412: Story discovery as the pathway to success (with Michelle Ray)

How do you kind of feel that anyone should maybe start on their journey with tapping into their own story? What's like an initial step someone could take if they want to understand, first of all, I guess, what their kind of core story actually is they're going to kind of always go back to? What's the first step on that process?

First step would be to pay sub me.

Just

kidding.

No, the first step, I think, is to, you know, really think about why and how you want to use your story, I think, because that I feel like will inform what story you bring forward.

I mean, we all have so many stories.

And I've found the ones that are really effective and are the ones that people can relate to.

But they're also very specific and very pointed.

So I would think about like which story you're trying to bring forth and for what purpose and then go about.

just kind of like thinking about what happened.

Maybe just sit down and do some journaling.

I do this thing called image sprints where I have people just think of like, think of a memory and think of like what comes to mind.

Like what, it's usually an image.

People don't remember in like words.

They remember often in images or sounds.

So have, you know, I have people like think of that image and then just quickly write off like descriptions, like sensory descriptions, what they were feeling, seeing, all that kind of stuff.

So oftentimes, if you can capture an image or capture a scrap, a moment of the story, then it kind of grows from there.

Lately, also, I've been thinking about how you can dig deeper by using artifacts from your past.

So journals, a lot of people write journals.

That's a great way to obviously think about things that happened in the past, but also Emails from that time or documents, any type of documents.

So when I was writing my memoir, I wanted to, like, amp up some of the conflict from the opening of my memoir.

And so I kind of went back to that time, like, what I was doing when I was preparing to leave for the Middle East.

And I had, like, to do all this weird documentation stuff.

And when I arrived at, you know, in Bahrain, I actually, like, and I had totally forgotten about this.

I'd actually, like, I was stopped at and held at customs because, like, I had all this proper documentation, but I didn't know who my sponsor was.