The more work I do in helping sustainability practitioners communicate, the greater appreciation I have for the power of story to help us save ourselves from ourselves.
This was underscored to me in the beginning of Lisa Cron’s excellent book, Wired for Story.
Our brains, like the amoeba, have one goal: SURVIVAL.
We can go weeks without food, days without water, but only about 35 seconds without finding MEANING in something.
We constantly scan our environment, probing for clues beneath the surface, with an embedded app. we call CURIOSITY.
Curiosity is our primal search engine that captures insight and filters it through past experience to help our minds predict the future in a never-ending battle to find CLARITY in the chaos around us.
Nature helps in our hunt for meaning by enticing us with story, to draw our RAPT attention.
We live vicariously through story, trying on trouble, to LEARN what we’d do just in case it happens to us.
The most powerful stories use urgency, novelty and surprise to deliver a TRUTH.
What’s your story?
