*For those who would rather see the conversation in print instead of video format, below is the transcript. We tried to catch any major transcription errors, but hope you'll forgive any we miss.

Stop Telling Tidy Stories: Transcript

Welcome to the Wild + Brave Life  Podcast, a place where we think wild ideas, take brave action and learn from awesome humans in all walks of life.  I'm Lew Hastings. And this is your host coach Morgan Hendrix. Hi Morgan.

Hey Lew, I'm so excited to be thinking with you today for our podcast.

Indeed. I'm excited as well.

Absolutely. Well, Lew, you chose a really great topic for us today. The concept has a lot of different applications, so wherever you're at really excited for you to think with us about it. Today, our topic or title is "Stop Telling Tidy Stories."

There are some things that happen when we clean up the stories that we tell and storytelling is just so essential to connecting and thinking together. We're going to talk about that a little bit today. Tell me Lew, why did you pick this topic from the list? I know there are a lot of things on there that you could have chosen.

What, what made you pick, "Stop Telling Tidy Stories?"

It's the one that jumped out at me, because if I think about all of the experiences, not just me, other people have had in our lives when we're talking to other people, we always think, well, we don't want to take up too much of their time, or we start to remove pieces that we think were not relevant in the experience.

And we, we clean them up and I think. You know, as you and I have said before to one, another life is messy. And sometimes those components once taken out, it makes the story very sterile and not real almost. I know that myself, I've told a number of stories that people are like, this is not real because I've taken out some of the

context.

Yes. I think there's something also that happens and you you're pointing to it when you say they almost become sterile they're too squeaky clean. If you only mentioned the factors that kind of fit inside your heuristics in what you expect to hear then in that case, you're really taking out a lot of the reality.

I think there are a lot of motives, different motives we have for being tidy. Taking away the contrary experiences the goal of doing that is usually to try to amplify the one-sidedness of the story. "This is a story about," and then you fill in the blank and then you retrofit the telling of the story to support that one point.

It is an effective way to make a point, but is it strictly true? Are you getting the heart of what was experienced in the story? When it is told with a single point?

I definitely subscribe to that. As a historian, somebody who actually went to school for that purpose, right. With that that discipline in mind. I think that's why I love reading biographies so much because even though the author may come with some bias, usually the treatments are "warts and all" right, so you get a well-rounded idea of the person.

You know, if you read about and I'll choose presidents, Morgan, as you know, I have somewhat of a presidential historian. You're a bit of a buff. I am a bit of a buffer. So when you, when you look at these these presidents that have so shaped our country and our history, and you look at them in their treatments in the history books, you don't get the full context of what made them who they are.

And it also takes the humanity out of them. Totally. It makes them someone that is you know, an icon rather than a human being. And I want to know that my presidents were human beings. Or I want to know that my fellow countrymen. Human beings. I want to hear about the heartbreaks. I want to hear about the struggles.

I want to hear all of that because otherwise there's a, there's a feeling of fakeness. There's a feeling of, and I think you mentioned this. What are you hiding? What are you, what are you trying to cover up or what are you trying to make sure that we don't see because you're trying to make us think in one way or another about this particular person.

Yeah, it can't be that tidy. I want to see the you know, the seedy underbelly of of people, places and things, right? Yeah.

Well, because at that point you feel that you've actually seen them. Some of it isn't just that you want the dirty, because you don't just want the dirt either.

You want the whole human. I've started talking about this as the obituary effect in storytelling. And I don't know if I accidentally borrowed that from somebody, but to me, the obituary effect comes into place when you tell the story in a way that essentially all of the characters now are dead, because you have told their story in a way that ties everything up into a bow and you haven't said anything that you wouldn't put in there, obituary. It fits with your picture of them. And usually the obituary effect happens when you're telling a story from your own life and you want to be seen a particular way, but the effect is you die. You're not a living person, who's in progress anymore.

And all of us, as we're in process, we become slow to grow when we try to live tidy stories, because we're trying to experience things in a way that we can instantly convert into a persuasive story that is clean, and it has no contradicting factors. In some ways, I see how the micro storytelling we do on social media has amplified this obituary effect for us.

Instead of it just being actual stories. Hey mom, "here's what happened at school this morning," or "this is who I was before you met me." When you meet a new colleague, now it's happening every 5, 10, 15 minutes. And it's kind of spawned another effect that I think of, I call it premature wisdom.

It's the delusion of premature wisdom. I was so confused before, but I have it all figured out now it's kind of a specific flavor of the obituary effect, but I don't know. I feel like you've probably seen that casting first rights on yourself because you've got to be done and fixed and tidy now, and the story dies, the truth, the complex truth of it kind of dies.

Yeah. And you, boy, you've packed so much in there. Let me just backtrack just a second. If I may back when I was in college, And taking writing courses, which I did, I took playwriting and creative writing. And yeah, I did not know that. I, I know you did not

learning new things about you after a decade .

When I was taking those courses, we had to write an obituary for a famous person and my famous I'll never forget it.

My famous person to write an obituary for is still alive, by the way. And it was Andrew Lloyd Webber. Oh. So I got to write all of the things about his life and accomplishments to that point. And I was like, wow, this guy has accomplished so much in his life so far and he's still going.

But it's interesting that newspapers do write obituaries ahead of celebrity deaths so that they can pull them out of a file and update it as needed and yeah. And get these obituaries out in a timely fashion.

Wow. That makes actually a lot of sense, but I never thought about that.

Yeah. And, and I learned that in that class and it was interesting that exactly what we're talking about, we made, or I made his life very tidy. It was, this is, this is who he was, where he was born and what he has done in his life. I didn't get to talk about his loves. I didn't get to talk about his struggles. I didn't get to talk about the failures. All I got to talk about was the, the public persona, the person that we want to remember him as, so that obituary effect is absolutely what we do, especially on social media.

But even when we meet somebody at a party, right, you want them, you put your best foot forward. Think about a job interview. This is ingrained in us to tell the best version of ourselves

and the thin slice at that just right. Just,

just that headline that makes people say, oh, you are X or this, and you act X. And this is what I can expect from you in the future when all of that may be true, but probably not. Right. Because to your point, we are still a work in progress. We are still growing, changing, progressing sometimes for the better, sometimes for

worse, right? It happens. And I do think that in progress ness, that if we make a point to notice, when we stop allowing ourselves the room to grow and be in process and we fight to put the messy back in the story.

And then I actually have a couple of techniques for doing that. For those of you who follow Wild + Brave, and you love that we do brave actions like something tactical practical. We have some of that for this. But the reason that we need to move toward messy stories again, is because we need to cultivate the humility that comes and the confidence that comes from recognizing that being in progress is healthy, it's respectable, and it is the only way to be authentically human.

Whenever you hear a story about someone who you respect and they're there in a messy place. Sometimes headlines will grab the messy and that's all they tell. And it's actually a tidy story because they've swept the strength, the great choices of the past, the potential change they've swept that out.

So it became, tidally just the gross spits and we take that tidy story and we let it destroy the value we saw in the person in the past. Is this is the hardest, I think when it happens in close personal relationships. Yeah. The headlines we leave, come to expect our celebrities to do things that disappoint us or our leaders to fall from grace.

But the people in our lives, it happens. The headlines can be just as brutal in person to person life. But if we recognize that being in progress is part of the truth of even a story with a beautiful ending. Something was really a season of growth for you, chances are, it was messy. And you start to love the messy parts because they are part of getting there. And they're part of freeing you from the delusions of perfection that are really a cage. They really keep us from growing. If you're only allowed to improve without making mistakes along the way that quantity of if your improvements shrinks.

For those of us who struggle with perfectionism you know exactly what I'm talking about here, right? Yeah. You can only take the most calculated risks and progress just slows to a crawl. I I'm, in my mind, storytelling is a place to live out the mindset that values humility and the fact that we are all humans and progress and to look for and support the value of that even when we want people to have things finally come together at some point. We want them to get there, but to stop stealing the process from them so that they genuinely do arrive.

Yeah, the, the stories become more interesting don't they? Especially for people that, and you've pretty much said this, you begin to root for that person, right? You want that person to succeed. You want to see the better outcome.

Think of the movies that we watch and the TV shows and where we have well, think about entertainment and acting throughout history. The, the most popular theme is the tragic hero, right? The hero that starts out with good intentions. And yet goes through the muck and mire and the messiness of life and things happen, bad things happen and takes them off track.

Yeah. And then you start to think, man, I want them to get back on track and

succeed. And it does something for you when you see them do it. You know, there's another interesting effect that you've, you've made me think about one of the big problems affecting a lot of us right now is loneliness and isolation.

And it's a, it's a human problem that is exacerbated by a lot of things that we've had an extra measure lately is our, our society, especially in the west, we were just very split up and we're all trying to be productive and make things happen. And we get lonesome and this technique of escaping the pull of the tidy stories.

Tidy stories, create isolation.

Here's how, here's how I say it. Talking to you. And I know a few things about you. So I run through the story that I could tell, and I go ahead and pull out the pieces. I don't think you'll connect to cause I have a picture of you, right? You're loo maybe I know that you love history and you read a lot and that's all I know about you, right?

Maybe I don't know anything else about you. And I tell you a story about a trip I took to somewhere and I was afraid for my life, for, from a bear in the process of learning some historical fact I think you'll find interesting. If I only try to impress you with this historical fact, I have learned, I will probably edit out the bear terror.

Right now, if I tell you the messy, the, the honest, messy version of the story, or we'll call it the gooey version of the story, I leave the bear chasing in and you have an opportunity to share your bear story. And I go, wait, you've been chased by a bear or whatever it is my perspective of who you are changes.

You have been able to grow to me. Nothing changed in who you were, but the limitations I had on my understanding of you are progressively broken down, simply because I have shared something that you were able to connect to pieces I wouldn't have predicted you connecting to. And in that way, like socially, you become a real person.

You jump off of the page. You're not Lew, my friend who knows history and reads a lot. You've now become a fellow adventurer that actually makes us feel less alone. When we discover new things about people.

It's something that Dr. Barbara Fredrickson talks about in her book called Love 2.0, but she talks about how bio synchrony is created between people.

The biological experience of love is shared positive emotion and the way that you share positive emotion, one of the most beautiful emotions you can share with another person is surprise. . If we share surprise over a shared experience, neither of us that we know.

We've experienced love in that micro moment. And that's what human connection is. And we're dying without it. So tidy stories take the love opportunities and they squish them to these you're I'm going to share, oh, he's gonna, he's gonna agree with me about this. I have this very short list of positive emotions.

I've decided we can share. Usually they, they go to things like shared you know, shared value of something like hope. I hope this can change a shared value of love vaguely. Like I really enjoy travel and I think Lew enjoys travel. So we'll reinforce those, but you don't get those spicy ones of shock and awe and fascination that come when you let the story get gooey.

I agree. Talk about messiness. You heard my phone ring there and I know we're supposed to ignore that that's messy, right? That's that's when messy happens, but to your point Morgan, and thank you for, for sharing all those things about these micro opportunities for love, for human experience human shared experience.

I love the shared experience of surprise. Yeah. Surprise and delight. Right? Let's let's let's continue that thought. It's not just, oh, I'm surprised that happened to you. I'm surprised and quite delighted

and delight often leads to curiosity, which is a super food, human emotion, curiosity. Oh, that is a thing, man.

Well, what happened to you? What, what was your experience like? Did you feel what I felt?

Yeah, exactly. And I think that and, and it deepens your character. It deepens what the person knew about you to your point. And, and really fleshes you out as a a well-rounded or or a more fully developed person in my mind.

You're not this cursory knowledge, one dimensional or two dimensional friend you're a much stronger personality than that. And, and again, that leads to the curiosity part. I want to know more. And then what else did you go through besides that? Like, I don't want, you want to know more about that one instance.

That's gonna trigger me to say, well, what about, have you ever done X or have you ever seen X? So that's the, those are the conversations that you have

after. What you're Demonstrating. And I hadn't put it together this way, but you are demonstrating this technique, this simple idea. If you let this wild idea chew on your brain a little bit and let it change your behavior, you might start having conversations that allow you to rethink the people in your life to rethink the narrow or the a one dimensional way you connect with them and rethinking to take what you assume, you know, our confidence level about what we know is way higher than it should be.

It's not just that we think we know each other it's so that our level of confidence that we fully understand each other is so out of proportion and you let a circumstance like this, you let the sharing of a story prompt you to see this person, Ray, thank them. You open up and you let them become human. Instead of the obituary effect killing the characters in all the story, which is us you, you, you do treat people as if they were already dead and buried when you decide who they are and don't let them keep surprising you keep fascinating you and, and share more things with them.

So

yeah, you can't put people in a box. No, you can't. And shouldn't it. It's tragic. I think that's part of the disconnect, right? Where we don't have human interaction. We don't have human connectivity because we put people in a box, oh, you are defined by this. You know, when we think about celebrities, We only see a small portion of their life.

So when the tabloids they've decided that they're going to focus on the negative. Or the juicy story, and that's unfortunate because there's so much more to that person. And that is just a small example of everyone who passes you on the street.

Right. If you're in New York city and you're walking down the street, how many, absolutely fascinating people do you pass by that you never get a chance to speak to, but if you continue to put people in boxes,

You will never meet

them. You will never meet them. And you will never know the breadth of experiences that people have had throughout the course of their life. That may even if you hear one of those stories, and again, this goes to learning from other people. It may even prompt you to take a turn in your own life and pursue something more exciting for yourself.

Learning from other people, that social learning element, where just hearing the stories of others, teaches us more of what's possible.

And it wakes us up to stuff. You gave a great example of how that this mindset can really shift how you treat strangers. I think you would also agree that it can really shift how we see the people we think we know.

One of the things is a coach. There's a real honor and a privilege in hearing from people. And when they hire you to be their thinking partner, they trust that you have the strength to receive whatever's going on. And so I get to hear sometimes more complex versions of life than what they're sharing with the people closest to them. And often when they're really burdened and drained and demoralized, just not sure how they're going to keep managing.

They have people in their life who they deeply care about, but they're telling them tidy stories. And when they talk to me, they give more of a full picture. But they don't feel free to have mixed results and take them to a conversation and have a friend think with them or a family member.

"I'm really loving what I'm doing. I'm feeling a little insecure that maybe I'm not qualified for what I'm working on. Because of this and this. I mean, I love what I'm doing." A lot of us, if we're the friend and our friend tells us that, what do we do? We say, don't be silly. You're just feeling like an imposter it's imposter syndrome.

Of course you should be there. We're asking them unintentionally to tidy up their story, instead of saying, "well, talk to me about that. What, what do you think maybe isn't fitting, you know, what, where are you inadequate? Where are you feeling inadequate in what you're doing?"

" Well, this happened in that happened."

Oh, you know, that's the kind of thing. They don't want to tell you something went wrong. They didn't know something they needed to know. Maybe even somebody got hurt or something fell behind. Right. But to tell that messy story, that gooey story. They're afraid that their loved one is going to think that they're giving up and the loved one wants to cheer em up!

And so we need to learn to listen to gooey stories, with more appreciation for the messiness, or we reinforce you are only free to tell me a story that you have tied into a bow. Wait until you're dead. Wait until this whole experience is dead and buried. And then you can tell me you'll, the obituary, tied in a bow.

That is really an interesting point. And it prompts me to think of being present in the moment with the people that you're speaking with and you can call people out, right? You can, you can call people out on that and say I'll get that version when you die. Yeah. Right. I'll get that. Thank you. Thank you.

But I'll get that version when you're dead. Now, really talk to me. Right. So I am very forward in that way that, you know, I, I, I can, I can have my social graces where of course it wouldn't. I wouldn't push people that I don't know to tell me that the gooey parts, but, but certainly, you know, if you're a good friend and someone tells you their tidy story, I almost go to my default, which is.

It's me. You're talking to here. Right? I'll get that version. Don't worry. Don't worry. It's already, somebody already wrote it. Some student in college already wrote that story and it's sitting in a file somewhere waiting for you to kick the bucket. Tell me that's great. You're not, yeah, come on. Let's talk about the

journey now.

You know, Lew, when you do that in relationships, you're, you're in line with your natural personality, your natural temperament to use that directness, to give them permission. And so that, that's a great example. If you're a direct person it may be that as long as you bring yourself to the conversation and recognize this as an opportunity. You can, elicit more details.

For those listeners who are a little more sometimes you have more of the supportive personality where you aren't as naturally direct having some supportive questions to say, oh, well, it sounds like you're really enjoying what you're doing. And you're glad that you're there, but you know, what are the, what are the parts that are a little more difficult to deal with?

You know, everyone has parts that are harder to deal with. What's challenging for you right now. And you kind of start asking more of those empathetic questions that you have to be careful that you don't phrase it like you're looking for the shocking, bad headline. Because that's another version of tidiness. But where you say, oh, and what else, you know, Get the more complex picture.

It sounds like you're loving this, you know, where are some of the challenges that, you know, haven't quite resolved yet can kind of give people permission. So if you, you know, whether you can tap into the strength of directness, like Lew does some of us, we had that strength and we're not using it just because we're distracted or we're thinking about what we're going to say next. Or we're not really invested in seeing this person as a whole person.

I actually had the opportunity to talk to some people who are really in crisis. They're been thinking of ending their life and often people who are in such a hopeless place, aren't just there because they don't have anyone in there. They often have people in their life who care about them very much, but they don't, they're afraid of sharing their burdens, their in-progress-ness with those people because they don't want to stress them or cause them anxiety or make them afraid. They don't want to burden the people they care about.

And I think that that is one of the longterm effects of tidy storytelling. So it really can save a life when you fight against this instinct. So,

yeah. And that's an interesting point too Morgan, that not only do people who are potentially in crisis, not want to burden their their loved ones, who, someone who clearly like, like you said, Loves them, or they do have somebody in their life, but there is that fear factor as well.

I don't want this person's view of me to be ruined. Right. And that's probably the most damaging of all. There's the selflessness of not wanting the person to be overburdened by my problems, but there's the selfishness as well of saying, ah, I can't reveal my self, that this is the last person that I would want to know this about me or to feel this way about me. And I'm not, I'm going to go literally to my grave before I let that happen. So you definitely have to, and you know, not to this by no means is, is to make this small in any way, but you have to know your audience, right? You have to be, you can't be direct with everyone, right. I'm not direct with everyone.

You know, if it's a good friend or somebody, I feel like I can, you know open up to, I would say, you know, come up. I know that I know better than that. But for those who are more fragile, those who are more consider it and thinking about someone else's films, like you, you really have to know your audience, but yeah, it's interesting when you talk about people in crisis and and their reasons for not involving people that are closest to them who could probably help them in a lot of cases. Right.

Absolutely. And so, and it is a need for more connection. Yeah. So we said we do some tactical practical. How about we do that? What are some of the things that we can do to stop telling tidy stories? One of them starts with, when you share stories, don't tie up the bow at the end, but be in progress.

Sometimes it takes humility and practice, but when you tell a story without telling the moral of the story at the end, you let the person you're talking to find their own moral of the story. And sometimes they will surprise you. Sometimes you'll learn new things from your story, you just told, if you don't tie it up. And tying it up, I think we all know what this means.

It's as simple as saying. Yeah. And so, you know, it was a really exciting trip and I'm just glad I'm back. It's like,

well, wait, right. The conversation doesn't go anywhere

after that. It goes nowhere. Right. So not tying up the bow at the end and, and keeping in some of the details. So it's, when you tell the story sometimes you can go as far, if you're someone who has really been living this way or telling your stories this way, especially a lot of us in helping professions.

We think that we need to tell tidy stories in order to be trustworthy, that if people see us as being too much in progress, why would we be able to help. And like you said, it's like kind of that selfishness of, " I want people to see me as having everything figured out." None of us have everything figured out.

It really helps when we get better at sharing our process as we go. And if we choose to do that, we become I'm someone who acknowledges that growth is in progress. So, so here's, here's something. If you're someone who is in that circumstance or deals with perfectionism, pick the words that you find scary and find a way to use them.

For me, scary phrase "I was wrong about it." It's a very scary phrase for most of us. We tend to edit those things out. We'll say it, package it nice. And be like, I learned that it's like, oh man, I, I assumed this and I was wrong about or like saying "I was wrong." I actually, it was a few months ago. I really was focused on this and I had it on my list.

Look for a chance to say I was wrong out loud, at least once a day, where you have to break inertia on those phrases you don't say. The things you don't want to have to be real. Like I don't want to be wrong. So if you were to say what the scary phrases are, the things you would naturally avoid in your storytelling, Lew, what comes to mind?

Yeah, I think for sure the, "I was wrong about X" is probably on top of everyone's list and it's certainly on top of mine. I find using the phrase or a phrase that starts with, "I couldn't" makes me feel weak or less than so I avoid, "I couldn't" a lot. And sometimes that's a good thing, right. Where, you know, I couldn't could be a something that you use to escape responsibility, but you should be using it right \ a lot more then we try to avoid it.

So, yeah. That's one of those scary phrases "I couldn't."

Hm. Hm. A version of that, that is a scary phrase for a lot of people is "I didn't prepare for," or "I didn't know." "I didn't know this." So thank you for sharing your story phrase. I think most of us can kind of guess, whereas ours are hat but choosing to use it and look for that thread in the story that you're telling about how your day went about you know, what you're planning to do next month.

Like try to weave it in this story. So use the phrases and, and, and let them gooey obituary effect with that one. A good technique is when somebody tells a story and they try to tie it up in a bow, ask one more question about some small detail of the experience. If you go through a particular detail, then sometimes it snaps people out of the "I'm telling a Tale" and they actually remember. And it can spark a whole, you get an actual side story that they wouldn't have told, and now you've had a genuine to experience. So you can kind of spark that in people by asking a curious question. So those would be the techniques that I would encourage us all to try.

If there's one you were going to lean into this week curious questions or adding in the scary phrase or simply using the story to share where you were at more completely, what do you think you might try this week lew?

I think this week I will probably try to be use of, see, I, I, I hesitate to say vulnerability, but a messy example of a learning experience that I would normally leave out. But it's important for people to hear it right, so that someone else doesn't go through X or someone goes, oh, I didn't know that. So now I there's, here's a landmine that Lew happened to throw out there that I didn't even know was there.

So I think this week, I might try leaving in a messy part of a story that will either prompt a, a longer conversation with a bigger conversation or help someone

Something you didn't mention, but I wouldn't be surprised if happens is when you tell that example, you might end up with somebody who they also made the mistake and they felt like they were the only one who did. And to see that you made the same error or had the same problem or whatever it is, whatever the messy detail they're suddenly not alone. And that is so helpful for their growing process as well. It is a gift and it does take humility to tell stories that are not tidy.

It is one of the brave things you can do that helps other people feel more connected to you and experience more meaning together. So I think you picked a great topic this week Super Lew.

Yeah. It's definitely one that I think we can all learn from, and certainly we all have the experience either through someone else who's told us their tidy story, or we tell our own tidy story or we only focus on the tidy stories and not not the deeper meaning in life.

So yeah, this one jumped out at me for

sure. We've got to stop letting our friends get away with it because sometimes they're, they're lonelier than we know. And it's a really good way to interrupt that loneliness to be a little more present to this story. So thank you for all the stories that you have shared with me and listened to for me, I think this is just one of the many ways we can kind of strengthen our Wild + Brave with each other.

Well, thank you. And thank everyone who's listening for thinking with us.