We are actually wired to change our stories. We embellish, we diminish, we combine memories, and sometimes we create memories that never happened. And we do this, according to the work of Frederic Bartlett and several other memory researchers after him, in an attempt to “smooth out” the memory in order to make it fit in the existing network of stories that comprise our sense of reality - our version of what is so. This is why we remember things to suit our situation: we’ve smoothed the memories out to confirm that our reality is exactly that - real. We’ve used this memory to make all the more clear that what is so IS SO. Things that don’t make sense to us, or aren’t consistent with our other stories, get edited out.

I tell stories about the children I have helped raise. I use descriptions. I give them titles and labels as if these things are true and I know who they are. I can get stuck in those stories. But what is so powerful about being a storyteller is that I am given the regular opportunity to step out of the stories I tell and see them as that: stories. This then gives me the opportunity to become curious. This is the real message here: the most powerful storytelling and parenting tool I have is curiosity.

The thesis of theoretical physicist Leonard Mlodinow’s book Subliminal, is that the “new unconscious” rules our behavior. People will make major decisions based on the stories they’ve collected even when those decisions are clearly not in their self-interest. They stay in their ideological lane even when it hurts them.

This doesn’t sound very hopeful, does it?

But it does line up with our experience. We can’t understand how people can behave and think the way they do. It amazes us and we judge them.

“Ballad of the Bards” is ultimately a story about how the incredible power of storytelling can be used, and is often used, to entrench oneself in old unhelpful dynamics. These two storytellers - a troubadour and a minstrel - have learned to despise each other by compounding the same old stories over and over. Ultimately the breakthrough happens through circumstance and the brave willingness to pay attention. It is only then that a kind of miracle can take place: they choose a different story.

This is something we all understand and suffer from. We repeat old stories and shackle ourselves to resentment and a blind desire to be right. We choose “right” over happy and thus sink deeper and deeper into unhealthy practices. The aim of this episode is to demonstrate a way out. To listen, to see, and then to choose something new.

The story “The Elephant in the Tavern” explores the idea that most of what people “say” is actually unsaid, and it claims that we are actually broadcasting precisely what we wish to keep secret: what we don’t want to say. So if this is actually happening, how do we conduct ourselves? How do we have a measure of control over what we are actually communicating to others all day long?

The How to Story approach is to simply know that you are doing this, and start to pay attention like a storyteller.