Avoiding anecdotage

can our storytelling be more spontaneous"
Johnnie Moore

Johnnie Moore

I’m Johnnie Moore, and I help people work better together

is there life in the telling of your story?

Transcript of this video:

Sometimes when I’m about to make one

of these little videos, I, I hesitate

and wonder if the little story I’m gonna tell

you is going to be good enough.

I worry sometimes

that I’m just drifting into a state of anecdotage.

It’s a term I use to describe the experience of listening

to someone telling a story where somehow

it’s lacking engagement.

And I think it’s

because they’re telling it without actually having much

sense of actually relating it to me,

to an actual human being

or to the other people in the room around them.

And I also have a sense,

sometimes they’re not very alive

to themselves in the telling of it.

You just get that experience of sitting there thinking, oh,

I dunno how long this story’s going to last,

but it’s clear this person just going to insist on getting

to the end of it to make some predetermined point.

I think that another thing about natural

alive storytelling is that we can tell a story,

not necessarily knowing exactly what the point

of it is going to be.

We might even leave the moral open to, to a conversation.

And I think what I hope makes these little films alive is

that I deliberately set out to do these, these kinds

of walks with an idea of what I want to talk about,

but without any kind of script so that you get a sense

of hope that I’m actually alive

to myself in the telling of the story.

That I’m thinking about it,

experiencing my thoughts as I go along.

And those are some thoughts on

avoiding getting into a state of anecdotage.

And I’m just sticking this little trailer on the end here

to say that if this interests you,

you might be interested in the practice

group on storytelling

that I’m gonna be running

with Shawn Callahan later this year.

Details in the link at the end of the video

or in the comments if you’re seeing this on LinkedIn

or Facebook.

 

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

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