somewhere, plant the time and character, which of course, in a Personal Story are us mostly. Then the conflict bring about the message and the resolution. I have so many stories of my struggles in my life! It is said there are great moment in our life and there are story moments. There is not much we can say when everything is great and we have no problem.

Sometimes, I even believe, the ugly Pathways Interface come about so we have something to tell later, "at the beginning" but also it does link us to each other. Tell the problems we had as a story, easy to remember and then tell farther to others. 

From one story, another arrises. 

When we open up, others open up. Go deeper, dare to tell. One story leads to another, even in my own mind. Yes, I have many personal stories to tell, but I am still here at 85 ready to tell them. And indeed, in the 20 month since I begun Pathways, I have written a lot, but still a lot of stories waiting to be told. 

I am sure, you do also have already Pathways stories, Pathways topics shorter anecdotes to tell each other. How you overcome difficulties, how you succeeded to help others.