Once Upon A Business – Episode 100
Lisa’s Tale: 100 Stories, 100 Lessons, One Journey
Lisa Bloom: I was very young, maybe just eight or nine years old. We were doing a school project on folklore. We were told to go and speak to people and collect stories. That was the first time I heard about the banshee.
Hi, it’s Lisa Bloom. And this is Once Upon a Business. And this is our hundredth episode, so it’s nothing like all the others. But I’m really, really glad you’re here. I don’t remember who the person was that I asked. She just seemed very old to me. And she told me that sometimes in the night you would hear the wail of the banshee. And it was a sign that someone in the village was going to die. The banshee fascinated me. We used to spend a lot of time out walking in my family. Sometimes my father and I would run on ahead and we’d hide behind the wall of the graveyard. Then as the rest of the family came along, we would jump out. It worked best when it was nearly dark on our evening walks.
And then there was the story of the Hellfire Club. An old burnt out ruin that was said to be a gentleman’s club, generally a place for debauchery. They would call up the witches and the spirits. And one night, they got so out of hand that the spirits took revenge and burnt the house down with all of them inside it. That was our Sunday morning walk up the Dublin mountains.
And then there was the time that my mother took me to see a witch. It started some years before. I had a wart on my knee, a big wart on my knee. And anything we did could just not get rid of it at first. We went to the doctor and she gave us some cream to put on. I put on that cream day and night. But a few weeks went by and then a few more months and it was still there. So we went back to the doctor. This time she said it was serious. She was going to have to freeze the wart to get rid of it. So she got this huge long flask and the smoke came out of this flask of the dry ice and she dabbed it on the wart that burnt it, burnt it off. And then she wrapped it and covered it over with a plaster and told me not to touch it for the rest of the day.
A couple of days later, when we took off the plaster, it seemed like the wort was gone and everything was fine. I was happy. But then a week later, I woke up one morning and it was back on my knee. And so we went back to the doctor and this time, she said, I’m going to have to cut it out. She got out a little knife, gave me a small injection, and she cut out the warts. Again, put a bandage on, told me not to touch it for 24, 48 hours. And when I finally opened the bandage, it was gone. I was pleased. It healed. Everything was great. You know what happened next? Three weeks later, I woke up one morning, and there it was again. The wart was on my knee.
So my mother took me to see a witch. And I’ll never forget that day. We pulled up at this house, walked through a long path through a garden and up a few steps into this house. My mother was told to stay in the foyer of the house, and I was led into a room that was quite dark. The curtains were closed. And towards the end of the room, an old woman sat in an armchair. She seemed very old to me, with long gray hair and wrinkles on her face. But when she looked at me, her eyes were bright. She asked me to sit down on the stool in front of her and tell me why I was there. I told her all about the wart and how hard we had tried to get rid of it. And she listened very, very quietly.
And then she leaned forward and she told me something. She told me to do something, and she gave me something and told me what to do with that, too. She also told me that I should never tell anybody, because if I did exactly what she told me, then the warp would go away, but if I told anybody, it would come back. And so I did what she told me. I took what she had to give me, and I did what she told me to do with it. And I never told anybody. And the very next day, the wart was gone. And you know what? I’ve never, ever told anybody. And the wart has never come back.
So, yes, I was surrounded by stories. But you know what? I think we’re all surrounded by stories. I think many of us are blessed with learning the lore of the land where we grow up, and even the lore of our families, our communities, our religion, our culture, all of the things that make up who we are and where we come from. We’re all around those stories at all times. For me, stories were a place where I could get lost, but in a good way.
My mother is an avid reader, and she was part of a book club when I was a child, and I would read those books often without her knowing, especially the spicy ones. But I couldn’t get enough of books back then. And of course, I had one of those mythological teachers, Mr. McMonagle. I remember the day he swept into our classroom, a young blonde fellow with an armload of books and his teacher’s cape flying behind him. Even his broad cork accent didn’t spoil the effect of this whirlwind of a teacher. Half the class fell in love with him, and we were all inspired by him. He would open up bags of books, pull them out one by one and throw them at the people he knew were readers. You must read this one, Lisa. Or Martin, this one is for you. And so for those years in high school, I learned about great literature and marvelous stories.
So from the earliest of days, I started collecting stories and I started telling stories. But strangely, I didn’t really notice. In fact, I was kind of the last to know. Decades later, I was invited to an evening of storytelling. A friend of mine asked me to come, and my kids were small and they were sick, and it was bad timing. And eventually, I managed to get myself organized and I got there. And when I walked in, a strange thing happened. I saw these two storytellers sitting on the stage, and they opened their mouths and began to tell stories. And it felt like almost like the walls were moving. Things were contracting and expanding. It was this surreal sense of, oh, my goodness, this is it. This is what. What I’ve always wanted to do. This is what I’ve always done. This is who I am.
And in the break, I went up to one of the people on the stage, and I said to her, I hear you teach storytelling. And she said, yes, I do. I said, I want to join your course. And she said, okay. I said, no, no, no. Like, I want to join now. Take my money. I want to do this now. It was so urgent for me. It was like I finally found myself. And I suspect you may have had that experience, too. In whatever it is that you do in your business, or whatever it is that you do that you love, is this finding the thing that just makes you feel alive, that makes you feel like, oh, this is who I am.
So I started studying with her, and I began to tell people, and strangely, they were not surprised. I told my brother, I’ve started studying storytelling. And he said, of course you have. I said, what do you mean? He said, you’ve been telling stories since before you could walk. I was the last to know. I didn’t realize that stories were all around me. Years later, after I’d started Story Coach, I ran into a friend who was a college roommate in our dorms. I told her what I was doing, and she smiled and nodded. And I looked at her. What’s going on? What do you mean? She said, don’t you remember you used to tell me stories at night to help me sleep. I had no recollection.
So everybody else could see the thing that I couldn’t. Even years later, opening up boxes from storage, boxes that had been left in people’s roofs or their storage units that when I was traveling the world. And I opened up these boxes to find books of stories that I hadn’t even noticed I’d been collecting for all these years. And then I realized I’d actually been telling stories, too. I’d been working in a corporate environment as a trainer. And I realized that I’d been telling stories there. I just, again, hadn’t really noticed. But once I did see it, I couldn’t unsee it. And I also saw the impact it had, not just on the work, but also on the people that I was working with.
I remember one time I was running a training course on sexual harassment in the workplace. It was one of those topics that people never want to learn about, but it’s for compliance. They have to and are hugely uncomfortable. There were several people in the room who just didn’t open their mouths. One in particular was a man who sat at the back with his arms crossed. And I knew they were just waiting for it to end. The big complaint was that it didn’t really relate to them. They were all good people, right? That’s what they said. We’re all good people. We don’t do this kind of thing. What are you talking about?
And I was trying to explain to them that sometimes inappropriate behavior is hard to even notice. We don’t notice what we do. But I wasn’t really getting through. And they weren’t really engaging and they didn’t want to talk about it. And then I remembered an incident that had happened to me. It was years before. It was possibly my first job. There was an older man that I worked with. He was a lot older. He was more like my father’s age, or possibly older than my father. And every time he would see me, he would call me dear. He would often come up to me and touch my shoulder or put his arm on my arm. I felt incredibly uncomfortable.
And it was even more so because I knew that he didn’t really notice. He didn’t really understand. He wasn’t intentionally trying to do something bad. But I felt awful. And I shared this with the people in the room. I did so I came forward and I sat on the edge of one of their tables, and we all kind of sat around, and I talked about this person, how uncomfortable I felt, and how he would sometimes just run his hand down my arm in a very affectionate way, as if maybe somebody might do that to a loved one or to a child. But for me, a colleague, a peer, a young woman in the workplace was horrible.
And you know what? Everybody in the room had an opinion. They started talking, they started sharing experiences. The story just opened it all up. And not only did they participate and did they engage, they were invested, and they really remembered the training. So that’s how it started for me professionally. I noticed that every time I told a story initially, it was more to keep me interested and to keep me engaged. I noticed the effect it had on people. It was even a visceral effect, a physiological effect. I would see their chins slacken, their eyes open wide. They would lean forward or sometimes lean back, but there was an actual shift in their body when I would start to tell a story.
And so I started to do it on purpose. I started to plan for it and weave it into all the work that I was doing as a trainer. When I left the corporate environment and went into my own business, well, it was around that time that I was learning storytelling. I had found it, and people were telling me I should think about coaching. And I kind of reluctantly went into coaching because a lot of people said it would be suitable for me, but I wasn’t sure it was a real profession. I wasn’t sure it wasn’t just a fad, but when a lot of people are saying the same thing, you really do need to listen. And I decided to sign up for a coaching course.
And what I discovered was that I actually loved it. Not just because it allowed me to understand myself differently, but not just because I could see a way to help others, but because it actually allowed me to see myself in a different way. And I realized that even though I could do lots of great things in my life and in my business, when I have a coach, I get to do so much more. It’s just so empowering. I totally fell in love with coaching. And while I was studying coaching and while I was studying storytelling, almost at the same time, I realized that there were so many connections that that moment of great storytelling where you can hear the proverbial pin drop in the room because people are so engaged, it’s very similar to that moment of great coaching when you’re just open to possibility.
You’re open to really thinking clearly about your situation, about what’s possible for you in the world. It’s a very similar experience. And what I came to see was there are kind of two sides, and this is how the business developed. The one is how we experience the world in story. So what I mean by that is when we’re walking through our lives, something happens. The most typical reaction to when something happens is we go tell somebody. I think it’s a basic human need. So we have an interaction or something unusual happens and we run to tell someone. We tell our family, we tell our friends, we tell our colleagues. But that’s our first reaction, is to go tell the story.
Now, when we tell that story, what happens is what we tell is only about, I don’t know, maybe less than 5% of pure fact. And the rest is how we choose to tell it. And how we choose to tell it is dependent upon our outlook, our opinions, our previous experience, maybe what side of the bed we woke up on in the morning, like how good a day it is or what’s happening in our lives. But it’s our opinion, it’s our story, and it’s not necessarily related to the pure fact of what just happened.
What I started to notice was that story we tell, which is so incredibly subjective, so incredibly far away from pure facts, is actually the way we come to see the world. We call it truth. We act as if it just landed upon us. We had nothing to do with it. And this is the thing that happened. Now, sometimes that story serves us and we tell wonderful, strong, empowering stories. And sometimes that story does us an incredible disservice. It’s a story that holds us back, that keeps us small. I started to realize that if we can look at the stories we tell and sometimes change or empower those stories, we actually change and empower our lives. So to me, story coaching was just an incredibly powerful possibility.
And then there’s the other side of it, which is how we talk about our business. Because once I started in the world of coaching, in the world of story coaching, I noticed that people, particularly coaches, but lots of people, are not very good at talking about what they do. They’re not very good about telling the story of the kind of transformation that they can offer their clients, and therefore they really struggle to get clients. I started to realize that if I could help people tell a more powerful story about their business, about their talent, about their skill, then they would have a much easier time being able to develop their business. And so that was the second direction that this business went in.
For me, first of all, it was all about the storytelling. I loved storytelling. I wanted everybody in the world to just become good storytellers, to love stories as much as I did. But then I realized that’s not how I can find clients myself because people aren’t really interested in storytelling in the same way that they’re not really interested in coaching. They want the outcome of storytelling and the outcome of coaching. So if you go to somebody and you say, hey, I can coach you every week for this, you know, this amount of time and at this price, and start talking about the process of what you do, people just lose interest. But if you tell them about the transformation, if you tell them, you know what, I can help you get a whole runway of clients. I can help you feel confident. I can help you build your business, Then people start to become more interested.
I had to come to that conclusion myself to realize that storytelling is the vehicle. And my passion for stories, my passion for fairy tales, my passion for helping people find their stories, that had to be the vehicle for them to achieve something that they really wanted. That’s what everybody has to do in their business to differentiate between the process and the vehicle.
So here I am, years later, the story coach, teaching people in my program selling through story and the story coach certification, Writing articles and books and more stories, speaking on stages, live and virtual. And of course, with my hundredth episode of Once Upon a Business, and what an amazing journey it’s been. And I’d like to thank you.Thank you for following. Thank you for listening today and every day that you’ve heard an episode. You know, people often ask me, what is storytelling all about? I’ve thought about this a lot over the years.
I think great storytelling is when you hear a story and it reminds you of something about yourself and about who you can become. Maybe you’ve forgotten that, or maybe you’ve never really known. It’s when you see your own potential, the possibilities that are right there in front of you. The great story is a gift that reminds you of who you are. When I look forward and I think about all the changes and the speed with which the world is changing, it can cause us to lose our center, to get lost in the world, to get lost from ourselves.
When I look forward into the next few years of business, it’s hard to predict what’s going to happen because things are changing so fast. But what I know for sure is that stories are like the ship that will help us sail through the that will help us navigate these really choppy waters. And that’s why being able to ground ourselves in our own story, in the story of our business, in the story of our past, our communities, is so incredibly important.
So I’d love to hear from you. Which episodes have you loved? What else would you like to hear? Is there more about story storytelling and story coaching that you’d like to learn? So send us an email at podcasts@mirasee.com and that email address will be in the show notes below. And finally, if today’s show resonated with you or if there was any other episode that you really loved, please share it with a few people. That’s how we get these beautiful stories out into the world.
I’m Lisa Bloom and you’ve been listening to Once Upon a Business. You can find out more about me at story-coach.com. That’s story-coach.com. Thank you. We’ll see you next time.