Stories define who we are and enable us to communicate in ways no other collection of words can achieve

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How would you feel if you came home and your house was gone-- blown up and burned down? Jane (a false name but real story) tells me that one of the happiest days in her life was the day she came home to find her house gone. She'd gone away for the weekend with her son, and upon returning home... home wasn't there. While she was gone, something in the house had exploded and it had burned to the ground. She wrote,

"I stopped at the mailbox, and then pulled into my driveway, and.....my house was gone. While we were gone, on the first morning at 3 am after the day we left, the house had exploded it had been in the papers, and many people had tried to reach us, but this was not possible. The firemen had risked their lives to save us, thinking we were in the house. The entire neighborhood had gathered at 3 am ...horrified When i got out of the car ...shocked, a neighbor told me what had happened, and he showed me tons of photographs of the house in flames. i asked him if my son could stay with him for about half an hour, and that I wanted to be alone. I walked into the ruins, and even if this was strictly forbidden, and there was the refrigerator, and it had melted to the floor. And then I started crying...sobbing. Why? Because I knew at that moment that I was the luckiest person in the entire world, and that moment didn't pass."

Jane used this story to illustrate how sometimes, when bad things happen, they put our lives in perspective. What could be seen as bad experiences can turn into wonderful outcomes. Imagine trying to argue that point without such a powerful story. It's amazing how a story can affect the way you think about something, or change the way you think. About ten years ago, I became interested in the "World of Story" and the Science and Art of story. After giving some feedback on a freinds novel, I asked him for feedback on a novel I was working on. I liked his feedback and he suggested that I take a workshop with screenwriting trainer Robert McKee, who had just written a book, Story Structure. When I took the course, I was amazed at how he'd made a science of Story creation and enhancement. I asked him if he'd ever spoken to psychologists, because I thought a lot of his ideas applied to psychology. "No. I'm a screenwriter," he replied. Well that got me started thinking about how story concepts could be applied to psychology. After all, psychologists elicit stories from their patients, with the goal of helping them to re-write those life stories in a healthier, happier way. I started thinking about all the fields that use stories, besides writers writing novels and screenplays-- lawyers talking to juries, ministers preaching, teachers, marketers, researchers, public speakers... and I concluded that the story business was one of the two or three biggest businesses in the world. After talking to a number of the leaders in some of these fields-- leaders on the use of story in those fields-- it became clear to me that there had never been a meeting that brought together experts from all the different worlds of story. I organized that meeting and held it in 2002. I'll be holding the sixth annual Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story on January 19-22, 2007, in Palm Springs, California. I've come to believe that as humans evolved, their protohuman ancestors, telling stories around the campfire, of hunts and close calls with death, grunting and gesturing, were actually, through the story telling, helping to form our brains the way they are today-- able to use language, visualize, use metaphors... We are very much the creation of our stories. We live our lives, perceiving our existence through the eyes of the stories we have adopted or that have been given to us by our culture, our family, our community. We build our dreams within the stories we are living. We connect to others when we find that their stories mesh with ours. Sharing our stories is a way to explore new opportunities to connect with each other, to expand our own repetoire of stories. Understanding how stories work is a way to look within our selves and our relationships and understand some of the reasons we think, feel and do the things we do. If you are a professional, there's a good chance that using stories and understanding how they function in your work will help you work better. I've used individual story analysis to help coach politicians identify the stories in their lives that define and illustrate who they are, what they stand for, their values, achievements and how they've faced adversity and challenges. Then I coach them on how to use the stories in their stump speeches. The same approach can be just as powerful for advocating for causes, for selling products, for getting people to think about new ideas in new ways. Since this is a social networking media website, this article doesn't have to end here. You can tell some of the ways you use stories, or you can share a story and how it has touched your life or defines who you are.

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel

Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.

Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook.

His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.

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and at Google Groups listserve Bottom-up Top-down conversation