One of the group took me to task. "This was not a 'story', it was more like boasting about how smart you had been. You can't make yourself the hero in your own story." I wasn't so sure about that statement, but I certainly never told that story again.

A couple of years back, Donald Davis did a workshop and said the same thing, "In a personal story, you can't make yourself the hero. If you saved a child, you can't be the 'hero' in the story. You have to make the child be the hero." The wheels in my head were turning, but there was still part of me that was not so sure.

Present Day: Now focusing on Stories in Business. How do we (I) communicate who we are and what we do (as a storyteller) without telling (boasting) about how good we are? And the message comes back load and clear: "Make your client the hero."

The message is finally starting to come through.

The good part is that I went back to that story of the mediation and looked at how I could make the client the hero. I found it! I found the part where the client's husband was her hero, she just hadn't recognized that part of the story. Once she did, she and her husband both became the triumphant heroes of their own story.

Here's my new version:

Stories are the best way to communicate, even in a dispute. People don’t listen to “facts”. People listen to stories. People remember stories.

 

Some years ago, in a mediation, I had a woman and her husband as clients who were suing the wedding photographer. The story she brought to the mediation was that she didn’t get the photographs she wanted from her most special day, her wedding. 

 

The story she told was one of anger and sadness. It was a story she had been telling for the entire first year of her marriage. Telling it to herself, to her husband, to her mother, to her friends, and trying to tell it to the photographer.

 

After an hour of back and forth, they could still not come to an agreement. The photographer offered one resolution: he would give the couple all of the proofs and negatives, and then they would be done with everything. He left the room so the couple could discuss their options.

 

I continued to listen as, once again, the woman cried and focused on how she did not have pictures of her “special day”. The husband turned to her and said, “Honey, I think we should take his deal and walk away, but I will do whatever you want.”

 

That was the real story – The husband said he would do “whatever she wanted.”

 

I turned to her and said, “I know you didn’t get the pictures you wanted, but I wonder if that’s the whole story. I wonder if the story you should be telling is that after a year of marriage, you have something that many women don’t; you have a husband that will “do whatever you want.” Maybe that’s the more important story.

 

She cried and fell into her husband’s arms, and within five minutes, the mediation was finished.

 

More important than the dispute coming to a resolution is that by going through this process and hearing her own story, the wife was able to focus on her new story, the story she hadn’t really heard yet. The story that just might get her unstuck. The story that made her husband the hero and that made their marriage a triumph.