Storytelling has long been recognized as a powerful, transformative tool in everything from personal growth to community development. In peace leadership, storytelling can become a powerful tool for unifying disparate groups, arriving at understanding across cultures, and creating common vision. How does the peace leader acquire the skills needed to use storytelling in their work? Storytelling, in peace leadership, begins with a deep commitment to personal growth and continues into understanding others in a cultural context. Presented here are skills and techniques that are integrated into a model peace leaders can learn and utilize to become a skilled agent of social and cultural change. To be most effective, the peace leader becomes a reflective story listener as well as a storyteller.
TopDefining Narrative And Story
Beginning the discussion with defining narrative and story to clarify the difference between the two and how they fit in the storytelling framework, then discussing why storytelling is important in transformative work, especially as it pertains to peace leadership, will lead the reader to understanding how peace leadership fits in the context of the hero’s journey and how becoming a peace leader is both a commitment to personal growth and a creative process. The remaining discussion will present an overview of techniques and practices used in the process of becoming an effective peace leader and storyteller. Finally, a model of how to integrate the techniques and practices will close the discussion.
Imagine a long thread that stands for the narrative of your life from beginning to end. Let us call it the golden thread. The thread is flexible and continuous. It is sequential but may not be a straight line through time and space. There are cause and effect relationships. A narrative is related in a historical context. Once an event happens the narrative is set. It is true that individuals have tried to subvert or eliminate specific narratives, as in the-Chinese Cultural Revolution, or the rise of Nazi Germany, but someone will always remember something of the actual history. Narrative exists from the personal to collective levels. It can hold your personal life experiences and extend out into the narrative of humanity. Your personal narrative, the golden thread of your life, is then woven into the fabric of all the golden threads of all the narratives that exist in the world tapestry that is humanity. This concept has been illustrated in mythologies around the world. One of my favorites is from the Norse:
Weaving becomes a metaphor for creation: we weave our way through our own lives, tangling with the threads of others. Words woven together become stories and songs with which we can share our experiences of existence.
In Norse mythology the Norns were women who would weave the wyrd (destiny) of all. The three norns associated with controlling wyrd were the sisters Urðr (fate), Verðandi (present) and Skuld (future). The Norns lived in the Well of Urd (destiny) that sat beneath Yggdrasil, the world tree that made up the center of the universe. Beneath the branches they would sit, creating the twine with which they would weave the lives of others.
The Norn’s were said to visit the bedside of each newborn and decide their fate, but the destinies they doled out were malleable. People could still influence their own destiny throughout their life by the personal choices that they made (Mythcrafts, 2018).