I love grandmothers. Today I’d like to thank the grandmother of Donald Davis. She was an excellent storytelling coach, and her grandson, whom she never met is a storyteller extraordinaire. She imparted great wisdom to her grandson by teaching his father how to tell his own story. You see, storytellers know when a story is not ready to be told. Often that is because we don’t know how it will end or because it’s just too soon to tell it without everyone ending up in tears, especially the storyteller. Sometimes it is a little of both. In real life, we don’t get that opportunity to age our story. We live it every day. People live through life-changing events all the time, but it's their life circumstance that are changed, not necessarily themselves — not right away. Psychologists differentiate between change which is constant, and transition which is the change happening inside the person’s mind. According to the work of William Bridges, after a life-changing event or ending, there is a period of transition where things are unclear and confusing. During this transition, you haven’t had a chance to grow and understand what has happened. At this juncture, the story people tell themselves about the event will greatly impact how they emerge from the transition phase. If they tell their story once before their emotions have caught up with their thoughts and actions, the narrative can get cooked. It can get “cooked in the squat” like a biscuit before it rises in the oven — and stay that way.
This is where Grandma Davis comes into play. She guided her son to tell the story of his leg being injured with an ax and guided him to tell it from different perspectives and over time. She said that if a person didn’t tell their story, it could sit on them like a rock. She told him you are not telling the story to change what happened; you are telling the story to change you. Stories have the power to change people because the truths they reveal can change a person’s thoughts which can change their feelings and their actions. Grandma Davis helped her son change his relationship to what happened to him and turn a tragedy into the prologue of his amazing life.
When you are a child and something happens to you, you think you are “BIG” because you are as big as you have ever been. As time goes on and you revisit the events of your life, you will find that you might have been much younger or smaller than you remember. Your judgment of yourself and others needs to mature and grow with you. We can all learn from Grandma Davis and reexamine stories from our own lives to see if they may have been “cooked in the squat” before we were able to keep telling them from different perspectives and over time.
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