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Q&A Session
Robin: Good morning. I was just going to stay asleep until you poked me.
Igor: Now that we’ve woken the beast, can we have some assistance with microphones? As we promised you yesterday, we want to start off today with a Q&A session.
You can reflect on the experiences you had yesterday or any questions you have about it, realizing of course we’re just starting the second day of a three day training. What have noticed?
Student: I noticed that as I was reflecting on the stories this morning and last night that my memories that I turned into stories, the stories all have a different point of view, a different narrative than it was when it was just a memory. That’s very interesting because now I can see my parents’ views on some things or my friends’ views or whatever.
Igor: There are a couple of things to address there, which I think are of great importance. The first one is now you really understand what we mean by re- membering something. That’s really what a memory is. You remember it. You’re pulling it together out of constitutional parts. However you are as a person when you recall something or actually remember it, you’ll alter the memory to fit that.
That also brings up the second part of it, which is as you remember stories, both tragedies and comedies – in the technical sense, comedies being happy stories and tragedies being sad ones – you’ll alter them. They’ll change for you and that’s a very useful thing. Doug Lipman, the storyteller, has a very wise comment that there are essentially two or three kinds of stories you will tell.
1. You tell stories that you need to hear. You know those are stories you need to hear because when you tell them – and it doesn’t matter if you tell it to one friend or to a group – you’ll find strong emotions coming out of you. At times you may even have to pause the story to be able to complete it.
2. Then there are the stories that they need to hear. You never quite know why you know they need to hear it but you do. Recall Doug Lipman is a great storyteller. He’s not a therapist and he has no therapeutic training experience or anything like that. Whenever he tells a story to a group, invariably he either changes something he had already planned – either the story or the way he defines a story – and invariably at the end of the evening someone comes up to him and says how did you know that I needed to hear that story, or how did you know that story was about me – or words to that effect.
I have no idea how that works. I’ve had lots of examples of that in my own therapeutic practice, although of course I try to get to the point where they say how did you know?
I know that Robin has had the same kind of experiences, but those are the two most important stories you’ll tell – the ones you tell for yourself because you grow, and the ones you tell for other people because somehow you have a sense that this is an important story to tell at this point. You won’t always know which type of story it is until you’ve finished.
Robin: I hear quite a few examples of people saying I had this experience, but it’s not really a story, like the most exciting thing that happened to me was I jumped off a really high cliff and it was just an amazing experience to feel that fear and then to jump and hit the water 80 feet below, not knowing what I was going to feel like.
That’s an experience. As an emotional elicitation story, you can imagine eliciting fear and anticipation and all of those things through that story. However, in the sense that we’re talking about stories here – stories that have a beginning, a middle and an end, having a hero and an antagonist, etc. – it doesn’t have those. Not immediately obviously. The tool that we gave you yesterday and the tools that we’ll give you today are ways of taking that memory and transforming it and giving it a different shape. If I just relate that experience, then it’s just an experience. If I frame it like I was always afraid of heights until XYZ, and then showing me how ABC – as Igor said, it’s not what happened. It’s what we make of it and how we use it.
The act of storytelling is lying. Memory is lying because we can never capture the whole truth of an experience. Even if we could capture our whole truth, that would still only be one perspective on it and other people would see and hear it differently.
Like for some psychotic reason, Igor has no ability to see the truth of the Bahamas.
Igor: It saddens me that Robin really doesn’t understand what a dire position I helped him out of.
Robin: It’s like he just has a mental block that stops him from seeing…
Igor: I’m a good friend. And as long as I see him succeed after all the efforts I put into it.
Robin: … what he really needs. There you go.
Igor: I can accept that. Thank you. Who’s next?
Student: When we were anchoring stories into the roots, I tried it before and it was very hard to visualize, but this time it was much easier to visualize and really play with these concepts. Why was it easier this time?
Igor: I have one word for you – hypnosis. You have become a very capable hypnotic subject. You’ve done a lot of training in that sense, and your unconscious mind is going oh I get it, sure I’ll do this. Memory is fundamentally an unconscious process. Even if you use memory tricks, all those memory tricks are designed to do is to stimulate the
unconscious mind into recalling it by a mechanism that it’s predisposed to recall.
For example for survival reasons, all human beings – and some will challenge this to some degree – but as a rule people have an excellent spatial memory so that you can go running around in the forest and understand that this tree and that tree are different and orient because of it.
Otherwise we would just be lost and saying all right I went for a pee, and where the heck is everyone now. I don’t know. We have a very strong memory for locations, and by using locations to attach things to, we’re just basically going into a sub-routine, a program that the unconscious already runs and says okay you’re running this show anyway, so let’s just put something useful there too.
As a rule, the more you develop that relationship with your unconscious mind, the more powerful your memory will be. At some point, I may actually do a whole week seminar just on memory stuff, but if you really want to see that you have to send lots of emails in because the more people ask for stuff, the more likely I can get it through my conscious filter called Cliff.
Robin: And also he’ll remember to do it.
Igor: Yes, my memory is terrible.
Robin: Just as a follow-on from that, if you really want to make these memories something that’s automatic for you that you can just bring to life as you’re inspired to do so by people, and then it’s about translation between sense systems. Take the visual memory and talk about it. Take what you can tell and see it. Make sure you feel both of those things.
Igor: And tell the stories. As a rule of thumb in terms of how to go from short-term memory to medium-term memory to long-term memory, right now all the stories you did yesterday are medium-term memory, so they’re not locked in there yet.
Those stories that you wish to lock in there follow a simple reset schedule. When you add a memory, 10 minutes later you review it. An hour later you review it and a day later, a week later, a month later, six months later and a year later. By the six-month to a year mark, that will become a permanent memory. In other words, it will no longer erase. You have to do a lot of distraction to erase those kinds of memories. That’s a very useful way of doing it. By reviewing it, I don’t mean you have to spend hours looking at it. It’s just literally mentally you can spend about five seconds just going yes, yes, yes and that little pause I had, that tells me that’s the one that I have to reinforce slightly. Then that’s it. You’re good to go.
That’s the beauty of using the visual system as a starting point because it’s the fastest one. Then you add all the layers like Robin was talking about to enrich it. Are there any other questions or comments?
Student: As you were talking this morning, we were talking about telling stories to one another. What occurred to me was a story that I told myself in the early 1990’s because I had a situation.
My mother killed herself. She shot herself in the head in a closet, and after that happened people always say if a child died – which I thank you for the child dying story – that you don’t have a future. You can’t imagine a future. In my case it was the same feeling, so I’ve told myself a story. We didn’t talk too much about the stories you tell yourself, but I told a story that I couldn’t see the future, but I was sure there were all these people with pinstripes shirts and white shirts with these really cool collars wearing jeans and loafers.
They were like totally clear about the future. They were going to do the future. So I said what I’ll do is I’m just going to grab a hold of the back of one of their shirts and in five years I’ll wake up and I’ll be in a future. I didn’t know which one it was going to be or what it would look like, but the story worked really well and I did wake up.
Igor: Thank you for sharing that. It’s a very powerful story. In fact, the story you just shared with us is probably one of the most powerful that you can tell. It’s the kind of story that shape the very fabric of our reality, and you’ve actually foreshadowed something that we’ll be coming onto tomorrow, which is these stories that we tell ourselves and these stories that people tell each other in groups and so on that fundamentally shape the fabric of our lives and the societies that we live in.
That’s something that we’ll come onto tomorrow, so thank you for sharing that. Just for everyone else, of course you can appreciate the story that you just heard is literally a life-changing one. It’s literally life and death for many people.
Storytelling can be chit-chat, storytelling can be influential and storytelling can be something that starts and stops wars. It can be a very powerful thing, so thank you for sharing that. Are there any other questions?
Monastery & Cat Stories Part 1
Igor: In that case, let’s do some storytelling. There’s a man. He’s an advertising executive. He’s very busy and very good. He’s easily the top-ranking sales guy in the advertising agency. By that I mean clients are always lining up to work with this guy. People really love him.
As things happen, he ends up becoming very busy. There’s a lot of work. For whatever reason, he gets consumed by working. He really loves it and he’s passionate about it, but then work starts developing a life of its own and sucking him further and further into it.
At one point in time, he starts to get to the point where he starts burning out. He’s just feeling like something’s missing in his life. Years have passed and he’s lost touch with his friends. He’s been through two marriages. Something is missing here.
His boss, who’s actually a good friend now because he’s the only person he’s been hanging out with really, comes in one day and says you’re a great advertising executive. You really are good at what you do, and I can tell that of late your work has been suffering. It’s still genius compared to everyone else we’ve got, but I can see that you’re not in a good place right now.
He says I think as a friend I’m going to do something that is going to be useful to you, but you’re not going to like it very much. I’m going to force you to take a sabbatical. You’re going to take off three or four weeks. You may not come to work. You may not take anything from work. You’re just going to go and live life. Go crazy. Go on a world tour. Go join a rock band. Do something.
Of course the man doesn’t like this idea at all. He’s lost. He’s like one of these prisoners who spend their entire life in prison and when they get released they don’t know how to make sense of the world. He’s a little frightened but his boss being true to his word as a security guard standing by his desk so that he can’t collect any work.
The security guard escorts him out and he drives home. The first night he’s sitting at home thinking what the heck do I do with myself? First he does all the things he told himself he would do. He watches late night TV. He drinks beer. He watches some more TV and drinks some more beer. He wakes up the next day with hangover saying what the heck do I do with myself?
Somewhere along the lines he gets the idea that he ought to just get in his car and just drive and just see where he ends up. So, he gets into his car and he starts driving. He’s got a big bottle of water and a sandwich in case something happens. He has a tank full of gas and he’s got a little sports bag in the back with some clothing and that’s it – no phone, no laptop, nothing. He just drives.
He’s playing music on the radio and he’s starting to enjoy himself. He’s driving all day and it starts getting towards evening and the sun is starting to set. He’s starting to get really tired because he’s been driving all day. He’s having a good time but now the adventure is starting to wear a bit thin.
He can’t turn back – although he wants to – because it would take just as long to get back. So, he starts to look out for a motel or a town where he can stay, but there’s nothing. He’s in the middle of open country and there’s really nothing around.
As the sun starts to set, he starts to get a little desperate because he really needs to stay somewhere and the last thing he wants to do is sleep in a cramped car in the middle of nowhere. As he’s driving, he sees a little hillside, like a small mountain or a tall hill – take you pick of what you call it – and on top of this there’s this old ramshackled building, kind of like a monastery or something. There’s a light sparkling because now it’s starting to get towards nighttime.
He thinks to himself, maybe it’s a hotel. Maybe it’s one of those freaky retreat type places. I’ll take a risk. At the very least, they’ll have a parking lot I can stay in. So, he drives around all the winding roads and gets lost a few times, but there’s that light up on the hill. Luckily it’s right at the top of the hill, so he backtracks and goes around the other side. He’s a little bit lost and after about an hour or so, he gets to this monastery and it’s now pitch black.
The stars are out. There’s no moon. It’s dark. It’s probably around 10:00 or 11:00 o’clock at night. He gets out of his car and goes up to this huge wooden gate. You know those gates with a little gate inside of it, a little door like man- sized and then the other one is for very big people?
He knocks on this door and there’s no response, so he bangs on the door and you can hear the booming sound of the wood going through what is obviously a very large corridor or a hallway behind it.
There’s no reply, so he bangs again. He’s just about to turn around to get back in his car and just crash in the back seat, when he hears a little shuffling coming along and some clanking of keys. It takes a while but eventually there’s the clanking of keys and the door clicks open, and there’s a little old monk in his brown habit.
He looks up with kindly eyes and says yes my son, what can I do for you? The man explains his situation and says I’ve been driving all day and I’m trying to look for a place to stay. There’s nothing around here. The monk is nodding his head and he’s very sympathetic. The man says can I just stay for one night here? I’m sorry to intrude but I’ll pay you lots of cash. The monk says oh no, payment is not important to us, but really it’s not the way of our order to allow strangers to stay here.
The man says oh please just one night, I’ll be gone tomorrow and you won’t even know I’ve been here. The old man says all right but I have to talk to the father abbot first, so please give me a moment. He shuts the door and there’s this loud noise. Slowly he shuffles off again.
The man’s waiting for ages and thinking maybe the old man has fallen asleep somewhere, but eventually he hears the shuffling again and the keys start clinking again and he gets a little excited.
The door clicks open and the old man opens the door again and next to him is standing another man who’s also old – not quite as old as the doorkeeper. He’s kind of that age that is dignified. There’s strength to it. He introduces himself as the abbot of this Abbey. He says I understand that you want to stay here for the night. I know that Father Gregory here explained to you that we
don’t normally let strangers into our order.
We’re a very special order and we have a very unique task in this world, and really it’s not for most people but we can’t turn people away in need, that’s part of our mandate is to help those in need. So, you may stay here for one night but there is a condition and you must accept this condition without reserve; otherwise, you may as well just turn around, get in your car and drive somewhere else.
The man’s a little desperate now, so he says anything, whatever you say. The abbot says all right, we’ll give a room. It will be a simple room. It will just be a monk’s room, with a palette, a bed and a pitcher of water. You must promise that when you get into this room, you will not leave it until the sun rises. You may not leave this room for any reason until the sun rises.
The man says of course, I’ll happily do that. The abbot says there’s one other thing. No matter what you hear tonight, no matter what it is, no matter what you think it is, you need to know two things. The first thing is you will always be safe. No matter what you hear and no matter what happens, you are 100% safe. Do not leave your room, and please do not ask us about that because not being part of our order and not being a monk like us, I cannot tell you.
The man says okay that’s no problem, that’s fine, whatever you say. So, he gets led to his sleeping quarters. It’s a simple palette. There’s a little table with a pitcher of water and an old-fashioned bed pan underneath the bed in case he has to go to the loo in the middle in the night.
The man is exhausted and falls asleep. Just as he’s falling asleep he hears a little click locking the door that he’s just come in, which he thinks is very strange. At one minute past midnight, there is the most disturbing sound. It’s impossible to describe. It’s as though a soul is being tortured. It sounds sad and mad. It sounds like all the grief in the world combined with all the terror.
The man sits bolt upright in spite of how tired he is and he’s sweating. The sound continues for six hours until just when the first rays of sun peek over the hill and kind of crack over the monastery. Literally the moment that first little crack of sunlight strikes the monastery, it just turns off like someone switched off a light switch. The man is exhausted and terrified. He’s shaking in his bed but eventually fatigue takes over and he falls asleep.
Robin: That’s funny. That reminds me of something.
Igor: I thought it would.
Robin: We’ll get started on the seventh category of story. Actually, what it reminds me of is that feeling of being trapped in a room. I had that just a couple of weeks ago.
How it started was there was this cat and it’s been hanging out in my back garden for ages. I was kind of ignoring it because I was hoping it would stop pooping in my garden and stop killing the birds and stuff like that. Are there any cat lovers in the room?
Igor: No puppies were harmed in the making of this video. Cats I don’t know about.
Robin: I like cats. To be honest I’ve started to feel quite affectionate towards this cat because it was always around my house. It kept coming in. But at the same time I was putting down chili powder and throwing catnip into the neighbor’s garden just to try to get the cat to move on.
Anyway my upstairs neighbor comes down to visit and we’re sitting out in the garden. She’s stroking this cat and she says oh my God this cat is starving. Have you noticed how thin it is? She said you can feel its bones through its fur. It’s all fur basically and the fur isn’t in good condition. It was obviously a black cat at some point, that kind of dark, very brown, almost black color but it’s kind of gone ginger, which is apparently a sign of bad nutrition.
It hasn’t got a collar on. I know that it’s been hanging around the back garden for at least the last couple of years. My neighbor, Anna, was going you have to feed this cat. Why aren’t you feeding it? It’s clearly starving. I said no because then it will just keep coming back. In the end, I think about it for a couple of days and decide to buy it a tin of Kit-Kat, oh no Whiska’s, cat food. You can tell I’m a big animal lover. I like the wild ones. So I opened the can of cat food and lay it out for it. It’s straight there wolfing it down, clearly starving, the poor thing. I thought obviously it’s a starving cat.
I was passing a pet shop a bit later and I don’t know why but I found myself back home with a hair brush and a little mouse for it to play with. Anyway I suppose I’m adjusting to the new life. It seems like I’ve adopted this cat now. The next day there’s a knocking on my door. I go to the front door and there’s this huge guy dressed in motorcycle leathers standing there saying did you feed my cat? Are you trying to steal my cat? That cat has got diabetes. You could kill it. Oops. You really don’t want to feed diabetic cats food that is rich in sugar and carbohydrates because for one thing they can’t digest it, and secondly their blood sugar levels start going up and down and they could die.
I’m not feeling too bad about this to be honest because I fed a starving cat that looked like a stray. I subtly suggest that perhaps a collar that says don’t
feed me because I’m diabetic might be useful.
But his attitude is we’ve never had any problems around here. That cat’s 19 years old, I’ve looked after it for 19 years. Don’t you understand? Would you like me to bring my vet bills round for you is that what you want? Maybe you want to share them with me? I’m thinking I’m really sorry I fed your cat. I didn’t understand the situation. I won’t do it again.
So, I get back to work but now I’ve got this really uncomfortable feeling because the cat’s not going away. It’s still sitting in my back garden and now I’m thinking oh my God, now this big motorcycle guy is attached to the cat. If I reach out to stroke the cat, he’ll say did you stroke my cat? Did you?
Now I’m starting to feel a bit tense in my own place about using my back garden. This is really unfair. We really don’t have time for this now, do we? That was just indulgent of me. Please forgive me.
Transformational Stories
Robin: So, you were asking about the seventh category of stories. The seventh
category that we’re going to look at today is: → Transformational stories, stories about transformation, stories that inspire transformation.
You may have noticed that these categories that we’re giving you are not clear cut and obviously, as Milton Erickson demonstrated so effectively, one story can serve many purposes.
The situations and the events that you’ve been describing in your stories, when you apply that model of five elements to them, that’s one way that that memory kind of gets shaped and morphed and changed more towards that shape that we recognize unconsciously as the shape of the story.
Today I’m going to give you another model. It’s really simple. There are three phases:
1. Beginning
2. Middle
3. End
In the beginning was the word. The word made flesh. Oh, that’s a different story.
# In the beginning section, you clearly articulate the problem or challenge or question.
# In the middle section, you demonstrate or explain the struggle. You get them feeling the struggle, the journey.
# In the end, you present the moment of awareness that leads to transformation.
Someone was asking me about this yesterday. Somebody was pointing out that if you look at a film, what typically happens is somewhere in the beginning section they will outline the hero’s flaw, what it is that the hero
needs to overcome. Then they’ll leave it and there will all kinds of other things going on, other elements, and they play jeopardy right until the end.
Then right at the end, you’ll have a success against the antagonist, and then the big villain will come back and Spider Man will be just about to get it and then suddenly right at the end there will be the moment where the hero overcomes his flaw and that’s the strength, the awareness that enables him then to be the victor, to triumph, to transform.
Any story that you have can become that kind of story ultimately. It’s in the passion that you tell it, in the way that you tell it and in the way that you draw people in. It’s in the relevance of the story you choose to the audience that you tell. Do you have an example of one of those?
Igor: Well, I never used to be very good at telling stories. I didn’t think I was. Of course going through things like hypnosis, NLP, my own trance training and so on, stories are kind of demanded of you. It’s part of what you’re supposed to do.
I remember before I chose this sort of thing as a career, believe it or not if you take every possible element of uselessness as far as public speaking goes and put it in one person, that pretty much defines me. I recall as a junior lawyer I was sent to the Frankfurt office. They had a thing with a time at a local university where one of the lawyers would go in every year and present two segments on English law. Of course the office gets very busy and there’s a lot of stuff going on, so invariably it gets delegated to the most junior member who can’t really say no, because you can see the ball tumbling- no, no, no you do it. All right.
Of course, they said it should be very easy because the lecture’s already been outline by a previous lawyer who’d been there a few years ago. They said don’t worry. He’s written the two lectures out for you already word for word. He’s even put the jokes in, so you’ve just got to turn up and read. You can see where this is going, right? So, I turn up and there’s this room full of students and they have an open-ended square, boardroom style, and they’re all very serious sitting there looking at me.
In Germany, of course, students tend to be a lot older than in England because their law program gets extended. So, they’re all pretty much my age and some are actually a little older than me because they’re all doing their Master’s and stuff like that. They’re very serious about understanding British law because they’ll have to deal with international at some point, right?
So, here I am reading my notes and going through it and trying my best, because this was the first time I’d actually read this stuff and I’m doing my best to actually make sense of the sentence. Okay, there’s a joke and there’s the punch line. Then I carry on reading. I’m sweating profusely. At the end of the seminar, they’re polite enough to knock on the table. That’s the way they applaud goes – I hope. Maybe it’s just get out.
Robin: Did they put a black cat on at the same time?
Igor: Yes, they got the sticks and started dipping them in pitch.
Robin: Grab the feathers.
Igor: It wasn’t my proudest moment. Really, my career as a presenter pretty much ended there. Something happened. I started doing hypnosis trainings and NLP, training to be a professional presenter. Somewhere along the lines, I heard many different hypnotic stories, training stories and all kinds of stuff, and they kind of seeped in.
I used to love just hearing them. I could sit there for hours. In fact I did. As part of my learning process – this will date me a little bit – I would get the audio tapes of my favorite instructors or the people I was admiring, and I would listen to those audio tapes. Some of them actually wore out. This also dates me. This is when mini discs became the hot new thing. I was one of the first people to actually have a mini disc player. I’d transcribe these fading tapes onto mini discs. They’ve long since died in case anyone’s wondering.
I would listen to them and my favorite part would always be the stories, which is ironic because it’s the bit that I didn’t think I could do. I did my trainer’s training and of course part of it is you’ve got to create lots of stories to prepare people for whatever training segments you’re doing and so on, and I always thought my stories were a bit weak.
I kind of did them perfunctorily. I just say yeah they’re on the checklist that they’re looking for, so I’ll just throw them out. I won’t really think much of it. People were very nice, but then of course they’re taught to be nice in terms of feedback, so I didn’t think much of it. I still didn’t think I was doing much in terms of storytelling.
Anyway I did pretty well in the trainer’s training. I enjoyed it and got my certificate. I’m actually allowed to stand on a stage now. I have permission. Then at some point not long after this, I got it into my head that maybe this would be an alternative career that I’d like to get into, the idea of teaching people things – either as a hypnotherapist, a coach or a trainer.
They were all kind of tumbling around in my mind, so I experimented with all sorts of approach. The very first thing that I did after coming back to the U.K. was I arranged for one of these practice groups. You know how they have hypnosis practice groups and NLP practice groups? I arranged to go there and teach an evening class, like an hour and a half hour class for free, just to get my training skills going.
Of course part of those training skills is telling stories and whatnot. I figured I’d invite my father down so that he could see what I was planning to do because he already knew I’d handed my resignation in, so he knew I was in my notice period.
He was very concerned but also very supportive. He always said go for it, do it if you really need to. Of course I suspect the fact that my law firm said that my job is open to me if I ever needed to come back did help matters. It definitely helped me.
So, I turned up and I started doing this thing. It was a very simple seminar on flow states and states of peak performance. Of course to bring it all out, I had to tell lots of stories to get people into the mood and to really understand what it would feel like. It went pretty well. People clapped. There were about 20 people in the room, including my dad.
They clapped and they were very nice. They shook my hand afterwards and said thank you very much. I thought that’s nice. It was better than the last time I’d stood on a stage.
That night I went to dinner with my father. It was a simple dinner, and he said something to me that really charmed me and that really actually made me feel very good.
He said Igor, when you told me that you were leaving the law firm to find another career, I’ve always supported you but I’ll tell you right now that I was a little concerned. I thought you were a little bit nuts but after seeing the looks on those people’s face tonight, I have no more doubts. I don’t think it was until then that I realized I could tell stories. Did you mean something like that?
Robin: Yes, fantastic. Thank you. It was not bad for a beginner. One of the things that I’m really clear on in my coaching is that if you want to tell extraordinary stories that touch people’s lives, then you have to be extraordinary. You have to go out and do extraordinary things. Put yourself in situations where you take risks, where you allow the universe to present you with the opportunities to transform.
Many of the stories that I tell are moments like that. However, they’re not all. We don’t always go through life having those moments every day, and it’s useful to be able to construct a story because you know you want to say something, and you have something to say that will be useful.
You think how can I tell this? How can I explain this journey that I’m going on, and make it into a transformational story? I’ve had a running joke with Randy, who’s just left the building, so let’s talk about him while he’s gone.
Basically I started a few days ago telling a story. It was the one about my mate ringing me up just before he went to the poker game. This was a genuine thing that happened. He came to see me before he went to a poker game. I had a conversation with him. I did a little bit of messing. He’s a friend and it’s what I do for a living.
He came back the next week and he said I won 50 quid. I haven’t won anything for two years and I won 50 quid that night. Please can I come round again before I go play poker tonight? I told that story to the assistants. That’s right, I told it to you first a while back? I did the one sentence version of the story and it got a laugh from Igor because he’s quick enough to get it straightaway.
I wanted to illustrate that it goes back to this idea of artistry, the interplay between conscious mind and unconscious mind. What I will do a lot with stories is tell them and fail and not worry about it. I just say oh well that one didn’t work, so I’ll try it again on somebody else or maybe if I tried this. I’ll just try it and see what responses I get. Sometimes I get a laugh, and sometimes I don’t and then I never talk to them again. Not really. That’s just part of the process of refining and telling stories.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to very quickly see if I can create one of these live from something that I’ve never thought about before.
Igor: Let’s give him a round of applause for that, folks.
Robin: I have a sense of something that I want to articulate, and it’s actually about being on stage and going out there and training and being successful. That’s the general area, and I’ve got some thoughts about the journey but it’s not very clear.
The beginning is when Igor finally persuaded me after much cajoling and frankly bribery and flattery, and blackmail at one point – you did delete those images, didn’t you?
Igor: Maybe.
Robin: I better make this a good story. So, I flew into the Bahamas and the thing is for the last three or four years I’ve very much been kind of just running my little private clinic, seeing clients who were referred to me, and keeping a low profile.
The thing is back when I was in my 20’s when I was much younger, I ran a theater company that was very successful doing what it did. It wasn’t nationally successful or anything like that, but in the town where I live it was the biggest thing going and hundreds of people came through that theater company and got their start in theater, and I realized that what I was good at was creating a safe space for people to learn from each other and from their mistakes, and have a good time going it.
But there were elements of my success that I really didn’t like. While I love it when you laugh and I love it when you clap and come up and tell me how great I am, at the same time I was Mr. Shakespeare in the park in those days and that meant that everyone and anyone involved in the town thought they could say what they liked about me.
They thought that they knew me because I had a public face, and that meant that I attracted all kinds of weirdo’s. It meant that I attracted stories that were inspired by jealousy and envy. Oh he’s this and he’s that. That’s all this kind of dark. My friend calls it an egregore. It’s like a dark spirit made up of all the gossip and the bad rumors that people spread about you and these can kind of follow you around. You’ve notice that, right Igor?
Igor: It comes with the territory.
Robin: Then there was the other thing, whenever I would start a relationship with somebody; I never knew whether it was me they really liked or whether it was because I was that guy and could help them in their career or something like that.
Those things bothered me because I’m actually quite a private person in lots of ways. I like my family. I like spending time in my garden, hanging out with my daughter and going for walks. I didn’t really have the energy or the motivation to want to go out there and do that.
As Igor said, I spent a lot of time just saving the world one person at a time, and this was a real struggle for me. Check. I spent a lot of time practicing Buddhist meditation and trying to become unattached from my ego, and I always thought that you needed a lot of ego to be that guy who stands up on that pedestal and says look at me, I’m great, I can teach you all what to do.
Igor: No bearing on me.
Robin: In the Bahamas, I talked to Igor. I talked to the guys who were there. I was still really struggling with this and struggling just for a way to see my way clear to being able to go out there and be more energetic and productive in my work because I have a daughter now, so that’s extra motivation. It wasn’t until coming here actually that things really changed. It wasn’t anything that Igor said or did, although seeing just how focused he was the entire time on your learning and just how dedicated he keeps his state of H++
when dealing not just one-on-one but with the whole aspect the way he runs his training.
Well, that might have given me a little idea that you could do these things without being too egotistical, but what really transformed it for me actually was listening to you guys and your stories and hearing not just the skills that you’ve learned, but hearing from so many people how what you’d learned had touched your lives individually in a deeply personal way and helped you to make transformations in your lives.
And that had come about through learning this stuff and through doing it. It wasn’t because Igor sat you down and did a session with you or anything like that. It was because he introduced you to some ideas and some ways of thinking that you were then able to take and apply in your own lives. I suddenly realized that there was a way that you can affect people really deeply by the message that you share with people. There is a teacher called Ramdas, who was originally a college professor at Harvard or MIT. Anyway he was Timothy Leary’s boss when Timothy Leary was still an acceptable established member of the scientific community, rather than the most dangerous man in the world.
Ramdas went off to India and became a guru, and I’ve got a tape of him in 1979 standing up in front of a group of people. He says it’s my karma to do this. What you make of it, that’s your karma.
So, transformational stories – beginning, middle and end – it’s time for an exercise, wouldn’t you say? I think so.
Igor: Do you get the idea?
Robin: Find a partner and either come up with a new experience, something that’s happened to you, or take one of the stories that you’ve already come up with, and see how just pulling out those five elements and looking at that structure there helps to just really shape that into a transformational story.
Igor: If it helps you to do this, you may find it easier if you think of a specific context. In particular think of a specific person that you would like to transform or inspire in some way and think about your own experiences in life. What have you been through that if they had gone through something similar might give them a sense of where to take things next in their own life?
The more specific you make it, the easier it is to actually attach content to it. If you want to just see where your mind takes you, then that’s fine too. Does everyone understand what to do? Let’s give you five minutes apiece, so 10 minutes in total, to explore the idea a little bit.
Just note one thing. It doesn’t matter where it ends up. It doesn’t matter if you make it through this whole structure. At this point the journey’s more important than the destination. We’ll play with the destination more in due course. Off you go.
How did the exercise go? Was it interesting? Who had a little more to say than they thought they would? Are there any comments or questions in terms of the exercise?
Student: Gwen was giving me an amazing story and we got to the point where there was the struggle and it was a very long struggle.
Igor: Sometimes they really are, aren’t they?
Student: Yes, and it was struggling to the point where she basically said – if you don’t mind me sharing – she had a friend that was closed off and didn’t want to keep walking going to a restaurant.
She couldn’t find one and she wanted to turn back, and she said wouldn’t it have been nice if she just made the decision and turned away but she didn’t? It felt like it was a huge hang and I let her know that. Then she closed it up with they found the restaurant and everything was okay.
Igor: What you just experienced is your unconscious storyteller in action. It’s saying it’s not complete yet. There’s something missing here. That’s one of the reasons we tell stories out loud because they sound very different once we actually open our mouths and put them out there than they sound in our heads.
I’ve told some phenomenal stories in my head. They don’t really work so well in real life. This is a useful thing. By the way, it’s not that the actual story
doesn’t work so well. It’s just that you need to adapt it to fit other people as well along the way.
Well done. That’s really how you build stories from just events into something more powerful. Thank you.
Robin: I have a follow-up question about that actually. It’s to you, Gwen. It’s your story, if you don’t mind. There was a moment there where you were faced with a decision. Do I turn my back and walk away and just say this isn’t worth the effort, or do you keep going? What is in there that makes her keep going? What is her process?
Student: The process was that she wasn’t really aware of having a choice about it at that moment, and so she kept going but unwillingly.
Robin: Did she have a good time at the end of it? Was it a happy story?
Student: She had a hard time but it was totally unnecessarily so because the positive solution came at the end.
Robin: Is the awareness and the realization, the fact that she has a choice about who she hangs out with?
Student: Yes.
Robin: When you’re clear about that, it makes it much easier to structure the story. Thank you.
Igor: Who else? Suddenly there are no stories left in the room.
Robin: You’re all so good.
Student: I’d just like a bit of clarification. Yesterday you presented a model with five steps. This is another version. Is it just a simplification of yesterday’s model?
Robin: Yesterday’s model had five elements, which I believe exist in most stories or
certainly you can find them when you go looking. This is more time-based. This is more a time structure, so it’s different to that extent.
Student: Would you modify it to do the three steps?
Igor: They can occur at any and all three of those steps. Some will of course lend themselves more to the five elements. For example, awareness and transformation fit awareness and transformation quite nicely, but the hero will go throughout.
Robin: And will be introduced in the beginning. The first step beginning hero creates empathy for…
Igor: Yes, think of these as overlapping structures that you can put together and there will elements that will be one-to-one and there will be elements that just go across.
Robin: They’re heuristics. They’re tools designed to get you thinking about the structure, but just go out and watch some movies and listen to some stories. People break the structure all the time, but it’s like with a great work of art. If Picasso had turned up at his first art class and said look, eyes on the side of their heads, people would have said oh dear no, be a lawyer. The famous lawyer Picasso.
Igor: Or Gandhi.
Robin: Yes. You can master some rules and then break them.
Igor: Is everyone good with that exercise? What we want to do now is take this essence and help you to scale things. You’ve told your transformation story and it took about five minutes to get it out. Sometimes you rambled a bit more and sometimes it was relatively easy to get out and you just chit- chatted afterwards.
What we’d like you to do is tell the same story again to the same person, only do it in 30 seconds. We’re going to use this to help you to scale it down.
Robin: One sentence.
Igor: One sentence per beginning, middle and end. For example, I used to think that I as a terrible storyteller. (That’s my preframe.) I actually taught a law seminar to German students and it didn’t go very well. I used to listen to my teachers and my trainers tell their stories. I loved them and felt totally inadequate that I couldn’t actually copy them and do the same thing as them.
I went to a training and eventually I taught my very first live seminar to the paying public. My father turned up and he said some very nice things about me afterwards. Simple, 30 seconds, maybe an extra sentence or two.
Robin: When I was younger, I experienced the downside of fame. I struggled to find a way to reach out to more people. Listening to your stories convinced me there was a way that I could do it that would be worth it.
Igor: That was almost like Haiku. Do you get the idea? Just spend 30 seconds apiece. What we’d like you to do is with the same partner tell your story in 30 seconds. Give them a chance to tell their story in 30 seconds.
Then spend no more than a minute or so talking about what you just did, and then do it again based on the feedback you just got from the other person. So, that’s another 30 seconds to do the refined version. You’ll basically have three minutes in total. Off you go.
Welcome back, everyone. How did that go? Was it easy? Who understands their story better now that you’ve been able to give a 30-second or a three- sentence version, but you also have a five-minute or a longer version, right? Excellent.
This idea of scaling up and down is another tool that you have to actually understand your stories, as well as being a tool for you to be able to fit the stories to the context that you’re in. Do you have a question?
Student: I found out that both of us had the same experience, trying to squeeze it down into a 30-second sound bite, we just completely missed the emotional pull in the story.
Igor: Yes it does. You’re right.
Student: We just really couldn’t relate to each other’s story as well without some crucial details.
Igor: There are ways that you can scale down and still maintain that. There’s a famous story. Was it Hemmingway who did the three-word stories or something like that?
I’ll have to paraphrase because I forget the actual version, but there was a competition amongst writers for who could write the shortest story. It was something like an ad in the paper – baby shoes, never worn.
Robin: Yes, it was Hemmingway.
Igor: There is strong emotion in that story, isn’t there? But it requires an immense amount of skill to bring that out. We don’t expect that of you at this level. All we expect you to be able to do is to be able to scale it up and down.
Yes, the more you scale it down, the more the emotional components start eroding, but then you get other advantages like speed and timing, so you can throw a nice little pithy thing out there.
If you really focus on it and really want to play with scaling stories up and down, you may well be able to create things like Hemmingway did, but it takes a lot of effort. I’m sure it took him a lot of effort to be able to create that very pithy little story, but yes it was a good thing to realize.
Robin: Blaise Pascal originally wrote the famous quote that has been attributed to many people. “I’m sorry I didn’t have time to write you a shorter letter.” What we’ll be doing for the rest of the day after the morning session is looking at what you identified there. It’s all the hypnotic elements that create connection that help to build powerful sensory representations in your audience.
Yes, by scaling down the structure, you’re losing all of that but what you’re creating and what you’re getting is the through line. Actors and writers talk about this a lot. What’s the through line of a character? What’s their narrative? What’s their drive?
When you have that in place, then you’ve got that energy in the story and it’s a lot easier to then add in those elements that add emotional connection. Thank you for your question.
Igor: Really it’s having that clarity that allows you to realize which points to emphasize.
Student: The young man here, I just love the way he took his story and brought it down, but it reminded me that when I was younger I had a minister who taught how to be able to take an idea or a story and bring it down to a minute to three minutes.
He used to say I may never have another chance to impact our life, so you had to learn how to do those stories and to have the emotion in it. I was just so happy that it’s being taught here.
Igor: It’s an important step.
Robin: Listen to what this woman has to say. She’s a phenomenal storyteller.
Student: I’m finding that with some people that I’ve spoke to, when they tell their stories they’re accessing the state and they’re in it while they’re telling it, whereas some people aren’t. How do you begin to enter the state?
Igor: That is a great question. If you want to know the answer to that, then come back after the break. We’re going to do an exercise first, but that’s what we’ll be addressing after the break. That was a very important question. Let’s do this last exercise we promised you before the break. You’ve taken your transformational story and you’ve condensed it down into a 30-second sound bite or an overview.
What I’d like you to do now is to choose one or two of the stories you told yesterday. Just scan them through your mind quickly. Select one or two of those and again put them through this structure and see if you can condense it down to about 30 seconds, three sentences each.
Just present it very quickly. They’ll present theirs. You’ll present another one and they’ll present another one. Then we’ll take a break and then we’ll look at the performance elements that will allow you to take that and build it back up again with a glorious impact.
Robin: Remember, these are scales. These are drills that help to train a way of thinking. It’s a conscious tool that you let go of as you gain more artistry.
Igor: Let’s take two minutes apiece, four minutes in total. Off you go. How did that go? Who understands some of the stories you told yesterday a bit better now? The value of scaling is
1. When you only have a minute, you can tell it in a minute.
2. It allows you to really understand the essence of what you’re trying to communicate so that when you start building it up again, you can actually build it up in the right direction rather than just foundering around and getting confused by your own facts.
Unless there’s something you want to add, I think it’s time for a break.
Robin: You have a whole bunch of stories now. You probably understand the mechanism of creating them. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself remembering stories, other relevant situations. Remember, this is an artificial situation. We’re asking you to generate stuff for no reason and in life that’s not how it works.
We tell stories that are directly relevant to our immediate ongoing experience. Don’t be surprised if the stories that you’ve come up with become relevant somewhere along the line.
Igor: That reminds me of something.
Robin: Oh really?
Igor: It’s time for a break. Let’s take 15 minutes. Thank you very much.
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