Lisa Whitman & Travis Hartman: Storytelling

Farming Stars

Lisa Whitman & Travis Hartman are the founders of Digital Stories Media, a full-service video production business specializing in corporate storytelling. While the digital world is the medium in which they work, their background in communications, fine arts and technology created a methodology for crafting corporate narratives that is deeply traditional.

Show Transcript (9,004 More Words)

Lisa: my Grandmother Martha – She was this beautiful, statuesque Kate Hepburn kind of woman and she didn’t have any really incredible adventure stories of climbing the mountains in Tibet. But she would sit down in the evenings and she would tell us the stories of our lives, prior to becoming born and being part of the family.
She would tell us stories of how she met our grandfather and how he drove this red convertible. She met him at Dusterberg’s drugstore down in Vincennes, and her sister wasn’t invited to go in the convertible but she was. That was their first official date.

So she would just kind of weave these great stories that we would ask over and over and over again to hear. It gave us this grounding. This idea of, this is who you are, this is where you come from. It really always resonated with me, because it was just that story gave me, personally, a place a place that I came from, a place that I was going. I knew who I was.

When we started this business, we started doing this because of her. I’ll tell you a little bit about that. She struggled with Alzheimer’s for 10 years. As she got further into the disease, she could no longer recall the stories that she’s used to tell us. So I, in chicken scratching, just took notes and notes, and notes in little bits and pieces that I could. But we never captured her story on video and it killed me to know that I wouldn’t hear her tell these stories ever again.

I thought if I’m lamenting my lack of foresight to do that, I know that other families are too. So we actually started doing this business with life documentaries for people in those golden years in that retirement community type of space.

What we did was we created Memory Care videos for therapeutic purposes in retirement communities and continuing care retirement homes. What we would do was either for people who were on articulate enough to share their story we would go in and capture story, just kind of like we’re doing right here.
Or if they weren’t in a place where they could recall it, we would tell it for them; through their family members, through photos that were captioned. One of the things that happens when you lose your memory is that you also forget to put, kind of like you go, “What was I just thinking about just now?” That happens all the time.

It can be really embarrassing and it can be really frustrating for the person that can’t remember. We would put captions underneath so there wouldn’t be that shamefulness of: I know I’m supposed to remember who this person is standing next to this model-T with me, but I cannot remember who it is.

So we’d put Martha and her sister Dorothy. When a therapist would be working with them, or even a family member, they would be able to look at and say, “Oh! Look Martha, there you are with your sister Dorothy.” So it became this wonderful therapeutic tool. Out of that, we were approached

Aaron: As if that wasn’t enough

Lisa: Right, exactly. It was so rewarding for us to see because one of the shows that we did was for a woman by the name of Bernie. I think her real name was Beatrice or something like that. She hardly spoke. Her family members said that she would just sit, quiet, on the couch all day long in his retirement community.
They said, “Good luck getting anything out of her. We’ve lost her.” It was heartbreaking. I said, “Well, tell me her story. Tell me what she was like.” They said, “Oh, she was a riot. She was full of life and she was this crazy Irish woman, she just had so much vivaciousness to her personality.” None of that was apparent in who she had become.

We said, “Okay, we want to see if we can recall that and collect that for you, be able to share that back with the family and back with Bernie herself.” So we collected all these pictures and we put captions underneath all of them. Then, you mentioned earlier, music and how important the underscoring is, because for us music is so key. It’s what brings us to tears. It’s what makes us remember: Oh my goodness, that was totally when we were walking through the campus in college.

Aaron: It’s why I cry at the end of “Rudy”, on mute. It’s not a sad story.

Lisa: So we are very intentional about the music that we choose. So we said: tell us about the music that Bernie enjoyed. They said, “Well, she loved the song “Wild Irish Rose” because she thought of herself as that person.” Of course, there was no other music that we should other than “Wild Irish Rose”.
We underscored this whole video to that song. They sat her down. They put it in a DVD player and it came up. They pushed play and almost within two or three notes she started to sway, she started to hum, she started to sing. She started to belt it out. She was remembering. She was smiling. She was pointing. She was articulating, “Oh! Do you remember? Do you remember?”

Grabbing the hand of the people who were next to her and her family was standing behind the couch watching all this and just tears running down their face. I thought: what a gift for us to be a part of such an intimate moment for this family. That’s when the light bulb went off. Okay, we have to do stories. No matter what the industry. No matter what the conduit. No matter what the portal.

Aaron: What the medium.

Lisa: What the medium. We have to. It sounds like a new phrase, ‘what the medium’? We have to be part of doing a story. We took that and we moved into a place where we weren’t doing individual stories. We had moved into a place where we were doing corporate stories for these retirement communities themselves.

Aaron: Oh, fun.

Lisa: They asked, can you start sharing the story of who we are as an organization, as a company, what we provide in the way of services? That’s how we parlayed from the individual storytelling to corporate narratives, personal narratives within a company or organization. That was a long answer to your question.

Aaron: Not at all. That is a great story.

Lisa: So it’s all because of Martha.

Aaron: All because of Martha. I will be getting a scan of that before you go.

Lisa: Okay.

Aaron: Again, it would be difficult to describe, but I like the Kate Hepburn description.

Lisa: Isn’t it true? She was an awesome woman.

Aaron: Has storytelling changed in your opinion, ever? Has it evolved to what we do in modern day or as we were saying has the medium just given us different opportunities to tell stories the same way but on a different platform?

Lisa: I’m going to let Travis handle that. Travis has his MFA in writing from the University of Chicago.

Aaron: Of course he does.

Lisa: I know, so amazing.

Travis: I was thinking a lot about what we were talking about, about how we talked about the story. Lisa of course was diligently gathering material and taking notes. That’s not how I approach things. I never take notes in meetings usually. I listen which goes back to the idea of story.
I think story has changed, because of the pace of the world we live in has changed. Story is obviously ancient. Story is fundamental to how we communicate as humans. People don’t have as much time and you have to get everything into a quicker pace. People give you a minute or two minute… Unless you can hook them and there’s a payoff and it’s interesting.

Aaron: Yes, I’ll stick around.

Travis: If they are learning… Yes. If you’re grabbing them then you can open up and you gain space. But I think in our media bombarded existence that we all have; checking our phones and billboards everywhere, 57 channels and nothing on as Springsteen would say on the television.
I think everybody is overloaded. We’ve all become very sophisticated at screening. I think that story is fundamentally the same, the aspects of narrative. It’s how we relate, how we communicate and how we understand.

I think that also, story is the way we get at the ‘why’ which I think is very important. People want to understand why you do things. They want to understand in a broader sense just the broader ‘why’, without getting too philosophical of everything.

I think that’s the importance of story. Yes, it has changed. You have to be relatively quick. You have to be concise. Unless you can hook somebody and get them to engage, you run the risk of losing them. You can probably articulate better. You can jump on what I started saying here.

Aaron: I’d like to see you do better than that, go.

Lisa: It’s interesting, because what Travis said is that with our media-
bombarded society that we have, we do have to filter out so much. We have so much that’s coming in and yet story seems to be a very constant theme. I’ll give you some examples.
You we were talking about crying at media. Have you seen the Google Chrome commercials or ads that tell a story? I’m sure you have. They’re using Facebook and they’re using Google Chrome and the “Dear Sophie”. It’s this father who is writing a story or letter to his yet unborn daughter. Then they chronicle Sophie’s life when she’s born. Then she gets a new little sibling

Aaron: It’s why I have a Gmail account for our unborn son.

Lisa: Are you serious?

Aaron: I’m absolutely serious, yes.

Lisa: There’s another one they do of a father and daughter communicating. I think her name is Jess. It’s apparent within the first two or three lines that her mother’s not in the picture. Either she’s died or they’re divorced. Something about the dad will text her or Google-Message to her that says, “Mom would be much better at this.” She’s away at college.
He’s asking her to help pick out his tie through Skype and that type of thing, or whatever Google’s video chat space is. At the end of it, you’re crying. It’s a browser. You’re crying over a commercial for a browser.

Travis: The one I remembers is the Hall & Oates song which incorporates music. Have you seen the one where there is Hall, typing, they keep putting in different words?

Aaron: She’s a tiger

Travis: Then she’s a man-eater.

Aaron: There’s a Wikipedia article about tigers known as man-eaters

Travis: Then it switches the little icon so you see who’s typing, color and name. It’s very cleverly done. That one leaps out at me. That’s a humorous example.

Lisa: The other one that I was thinking of, I am not a sports person at all. He is huge in sports. I don’t know anything about it. But I will watch the Super Bowl commercials because they’re so interesting. The one that everyone was talking about, was the Budweiser commercial.

Aaron: With the dog and the pony?

Lisa: Yes, the song “Landslide” that was done Fleetwood Mac. It’s this guy, who has this horse that he has grown up with and he loves. Of course, it’s a Clydesdale. The Clydesdale moves on. He’s going to a parade. The guy realizes that The Budweiser Clydesdales are coming to his town. He drives and the horse turns and sees his owner and it’s just… you start crying.

Aaron: I’m having an emotional day apparently.

Travis: Well, the one that I remember…

Lisa: It’s beer, its beer.

Aaron: It’s not even good beer. Let’s just be honest

Lisa: Exactly.

Travis: This must say something about me because the one I remember from the Super Bowl is the Doritos time machine, which again tells a story. Do you remember the Doritos time machines?

Aaron: I don’t

Travis: It’s where the boy builds the time machine out of a cardboard in his yard.

Lisa: Out of a cardboard box.

Travis: The guy comes and hands him the Doritos and he goes in it and he is just transported. He comes out. Although I think he’s not actually transported. The kid gets up and hands the Doritos box to some old scraggly guy, who might be his grandfather or some relative. The guy comes out of the box and he looks down, what was the kid that he handed the bag to, it was the old man.

Lisa: He screaming, “It worked!”

Travis: He starts screaming, “It works!”

Aaron: It’s sort of “Looper” meets vending machine snacks.

Travis: Exactly.

Lisa: So the idea of story, obviously, still resonates with us. If we can get teary over this roundtable discussion because of a beer commercial…

Aaron: Super-Bowl commercial? Yes.

Lisa: That we are not even watching, that means that there’s something to story. So when we approach anything. When we approach a client, when we start talking about… for example, when we met you, when we sat down Aaron to get together to talk, to find a little bit more about your business, but 90% of what we talked about was your incredible life history. A question begets another question begets another question

Aaron: In hindsight it seems like a straight line but…

Lisa: That’s really what connects us as people. It’s this thing, it’s this common thread of humanity and yet there are these diversions that happen with other people’s stories that expand our worldview. I am a huge believer that everyone has something to teach us to.
What I find so interesting is that anytime that we’ll approach somebody and I’ll ask them tell me your story, they’ll say, “My story is not very interesting.” Then I’ll say, Well, tell you where you came from or tell me how you got interested in doing this? Why are you doing ‘fill in the blank’?” Whatever that the career is that they have or the company that they are running, their space in life right then, it becomes this epiphinal [SP], “Aha! I actually do have an interesting story.”
There is a writer, her name is Glenna Milton. She said that, “questions are small gifts that we can give to one another.” I love that, because isn’t it true that when somebody sits across from you and they put away their phone or their i-device and they sit there and they look at you and say, tell me about yourself. Now tell me how you got there.

It’s this way that they can, kind of invest their time into your life to get to know you because they want to know who you are. So, it’s a gift that they’re giving you. The way that they are giving it to you is through asking questions of you and allowing you to share your narrative.

Aaron: It reminds me of the period where I was in training for marriage and family therapy. There is a field called Narrative Family Therapy. In that instance, it’s bringing together members of a family to collectively describe what the family’s story is from each of the different perspectives.
But what I had really enjoyed about it was just this realization of how we think about our history and how we imagine our future and how we shape the stories we are telling ourselves, don’t necessarily have anything to do with what happened.
Because of that, we have this superpower of one, rewriting the past. Obviously you need some cooperation of others to do that, but also the ability to script our future to some degree. That power of story, when you meet people who are unhappy or people are ecstatic or pleased or proud of whatever it may be, it comes back to how they told their story, because the same experiences can be viewed so many different ways.

I was curious, Travis, how do you approach helping somebody craft their story? Do you have a methodology or a means of doing it or do you just poke and then be quiet and see what comes out then guide that?

Travis: I’m looking at Lisa now, because I think the method is she starts asking a lot of questions. She has an amazing gift of getting people to open up and to pull the stories out of them.

Aaron: She seems trustworthy.

Travis: Yes.

Lisa: There’s nothing nefarious about my questions.

Travis: I think that might be our secret sauce.

Aaron: You’re the closer?

Travis: Not to be flippant, our logo, our motto, our tagline is “what you said, only better”. I think that you have to listen, truly listen and intently listen. More than the speaker, the storyteller. Obviously, that’s an aspect of storytelling is that there’s a storyteller who has their narrative or their idea that they’re trying to convey or their what, their why, their what, why, who and how that they’re trying to convey.
But there’s also an active part being played by the listener. So we’re in the unique situation where we are the listener for the client, for a business, for an individual organization. But then we, after listening very intently, and taking notes and doing our homework we have to then, not translate so much, but shape it, craft and put it out for the broader audience.

We’re sort of this intermediary conduit. I think it’s very interesting because I think that in doing that, it’s very similar to what writers’ do, what documentarians do.

Aaron: I was going to say, is it any different from what writers and documentarians do?

Travis: Probably the pacing and the time. It goes right back to how much time do you have.

Aaron: And you’re being an advocate, an ambassador not just a journalist.

Travis: Right. To be quite honest if it’s a business situation where you are creating something to obviously sell a business, there’s going to be an agenda. Put that upfront, you obviously come at it from a certain angle. I think it’s listening, it’s emphasizing with what you are hearing and viewing it from outside of the storytellers’ or the business or the person that wants to convey the message.
Again, I’m going to leap back to some other things that we’ve talked about. We were talking about story. When you talk, when you meet somebody and you start talking about your life. You mention how you look back and it suddenly makes sense.

It seems that all these things that are happening somewhat randomly and why something happened this way or that way. When you look back at it, there starts to be a line or a path that starts to make sense. I think that we’re all living our lives by creating story, the story of our life.

Lisa: “One Direction” song.

Travis: Exactly.

Lisa: Teenage daughters.

Travis: I was studying their lyrics so I can apply them to our talk this morning. Without rambling too long, I read a lot of Joseph Campbell.

Aaron: I was just about to ask.

Travis. Yes, Joseph Campbell. Very early on what introduced me to Joseph Campbell was Bill Moyer’s series that he did ‘The Power of Myth’ with Joseph Campbell. That made me realize that myth which is storytelling, religion, and it lends itself even into philosophy and narrative and great writing and etc., music, song… All of it is based on storytelling. Storytelling is the way we communicate.
There are, really, very few fundamental stories. That’s one of things at the base that everybody has their own unique story, but when you start to look at them everyone is telling the same story. Being able to tell your story well is really being able to communicate well and being able to communicate well is obviously beneficial.

Lisa: If I can jump in on what Travis said.

Travis: Sure.

Lisa: What’s really neat is when you watch somebody who is either a client or someone who owns a company or somebody who is just a part of an organization. You start asking them to tell the story of how they started the company, why their company is important to them, why they even joined that organization or that movement or that business. At first they think: well, again, I don’t really have that great of a story. I don’t think that mine is very unique.

Aaron: I needed a job, I made one. Now I do it.

Lisa: Exactly. But then you start asking, “Okay, why are you staying? What led you there to begin with? What has kept you there? What do you get excited about every day in what you do?” That’s where the story comes through. I don’t see us necessarily as storyteller’s as much as story revealers.

Aaron: Facilitators, encouragers.

Lisa: I like that. I like the word ‘advocate’ that you used earlier because that’s what we do. We give a platform to be able to share somebody’s story for them, on their behalf. They may say, “Oh, it’s all jumbled and I don’t know how to… Let me just tell you.” It ends up being 10 pages of notes.
Then what we can do is take that and distill down and craft and define their story for them with music, with the right pacing, with figuring out how did it begin, where does the climax come to as far as the challenge within that or some of the interesting aspects of that business or company, then, kind of, the result. That’s what Travis said that there’s that universal platform for story.

What’s really rewarding for us is; at the end of the day when we’ve finished doing that video, when we finished doing that written case- study, when we finished doing a collateral piece to help further this company or organization and they say, “Ah, that’s just what I wanted to tell.”

That’s when it’s rewarding because we think, “Oh, we hit the mark.” Not a pat on backs kind of a situation but an: Oh! We got it right. We told their story for them, the one that they couldn’t tell themselves but we felt excited for them, on their behalf and were able to kind of tease out in the way that you would untangle a necklace. You carefully and gently pull this thread and pull this thread

Aaron: Or, an iPhone headset

Lisa: Similar to that.

Aaron: I was just thinking when you were talking about the getting people going. You’re getting all of the words out of them. Then what I think is the hard part is, now how can I get rid of most of these words and tell the story as clearly and concisely?
Travis, you’re talking about the attention span and I myself am willing to listen to very extended stories. I just got through George Martin’s works for the second time. It’s such a good story in terms of what I like. But if you don’t get me immediately, like I might give you 30 seconds but at that point we make that decision.

I think that’s what makes it even harder now is back when there wasn’t television I’d be willing to give you a lot more time because what else am I going to do? Now you have everything to choose from.

Travis: That goes back to my experience studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The writing program was, it’s obviously poetry, you’re writing narrative, you’re playwriting or screenwriting, any type of communication.
In the written form there’s always that, there’s always the image of the stereotype of the writers sitting at a typewriter trying to figure out how to craft that first sentence. I think that’s part of it. Your opening is obviously important. You have to make it interesting. You have to capture their interest immediately.

You don’t see too many movies that start off with a very mundane or a not very interesting scene because you’re not going to be hooked into wanting to invest the time. Clearly, I’ve experienced the same thing you’re talking about.

I noticed that, since the advent of the Internet, my attention spam to even get myself to sit down and invest two hours in watching a movie. I do not read novels the way I used to before my life became cluttered with bombardment of media.

Aaron: My Facebook just binged. I have to go and check that.

Travis: We are becoming conditioned to wanting new stimulus all the time. We are addicted to information. We always want to find out the next thing. The only thing that I can say is, what I’ve realized is that my MFA, my study of poetry, has helped me through being able to take a lot of information and pair it down to the essentials and try to tell something that is interesting and something that conveys the essential message in a concise way and hopefully in an interesting way. Then with the appropriate words that have some emotion, connecting at a human level with somebody.

Lisa: But there’s something magical that does happen when you get involved in a story. For example, what you just described in that you’ve been listening to long, long stories. What happens you is when you get invested in it, whether it is after 6 seconds or 30 seconds or 30 minutes, then you kind of put away all of the other distractions and all of the other interruptions and you are fully present with that.
That can happen if you’re watching a 2 minute piece, or a 2 hours movie. The beauty of story and a really well told story, whether it be in book form, in audio form, in a movie, any type of story is that it gives us this gift of just being in the moment, and being present which is something that we as a culture and me as a person do not do well.

We’re always multi-tasking. We hold that up as a banner that we have arrived. We are very self-actualized because I can be checking my emails and I can be typing an email and I can be answering the phone and I can be talking to a colleague

Aaron: Even though cognitive science says that people do not multi-
task. You can shift gears as fast as you want but it’s inefficient and you don’t give much attention.

Lisa: Absolutely we don’t, it’s terrible

Aaron: There is so much battering is the word that comes to mind. We are constantly being battered by stimuli.

Lisa: Yes. What story does for us is that it allows us to really be the fully present people that we were designed to be. Because story is intrinsic to all of us, it’s what ties us together. There’s some etymology that says that story actually means to know. That’s where the root of story comes from.
So if you are fully present with someone as they’re telling their story, whatever medium they’re telling it in, then it allows you to be really who you are supposed to be, which is compartmentalized with that one person, with that one story, with that one area at a time.

We have five children together and story starts really, really young and it happens all throughout your life. What I’ve started trying to do is, and you’ll find that soon enough, Aaron, when your kids start bickering, what you have to do as a parent and all parents know this, is you stop and you turn and say, “Okay.” You turn to the first kid and say, “You tell me your side of the…”

Aaron: Make your case.

Lisa: “…of the story. Tell me your side of the story.” And just like you said in the narrative “Family Therapy”, it may be the most cockamamie, off the wall, totally untrue version of the story, because you’ll know that when you turn to the second kid and you’ll say, “Okay, tell me your version of the story.” They’ll tell their version of the story.
But here’s what’s happening with that, you’re present, you’re listening and it becomes therapeutic. It’s not in the retelling and making sure that the facts count or who’s right… well, sometimes it is, and who’s wrong. But it’s the fact that somebody is listening to me, somebody has validated what I am saying.

That crosses cultural barriers. That crosses age barriers. That crosses business barriers because as a company or a business or an organization or even a person, if you’re able to say, “This is what I do, this is why I do it, interestingly enough, and this is why I will continue to do it.” You have given them this beautiful gift of allowing them to share their story.

Aaron: I imagine the ability to move people with their own story is joyful. To be able to take what they’ve said, get rid of all the superfluous words. Then tell them their story back in such a way where they: that’s my hero. That’s who I want be when I grow up, apparently who I just told you I was.
Travis, I hope that this is described in a way that doesn’t sound silly but when you mention poetry, it struck me that I’ve had this belief that words are magical. They have a power to them because by choosing the right words, I can create a version of reality in your mind that can change the way you think about the world.

If I use the right words and they mean the same thing to you and we can create realities through the words we choose to describe, whether it’s our own narratives or the behavior of someone else or the state of… and I think it’s…

Help me with the right word. I think we downplay, that’s a weak word for it. I think we dismiss the power of words because we are so bombarded and to your point, we are criticized for not paying attention, but when was the last time you were taught how to focus?

Travis: I’m going to leap on part of what you were saying there because not only, I think, the power of words can change the world but they do it every day on a broad or a small scale. I don’t know why this leapt to mind, but I’ll just tell it and it will incorporate a bit of a story.
When I was 12, my parents, who were school teachers, took me out of school for a year and we traveled. We lived in the lower peninsula of Michigan. We took our sailboat from Michigan down to Florida which involved Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Eerie, the Eerie Canal, and then the Hudson River, then down the inner coastal, all along…

Aaron: You were transporting it.

Travis: We were sailing. Of course on the Eerie Canal you have to drop your mast and go through all the locks. Obviously we had a motor on the sailboat. Then we put our mast up in the Hudson River and went all the way down, for a couple of runs, we were outside in the ocean but most of them were in the inner coastal.
Anyway, that’s a long back-story getting into where I was. This was 1981, I was 12. And, I remember very distinctly and clearly, experiencing some of the smaller towns on the Jersey coast and hearing the music of the time. One of the ways that none of us think about it consciously is how words are changing the world is through music, music is poetry. In 1981, when you’re on the Jersey shore you’re going to hear a lot of Bruce Springsteen

Aaron: I was going to say either Bruce Springsteen or Bon Jovi.

Travis: Exactly. Of course as a 12 year old, I heard it. I would hear these and I’d remember them but I didn’t pay much attention. I was a little too young to be into music. Later on, when I began to discover Springsteen and listen to his music, this ties into another aspect of story because I think Springsteen shaped the world.
You listen to a Bruce Springsteen song and you are immediately taken back to a particular era in the United States, in America, in a culture, a bygone era of manufacturing. It spread to his stories that talk about major changes that occurred in the economy, post-Vietnam, etc.

But anyway, when I hear Springsteen now, I am transported back to my memories of very specific memories through to the words of his songs to experiencing New Jersey and the Jersey Coast in 1981 as a 12 year old, the magic there for me is that it gives me a window into a world by connecting experience I had, many years before, to words he’s using to describe a world.

I’m there. I’m transported there both because of his music and his words and his poetry and his crafting of story. But also because of the story, the life I experienced. Our memories are basically stories that I actually experienced. My experiences enriches his story and his story enriches my experience.

It makes me get even further into his story and I feel like I’ve lived part of that and they get very entangled up until it becomes something that each of those individual parts marry together. Like I said earlier, all stories involve a storyteller and the listener that you’re each bringing something to the table.

In essence, and story that that you tell, I think of William Faulkner and a great book “The Sound and The Fury” which made a huge impact on me as a young man. It’s a great piece of literature. Everybody who reads that is going to be impacted. The magic is that we are all experiencing it a little bit differently.
Even though we’re experiencing that universal truth, we’re all envisioning it just slightly differently. Yet in the broader sense, we’re all experiencing the actual truths of it over universally.

Aaron: What is the role of sharing in the power of a story?

Travis: I think sharing is important in a role of a story because it connects us. First of all, we all walk around very buttoned up. We all have our walls. We all have our masks on.

Aaron: Pretenders.

Travis: When the story is shared, it is actually an act of becoming vulnerable because as soon as you start to tell a story, if you honestly tell a story you are becoming vulnerable.

Aaron: You’re being known.

Travis: You’re being known and I think that when you listen there’s, generally most people’s conversations are based on storytelling back and forth. You’re inviting somebody to engage, open up and share. I’m having a hard time, you threw me through a loop with that question. I’d have to think about that more and maybe Lisa can jump in. The act of telling a story is an act of sharing

Lisa: What I love to do through our work, but also personally, and I’ll get back to that word ‘advocate’, is sometimes people are reticent to share their story but we know how powerful that can be. So sometimes we take on the role of being the sharer on behalf of that person or on behalf of that company or organization.
I think sometimes that works; being a third party works even better, depending on who that person is. Because then you can share more than what that person would say about themselves. It’s like testimony. When you’re trying to talk about yourself, you sound a little bit prideful. You can pat yourself on the back a little too much or you downplay some of your skills.

Aaron: So that you don’t seem prideful.

Lisa: Exactly. But if you’re standing next to a person who knows you really well and who has experienced something with you, they can grab you by the wrist and they can pull you into a conversation, “Oh, you need to know Aaron. Aaron is brilliant at this. And Aaron does this. And Aaron does this.” You can just stand there, “Ah shucks.”

Aaron: Bask in the glow.

Lisa: Exactly. So in that way, the sharing of a story from a third party can be so powerful. But what Travis said, that also sharing your own story puts you in a place of vulnerability but there’s a relief after because you are finally known or at least that aspect of you is finally known. The late Maya Angelou said that ‘words are things and that they have power.’ Just like what you said Aaron, words have power.

Aaron: I bet she said it better.

Lisa: She did. Well, better than what I just said, not necessarily better than what you said. She also said that, I’m not going to say this correctly, what you said, even though words have power, what you said may not be remembered. How you made someone feel will be remembered. That can happen through tone of voice. That can happen through a look. That can happen through specific words or the choice of words.
We are a powerful group of people, we humans are powerful because our words can lift and our words can devastate. The same thing with story. A well placed zinger can leave you hurting from the tiny age of 12 and you’ll remember that.

I’ll tell you a story. There was a girl that was in my high school and she teased me mercilessly and was really very cruel. When I saw her ask to be my friend on Facebook, I was immediately 14 again. I was sitting there looking at her in the hallway by her locker and I was thinking, I am not going to befriend you.

Aaron: I am not going to be your friend.

Lisa: Well, I ended up befriending her

Aaron: Because you are an adult.

Lisa: Exactly, but the non-adult in me wanted to say “No. Because you were not very nice and I am not going to friend you.” Words are powerful things and being able to share that story in a vulnerable space that takes a lot of guts and it takes a gentle listener.

Aaron: I almost feel like I shouldn’t ask, what is the future of your story? How do you see or what are you telling yourself now about where that is going? Or do you do that at all? As professional storytellers do you not write what hasn’t happened yet?

Lisa: That’s a really good question.

Travis: I think we’re just trying to survive day-to-day with five kids ranging from 17 to 4 at the moment.

Aaron: So you have six jobs?

Travis: Yes.

Lisa: What I think both Travis and I have learned is that, if anything, the art of story is becoming more and more relevant in today’s culture. If you open any “Forbes”, “Inc Magazine”, “NY Times”, “Harvard Review”, any of those types of periodicals will tell you over and over and over again, I’m going to talk from a business perspective, tell your company stories.

Aaron: The power of story.

Lisa: The power of story. It’s become such the buzzword now, to tell your company stories, tell your corporate narrative. Which is exactly what we do so we love it because now we have all sorts of ..

Aaron: You don’t have to explain the value.

Lisa: No, we just pick up any magazine or link to any kind of article and we say look, don’t listen to us, and listen to all of the experts in the industry. But if you think about it, you think about TED-talks, you think about all the stories that go on on NPR and other news programs, “All Things Considered” and “This American Life”, that is all story. Everything is story.
What story will do is, for a company or a business, it helps you to explain who you are to your employees, to you leadership staff and to the greater community at large. It also allows you to really feel a sense of pride in what you’re doing and why are doing it in the first place.

So I don’t see story ever necessarily completely going away. There is also a ‘new movement’, I guess it’s been around for a long time, but slow living, the idea of being very present in the moment. What is the phrase wherever you are?

Aaron: Where ever you go, there you are?

Lisa: Something like that. If you’re going to be somewhere, be there.

Travis: I’m going to slaughter the Latin, but the saying is, “Hic et nunc, Be Here Now.”

Lisa: He actually did it in Latin. That was really impressive.

Travis: But I’m sure my pronunciation is not very good.

Aaron: Show off.

Lisa: What we’re learning is that with the incorporation of our fast-paced culture, our media saturated culture that people are returning to that front porch art of story, that idea of sit down, tell me your journey. I love when I meet somebody for the first time when they say this to me or I try to do this with other people, instead of saying, “What do you do?”
One of two things, say, “Tell me how you got to where you are?” or another way of saying it is, “What brought you to this place?” “How did you get started in this industry?” Or “What’s keeping you busy lately?”

Aaron: One of my favorite questions, because of the ‘what do you do is’, I don’t want to answer that, is ‘what do you enjoy’?

Lisa: Ooh, I like that.

Aaron: Because the moment somebody picks on something they care about, you know when you do, it’s very easy to draw and encourage more of that out. Well, what do I enjoy? I enjoy playing with my son. Tell me about that. How old is he? What do you do? Well we put on capes and we build castles out of pillows. It’s not what you love; it’s that you love it.
That was actually the definition of a nerd recently on one of the podcasts I listened to. It’s not what you love, it’s how you love that thing. The joy of just immersing yourself in it and surrounding yourself with people who love it. It doesn’t matter if it’s cars or football or pewter dungeons and dragons’ figures or whatever it may be; it’s the loving of a thing and willing to be misunderstood.

Travis: For some reason I was catapulted onto this thought when you were telling me that. I think that what it does, is helps us connect as humans. We think that businesses do business with other businesses, and they do. But really, businesses really do business with people.
What a lot of businesses and corporations have been struggling with, some have been adapting better than others, the big question now is for social media, how do we use it? I think what’s happening is that, I’m not going to speak very eloquently about this, because the thought is there in my head but I don’t know how I will articulate it. My story may not be very concise.

In business, we are trying to figure out how to enter this new media- driven, interconnected world where interaction on one hand is much more immediate and much more personal. But on the other hand, because it’s happening through text and through a computer screen it’s much more impersonal.

How do you interact in a people-to-people way because you have that opportunity to do that more? How do you conduct business people to people through a lot of technology sometimes and because there are so many people that have access to everybody so easily, how do you stand up above your competition?

Aaron: How do you also not be noise?

Travis: Exactly, how do you not also be noise? So you have to connect human-to-human and person to person, that’s how you use story. I know that I’m not being as concise as I wish I would be or as eloquent. The other thing that has been striking as we’re sitting here talking is, especially with corporations there is the idea of brand identity and your brand.
Companies are very conscious of their brand, well what is their brand? Their brand really is, through a visual medium, a lot of it. It really is trying to tell the most important things in the most concise manner, it is your corporate history. Corporate history is story. It’s where you’ve been. It’s where you’re going. Brand is really a corporation telling its story.

Aaron: It’s interesting. I think it was Phil Daniels who has taught me a lot about brand because, like many back a few years ago, you mean your logo, or the colors. No, those are what I would consider artifacts of your brand.
One of the things that help me when I’m trying to understand a company’s brand is what is it that people tell other people about you, because if we can influence that, again we’re shaping hearts and minds. I was thinking of Paton and the famous speeches. I bet nobody remembers the words but they all remember that we are going to get up and keep fighting.

Travis: What I remember and I don’t know if it actually happened, but in the movie, do you remember the slapping?

Aaron: Huge.

Travis: I remember the huge American flag in the background. He is prancing and everybody is walking around in front of it, the way it was staged. There’s that constant iconic reminder of who you are and what this is for. This brings me to an earlier thought I was thinking and wasn’t able to slip in. We all have our own individual stories and we all live in a culture and there’s a cultural story.
The process of our lives is trying to successfully, because you don’t want to end up in prison or on the wrong side of the… there are all kinds of negative ways you can end up integrating into the world.

And a positive way is how well you integrate your personal story with the meta-narrative, the mega-story or the history of the world. That’s what we’re all doing in the process of our lives is we all have our own internal story. We’re integrating that with the broader story.

As my earlier example, I could take my personal history and my personal stories and experience the music and the songs and the narrative of Springsteen that he created around Jersey and the Eastern United States. I was integrating my personal experience, my personal story with his broader story. There’s a satisfaction in that. There’s a connection that occurs.

Aaron: Threads being woven together. I was thinking that a concert is very much people collecting to celebrate a story together. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that music can be so powerful. But at the same time, I can be individually moved by music even if no one else hears it.

Travis: Absolutely.

Aaron: So it’s not that simple, I guess.

Travis: Absolutely. And I have to mention an amazing musician that I’ve recently listened to and had the privilege of seeing in concert here at the Vogue Theater is Jason Isbell. His latest album is “Southeastern”. He used to be with the “Drive-by Truckers”. Interestingly enough, I was listening to the “Drive-by Truckers” back when I was at the Art Institute.
I was introduced by a roommate. My favorite song on one of their albums, “The Dirty South”, was actually written by Jason Isbell. I discovered him 10 years later, and have gone to see him in concert. To make a long story short, his album, “Southeastern”, has got a lot of critical acclaim. The reason is there’s not a bad song on that album. Every song on that album tells a story.

You listen, you’re in every song, intently listening to that song, you’re there, you’re in it, he brings you into it. It’s a successful aspect of a successful song and being a successful song writer. By the next song, you’re immediately into that song. You’ll sit and listen to the whole album and when you’re all done, you just shake your head, and damn, that is an amazing album.

That’s a situation where he creates a whole world, a whole narrative through these individual songs. There’s a consistency. They seem to all fit together but when you really look at them, they’re all about a very different story. I went to the concert and everybody at the concert was there with me. We were all sharing that. But I can listen to that and be affected by it sitting alone in front of my stereo. I can be in a concert and sharing that.

It’s an aspect in partaking in story, all of us that are listening are of course envisioning that story. We all are picturing it. We have a movie in our heads that’s playing. All of our movies are uniquely different based on all of our experiences because that’s what we bring to it.

I mean, one of his songs talks about something happening on a Great Lakes freighter. I grew up in Northern Michigan, out on the Lakes. So I have a different view of that than maybe you would growing up out on the West Coast, but we all experience it. We all share in it. We all get the basic universal truth out of his music and the message of each song. We’re all bringing our stories in that process of actively listening

Aaron: For somebody who is beginning to realize that they’re being drawn to story and storytelling, beginning to awaken a passion, at this early point maybe it’s just a curiosity, a tickle, what advice would you have to someone just beginning to become aware of the power of story and wanting to immerse themselves in it, where do you start?

Lisa: I would recommend two different things for somebody who is really connecting to story. Number one read a lot. And Number two, write a lot.

Aaron: Oh. The writing, that is the tough one, isn’t it?

Lisa: You don’t have to be a good writer. That’s what people think. I need to be a good storyteller to be a good storyteller, no you don’t. Just start writing. It can be chicken scratching. It can be a grocery list. Just start writing and then when you start writing it turns into journaling and then it turns into transparency. You can go by guidelines. If you look, goodness, if you type in storytelling into a browser you will be bombarded with you all sorts of things.

Aaron: Here is all the information.

Lisa: Exactly. It can be anything that really resonates with you. You start with a ‘who am I?’ question. Where did I come from? You talk a little bit about your personal life from your background and your family and what you’ve done and where you went to high school. Or were you in marching band? Why did you choose the clarinet? Just little things like that, little touch points that help you start crafting that story.
When you read or when you listen to audio books or when you listen to the radio or any type of auditory listening to somebody else’s story or reading somebody else’s story it broadens your idea of what story is. It allows you to play with different tones of voice, play with different structures.

I was in Wal-Mart last week, I don’t even remember what I was picking up but I walked through the book section and I had never read the “Book Thief”, which of course is this huge critically acclaimed book. I pulled it off the shelf and started reading it.

I’m a huge book snob in that if it doesn’t capture me in the first paragraph or two, I’m done with the book. Maybe I don’t have enough time, maybe I just don’t have the attention span, but it has to capture me. I started reading and I was drawn in. I don’t know if you’ve read “The Book Thief”?

Aaron: No, I haven’t

Lisa: Okay, I’ve only read the first chapter. I’ll be honest, because I had to do the rest of my shopping. But I was drawn in because the language is so strange and so disturbingly beautiful. What you realize is that the narrator is Death who’s writing this, and I won’t give any more of it away. But that the book is written from the perspective of Death and how Death is describing what he/she/it does. When it approaches a soul that’s right on the verge of dying

Aaron: Oh my, I think I’ve just got goosebumps.

Lisa: I’m standing in Wal-Mart with the bright florescent lights and I’m, heaven, these chills.

Aaron: Creepy.

Lisa: Like a horror movie but it was beautifully written. So I learned through that is that words have power. If you take them apart, they were just words but woven together, the way that this author wove them together, is just powerful. You can learn by reading, by practicing writing, by telling your story. Try doing it.
I’m going to tell my story in 60 lines or I’m going to tell my story in three pages. Try different ways of doing that. That’s how you discover what your own voice is. That’s how you discover really where your passion is, where it comes in the line of story. Do I love telling my own? Do I have an interesting one to share? Do I love sharing others or do I love exploring others? You find your way in that art of story. That’s how you discover it.

Travis: Now I’m wondering if the title of the book is allegorical, “The Book Thief” is Death. Everybody is their own book, using words.

Aaron: Everyone’s story.

Travis: I’ll have to read the book to know, I guess.

Lisa: He’s a lot deeper than I. I was just standing at Wal-Mart. I mean really. That’s where I was.

Travis: Listeners who have read it are probably like, “Nah, he’s totally wrong. You’re off base.”

Aaron: The irony is that you’re in Wal-Mart reading a book you haven’t paid for called “The Book Thief”.

Travis: Exactly.

Lisa: How ironic is that? I didn’t even think about that, that’s great

Aaron: Lisa and Travis, thank you so much for sharing your stories and sharing so much about story. I am inspired, the reading, the writing. Of course, it’s always writing. It’s always the thing that we don’t want to do. I’m very grateful that you shared this with us, thank you.

Lisa: Thanks for having us.

Travis: Thank you.

The post Lisa Whitman & Travis Hartman: Storytelling appeared first on Farming Stars.