Day 105: Lisa Bloom

January 13, 2010 at 12:01 am, Category: Inspiration

“… the truth is that there is a very strong revival happening all around the world in storytelling and people are applying storytelling in all different kinds of ways.  The more I research it and look into it and develop my own work, the more I’m seeing it’s out there, so that gives me great inspiration.”

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Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Lisa, for joining us on the Project today, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?

Lisa Bloom: Absolutely, yes.  I am Lisa Bloom.  I’m a storyteller and a coach.  I’m originally from Ireland.  I’m living in Israel.  I’m the founder of a company called Story Coaching.

Toni: Story Coaching.  Well, let me just go right into that first question with you, and when you think about the word inspiration, who do you inspire, Lisa, and how do you go about that?

Lisa: Who do I inspire?  Great question.  I think that anybody who hears my stories and hears me tell stories finds some inspiration.  The truth is, I’m not completely comfortable saying that I inspire them, because I believe that it’s the stories that inspire them.

You know, I discovered this quite a long time ago.  I discovered this when I was a training and development professional, and I would go into a classroom and organizations, and I would teach a particular subject.  I found that the more stories I told, the more engaged people became, and the more excited and passionate, and the more the information that I was trying to communicate came across.

So I found that … well, first I found that I was telling more and more stories, but I also found that there was some kind of magic that happened that put people in the story space, a place of great safety and comfort.  It allowed them to hear things that other forms of communication don’t enable as easily.

Toni: That’s really interesting.  When you do this storytelling and when you moved into the storytelling, what do you think that does to help someone explore their potential?

Lisa: Well, you know, there are so many different types of storytelling and there’s so many ways that I’ve found that are exciting ways to use storytelling, particularly in coaching.  Sometimes when you tell a story, and it can be a personal story or a folk tale or any kind of story that you may have heard or read in a book or seen even in a movie, what happens is that people get access to experience and information that in other ways they don’t seem to reach it as well.

So, I think what happens is that there’s definitely different levels of the way that we can use storytelling, but as we use stories, people find themselves able to deal with issues and to face issues that previously they had some difficulty with.

Another way of looking at storytelling is that we are all storytellers and as people experience their life they tell their story, whether it’s how they got to work in the morning or the people they’ve met or where they had dinner the night before.

We’re constantly telling our story, and that telling is completely and utterly subjective.  We chose the words, we chose the narrative, we chose the perspective, the approach, and as we start to examine our stories, and that’s the process that I introduce people to is looking at the stories that we tell, then what happens is that they realize that they can actually change the story.  Sometimes the stories that they are telling don’t serve them that well and the stories that they could be telling would be so much more empowering.

So we look at how the stories exist for them right now, where they are coming from sometimes, what it is that they are creating out of their storytelling, and in fact out of their defining their reality, and then look to see how we can create better stories.  Stories that are more empowering, stories that are stronger for them and that allows them to really reach their own potential and become who they were really meant to be.

Toni: So really what you do is you tell the stories, but it’s in a way to engage the person you’re working with so that they can tell you their story and then possibly reframe that story to create a better life for them.

Lisa: Yeah.  Well, you know, I tell stories, but I also listen to stories.  A big part of storytelling is story-listening.  So yes, I sometimes tell stories and I often use my own stories or stories that I’ve heard.  For example, for them to create metaphors, to create mirrors for life.  But the really important thing is teaching people the tools and allowing them access to their own stories, and then finding ways that they can create stories that are even more powerful.

One of the things that I often do is I help people and we look at business-building skills.  How do we create the stories that will build our business, the stories that will attract our clients, the stories that will compel people to remember us and to be attracted to do business with us?  That’s coming from my clients, that’s not coming from me.  That’s their stories.

I enabled that process and I helped them really use this incredibly powerful tool of storytelling.  It’s the oldest and most powerful tool of influence, really.  If we go back to centuries ago and decades ago, different times and different places, every culture is based on storytelling.  That’s how we passed on our values.  That’s how we passed on our life lessons.  Whether it was in the old days around the fireplace or whether it’s nowadays as we sit around the dinner table or SMS each other, you know; we’re still using stories.  It’s very, very powerful.

Toni: When you think about inspiration for yourself, Lisa, what do you need to be inspired?

Lisa: What do I need to be inspired?  Well, I think authenticity.  I love listening to stories and when I hear a story that comes from a place of authenticity for me that’s really inspiring.  There are the places that I go to for inspiration.  I loved TED, the site, it’s just great creativity and great storytelling.  They take these people who are just excelling in their fields or very creative, and they’re telling a great story about us and I love that.  That gives me great inspiration.

I love also, and I find very inspiring Byron Katie’s work because she also, she takes some of the most simple and common issues that we all deal with and she looks at kind of paring away the story, looking at what’s the story behind it, and I find her creativity simplistic, created out of almost nothing, out of the ordinary.  That’s very inspiring.

And then the one other place that I think is very, very inspiring is there’s a website and an organization called The Moth and they exist on themoth.org.  What they do is they have people tell stories.  They have to be true stories and they have to be told without notes.  Here you have people sometimes telling again the most ordinary simple things that happened in their life, and yet they tell them in a very creative way and to me that’s the true power of storytelling and a wonderful source of inspiration for me.

Toni: And it’s called The Moth?

Lisa: Yes, themoth.org.

Toni: Oh, that’s great!  How did you get into storytelling?  It’s a really interesting, I think, a great tool as you said of influence to work with people and I find it fascinating.  When you were either in personal life or professional life, where were you, what were you thinking?  How did you come to the table and realize you know, storytelling is where it’s at, this is what works?

Lisa: Well, you know, I first came to storytelling in a kind of a professional way.  When somebody simply said to me there’s a storyteller in the town next to ours and she’s running a course and why don’t you take the course with me?  I went along to see her and to see her work and I had this absolute epiphany.  I mean, I just realized that I’ve been doing this since I was a child, you know?

I was born a storyteller.  I’ve always told stories.  I tell stories when I was a student waiting tables because I knew if I told a story I’d get better tips.  I told stories years after, 10 to 15 years after meeting up with a person who I was a roommate with in college, she told me don’t you remember, you used to tell me stories to help me sleep?  I’d totally forgotten.

I re-found something that I’d been doing my whole life and similarly to coaching, although my background is in training development, when I started learning coaching specifically I realized you know, I’ve been coaching for years.  Similarly, I’ve been telling stories for years.

As I studied both of these and realized that they were so deeply and intrinsically connected, I started to uncover this whole world of stories could be used in a very empowering way to help people really develop themselves and reach their potential and find inspiration from their own lives, from their own experience.

Toni: Well, Lisa, what do you need to explore your own potential?

Lisa: I think opportunities to tell stories and opportunities to help people tell stories.  Part of what I do is that I actually teach coaches how to use storytelling in their coaching.  I also help people find their own stories and then use them for their businesses, for creating the story that will attract a client or for creating the story that they want to use on their website or for their speaking engagements.  That to me is just really fulfilling and inspiring work and helps me move forward and feel that creativity all the time.

Toni: Are there other tools that you reach for that you know whether it’s exploring your potential or other tools and resources to stay inspired, and to stay with that wonderful storytelling, are there tools or resources that you may reach for to learn more, to open up the stories, to gather more stories, to story gather, you know?

Lisa: Yeah.  You know, the truth is that there is a very strong revival happening all around the world in storytelling and people are applying storytelling in all different kinds of ways.  The more I research it and look into it and develop my own work, the more I’m seeing it’s out there, so that gives me great inspiration.

There’s actually quite a … you know, it’s a relatively small circle of people who are involved in story work.  The internet is just the most phenomenal tool for this, so here I am on one side of the world and I know storytellers from all over the world because we’ve connected through the internet and there’s forums where people discuss how they use stories.  There are forums on healing story and how people use story in healing environments.

I know that even in medical schools and law schools around the world, people are beginning to look at narrative and the way that narrative can be used in practical business and in the medical field There’s so much out there and there’s so many ways to access these tools.

I have local meetings with storytellers here in Israel.  We meet and we share our skills and we give each other support in the work we’re doing, and then I have monthly and weekly meetings with groups of storytellers around the world who are using stories in all different areas.  So there’s a lot out there that’s available.

Then of course my interaction with people and the coaching that I do is a great resource for me, because every story that I tell and every story that I listen to expands my understanding of the power of story.  Every time I tell a story; I can tell the same story 20 times and it will have a different effect every time.  It will reach people differently each time.  So that’s a huge learning experience for me.

I remember I once heard of an old and very, very experienced storyteller saying that you have to tell a story about a hundred times before it becomes yours, which sounds absurd, you know?  How can you tell the same story 100 times?  But I’m learning as I work with this tool that the more you tell, the more you understand in your story, and that can be a folk tale or a fairy tale, and it can be your own story of how you experienced a particular event in your life.  The more you tell it, the more you understand about it.

So there’s lots of opportunity to learn and to move forward and to see this incredible tool in action, to see how it pans out.

Toni: I would imagine to your quote of telling a story 100 times before it becomes yours, I would imagine that the more you tell that story to as many different people and their perception and what they reflect back to you becomes such a deeper level of understanding of the impact of that story on your own life.

Lisa: Yeah, absolutely.  Absolutely.  Sometimes it surprises you because you tell a story and you tell it with a certain intention.  You assume that that intention will be communicated or that it will come across.  Suddenly one day after telling it 20 times, somebody hears it in a very different way and applies it in a very different way.  That’s really beautiful because that just gives you a whole new perspective.

I think that’s what coaching is about as well. It’s about helping people to see different perspectives and to reframe their experiences so that they can turn them into more positive and more empowering realities.

Toni: Right.

Lisa: The story helps us do that, because as we tell our own story we choose that reality.  We choose how we define that reality.  So you know my job is to help people really examine these stories, really look at them and dig into them and find out where they are from and find out how they are doing for us.  Are these stories really serving us well, or it is time to get rid of old stories?

I have a great example of that where I grew up in a family where I was the youngest child, and one of my older sisters was a really funny child.  She was kind of the clown of the family.  She always made everybody laugh and she always made everybody … she always has a funny thing to say, and she always said when she grew up she was going to be an actress, and I secretly really wanted to do something like that too, but that wasn’t my job.  That wasn’t my role in the family.

So years and years later when I found myself on the stage one of the first times telling stories as a professional storyteller, I was standing there, I was so happy to be where I was, and you know, my story was practiced and I was ready and I felt great and my audience was listening and it went across beautifully and I got wonderful feedback, and I felt a fraud.

There was something inside me that felt that something was wrong, and when I stepped away and I thought here I am fulfilling my life’s dream, doing what I love to do, being told that I’m wonderful at it and it’s great and everything is fine and my audience is here, why am I feeling a fraud?

And then I realized that I had this old story.  I was living this old story of “I’m not the sister. I’m not the child who should be on the stage.  My sister should be.”  Meantime, my sister has gone on to do entirely different things.  She works as an executive in a company.  She’s the furthest you could possibly be from any time of entertaining field and is perfectly  happy with that.

But you know, I was holding onto an old story.  The moment I had that realization and I could let go of that story, I stopped feeling like a fraud and I could just enjoy where I was and be totally at one with where I was, which was where I was supposed to be.

You know, that’s a great example of how we hold onto these stories that just don’t serve us well, they serve us badly  and until we examine them and look at them and think you know, this is just a story, it’s a narrative, and it doesn’t work for me.  Goodbye.  Let go of it.

Toni: What an absolutely beautiful example of storytelling that you just gave.  The interview itself – what a great story you’ve told about storytelling!  It’s amazing, it really is.  We will definitely post how people can get a hold of you or possibly use your services at the end of this interview but my goodness, your story today for the Get Inspired! Project is greatly appreciated and thank you so much, Lisa, for telling it to us today.

Lisa: Thank you.  Thank you for the opportunity.  I think it’s a wonderful Project and I’m really proud to be a part of it, so thank you.

Toni: Thank you and take care of yourself.

Lisa: Thank you.

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For more information about Lisa Bloom:  www.story-coach.com

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