It was a long time ago - no: a damn long time! -when I started working on my story book. It is not yet finished.
But one day, on his birthday, this book will not be one book, but several books at the same time. The one that I hope you will soon have in your hands, and the whole pile of unwritten books underneath. Some of them I started and didn't finish, some hung in my head but didn't want to get into my heart and then of course not onto paper. Some simply got out of hand and now drift hopelessly without a helmsman, like soul sellers on the server's boundless sea of data.
TOO LAZY TO READ ON? THEN LISTEN TO ME:
In the blogcast, I read this recent blog article to you. With emphasis, of course!
In the meantime, I even brought out a completely different one.
In the meantime, I think almost hourly of the writer Maximilan Glanz from the TV series "Der ganz normale Wahnsinn" and his unfinished work "Woran es liegt, dass sich der Einzelne nicht wohlfühlt, obwohl es uns allen so gut geht". Two programmatic titles in many other respects to this day, indeed!
Anyone who has been following my work on the book, which doesn't exist yet, in any form, is about to throw their hands up in horror, I bet. Last Tuesday I started all over again. Well, what did I say?
What a pain, my goodness! I have lost count of how many times I have now started and then discarded each of these attempts. Some of them were even quite a bit past "started".
This has never happened to me before, although I have had to toil quite a lot and with a lot of my writing. But the toil is part of it, it's the process, the work itself. Although you know it's an indispensable part of the exercise, there are phases when you're convinced it only affects you, the biggest dork on earth, who just can't do anything. Everything successful before was an accident.
Maybe it's all true? After all, you can have fleas, lice and a birthday at the same time.
In any case, this much is official: this time I'm particularly struggling.
Story means transformation
Why am I telling you this? Because it has a lot to do with one of the original sources of understanding of this book (which doesn't exist yet) and of Story, and so with what you will then be able to draw out.
Let's take a dashing shortcut through the unwritten books here and let me tell you what the finished one definitely won't be. Because I already know that. It will:
1. not a book about storytelling. Certainly not! There are already plenty of such manuals, even some very good ones.
2. not a book about dramaturgy, about the next trick in terms of media effectiveness or anything else like that.
3. not a book about the honeyed sweet magic dust of literature, films or theatre, even if they always accompany us with relish, these many wonderful stories about people and their transformation into ... yes: into what?
And that is exactly what it will be: a book about transformation. About a transformation that is imminent, that presses and pushes and demands in many, many of us and wants to finally resolve so much of what is going wrong here and now and has long since gone wrong: in a new story, in a New Story.
The pain of transformation was then what kept holding me back and driving me in equal measure as I nibbled at this tough thing until it almost wore me down.
I noticed a substantial transformation in myself.
With every blog article I wrote, every podcast conversation I had, every workshop and every keynote, my thematic focus shifted more and more. Whereas originally I dutifully lived up to my nome de guerre, The Story Dude, and always focused my work on story as it is understood in the best, in the rarest cases under storytelling, i.e. on the mysterious background and the high art of storytelling, on the magical-magnetic power of stories and how we can use them for our manifold tasks in just as many ways, I shifted, my perspective shifted visibly to the nucleus of story in the essential sense. That is, to its mythological origins, which are to be found where we humans define ourselves as - well: as humans. Or try to find ourselves there. Where we have grown within ourselves, where something moves within us.
Consequently, my coaching sessions for companies, brands, NGOs, managers and founders have increasingly focused on this aspect and what lies behind it, what is bubbling deep inside.
Every time it was the same: as soon as we started talking about the planned task, we unexpectedly took a tight turn and ended up at the core of the matter, at the inner story of the coachees. This is still the case today - every PowerHour basically revolves around this.
Yes, the inner story. That's what we're really talking about when we talk about story, because that's where our perspective comes from, along with the direction, speed and spin for our narratives. This is where the momentum for the movement of people, teams and society is created and ultimately the transformation, especially that on the outside. The inner story is the nourishing humus of the narrative blossom. We tell stories for this kind of experience.
The longing story burns within us.
Little by little, I expanded this - yes: philosophical - part in my keynotes and lectures. Cautiously, perhaps, even a little too hesitantly, because I heard sceptical voices from my team.
Do people really understand this?
Don't people expect something else?
Isn't that too esoteric?
The answer was given by the audience.
If I am almost regularly pleased to receive wonderfully positive feedback for my Instigate & Brand, the response to the new depth of topics is even more than that. People feel touched, understood and picked up. I often receive letters with the tenor "Thank you for your latest blog post, it reached me at just the right time in my life ...".
Why is that?
Obviously, something is meeting a growing, a burning longing in many people. Some of us can already see and describe it, most of us who feel it feel it latently: we are missing something crucial - as people, as teams, as a society.
What we are missing flares up in different corners, in increasing density, under different names, the disturbing circumstances through Corona act as an accelerant of the special class for this.
Ultimately, it is always about the meaning in us, in our work, in our existence. Some people search for it and call it the "why" or the "purpose". In companies they say "purpose" and hopefully don't mean "marketing stunt".
The way we live today, question after question flashes up for a growing number of people in a hectic pace:
What is this?
What will be?
What is it all for?
What will become of us?
Who will we become?
In short: Who am I?
These questions are not new. They are primal questions of the human being, the living being that already knows at birth: I won't get out of this number alive.
The answers to that, those are the ones that hurt so much inside us, that want to get out, that want to go into the world. In a way, it's like giving birth. It's not pleasant for anyone involved, which is to say! No one knows why it has to be so painful. But that's the way it is: if something wants to go out into the world, then it has to go out, nothing helps.
It's the same with babies and it's no different with our spiritual children. And certainly not when the transformed self wants to get out of oneself and into life. It is too big for the old shell, because we have outgrown ourselves. These are growing pains in our old skin that suddenly lend a touch of ironic reality to the saying "I feel like I've been born again".
Are we running out of breath?
If you have an idea, if you want to create something - regardless of whether it is tiny or huge, whether it has meaning for you or the world, or whether it means the world to you, whether you invent something or invent yourself: every creative process has to get over something. My friend Constantin recently said to me, meaningfully, "The more important, the more necessary something is that you bring into the world, the greater are the counterforces that want to prevent it." If he is right, then my book will be quite important. Let's keep our fingers crossed for Constantin!
Perhaps this is also what urges, drives and stings so many people. We humans have to bring something into the world, create or improve something. We need to grow ourselves, but we learn nothing but to function, to conform and to fill the emptiness that arises in us with things that we consume and define ourselves by. From food to media to stuff.
We, as humans, are playing hooky in a big way from our unique role in the interplay of everything, and have been doing so for an infinitely long time, by trying to dominate, to conquer, to defeat. This is the story we have been telling ourselves and each other for ages under the title "someone will win". We interpret it as an eternal struggle of good against evil and are firmly convinced of one thing: we are the good guys.
So we exploit instead of being useful. We create more and more on the outside, but a vacuum on the inside. We are left breathless. Yet we don't want to and don't understand that we act on the outside but live on the inside. Or not.
It's about our inner story and the painfully yawning emptiness that comes when it's missing - and it's missing. Or, as my grandmother, old Story Dudette, would say, "No Story. No Glory."
Anyone who knows my grandmother knows that contradicting her is not a good idea. Trust me on this one: Not only do I know her, but I know her badass right hook that comes out of her little sleeve faster than Lucky Luke can pull (he's known to pull faster than his shadow). So I don't disagree, but allow myself an updated treatment of the material, dearest Omama. This has already worked well for others, for example in "Pygmalion" and "My Fair Lady", hasn't it?
So let's write "New Story. New Glory." on the premiere announcement, open the gates of the World Theatre and raise the curtain. Hopefully you will soon have the libretto in your hands (although I'd rather not promise anything ...). It currently has the working title "The book that doesn't exist yet" and is about how a New Story makes us strong as people, teams and society.
It's about you, about me and about all of us, so it's also going to be a pretty personal book for us. That's probably why it took so long to write it. Because it wasn't ready yet - because I wasn't ready yet.
But now!
And at least there's also a story to tell about the development process, because as my grandmother - see above ...