Are You a Storyteller? Fact vs. Story

Do you realize how often you tell stories?

You may be an experienced storyteller and not even know it.

Stories keep us in suffering and when they define us, they trap us.

One of the most fundamental practices of Conscious Leadership is to learn to notice what is fact vs. what is story and to look for alternative stories.

Learning to recognize the distinction between story and fact gives you access to seeing the world in a completely different way, helps you to recognize more opportunities for you to break out of your own patterns and support others in breaking out of theirs.

This concept is one of the first things I teach when I begin working with CEOs, Founders and Executive teams.

In the episode, Fact vs. Story — The Most Fundamental Concept in Conscious Leadership , on Allowed: Conscious Leadership and Personal Growth , I teach you how to recognize your stories and learn to speak unarguably with facts. (What is speaking unarguably? Check out: The Best Communication Ninja Skill — Speaking Unarguably .)

Highlights:

• 6:11 — What is a story?
• 8:11 — What is the difference between a fact and a story? There are two different categories of facts. Facts you can attain from your external senses, such as sight, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. The second category is internal facts such as body sensations and emotions — these are inner experience facts.
• 10:38 — There are 3 types of inner facts you can observe. The first is body sensations. The second is emotions. The third category is thoughts.
• 11:48 — How can we describe our emotions in an unarguable way? It is useful to focus on a model that uses 5 basic emotions. These are joy, fear, sadness, anger, and desire.
• 21:40 — As a leader, your stories matter and are important to share. So labeling them and being aware that stories are not facts is a key to Conscious Leadership.

Our stories are what keep us in suffering. We all have so many stories.

Might there be a story about how things need to be different? How somebody should behave in a different way? How something in your life is not enough? Something in you is not enough?

When our stories define us, they trap us.

One of the practices of conscious leadership is to access greater influence, control, and power in our own lives, satisfy our own needs and create our visions by looking for alternate stories.

So, in this week’s episode, we explore the fundamental invitation of Conscious Leadership, which is to understand the difference between a fact and a story.

There are so many of us who really stand for change in the world.

When we are standing in our own stories, it’s very hard to enroll those whom we need to most influence in order to create that change we desire.

As leaders, we can use our storytelling abilities to inspire and to motivate, but when we want to create a truly lasting change, we can speak unarguably in the language of facts.

This episode will help you begin to notice, “is it a fact, or is it a story?”

Originally published at https://caneel.com.