Storyworthy Summary (C17): Discovering Yourself

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Sometimes, you will come across, or remember, a five-second moment, without fully understanding why it’s a five-second moment.

In other words, you know an event had an impact on your life, but you have no idea why.

To discover the meaning of a five-second moment, the advice is this:

Tell your story out loud.

Don’t worry about crafting it in any way. Just tell it as honestly and completely as you can. Include all the details that you would normally leave out in front of an audience.

By doing this, you will often discover the meaning of the moment. It’s kind of like journaling, but out loud.

A story you tell to an audience should never ever be about more than one thing.

Lots of things can happen in the story, but the five-second moment must stand alone, and the meaning of that moment must also be singular.

That doesn’t mean that a moment can’t have more than one meaning. They often do. Rather, it means that the version of the story you tell should only focus on one meaning of the moment, regardless of how many ways it impacted you.

If you try to force more than one meaning on your audience, all meanings will be diluted. It will also be much harder to craft a story with multiple meanings. Instead, it’s better to just tell two (or more) different versions of the story, specifically crafting each version to present a different meaning.

Another way to discover the meaning behind a five-second moment is to ask yourself why you do the things you do.

The answer to this is often not obvious, but searching yourself for the answer can often bring to light reasons for why you do things that you have never considered before.

By now, I’m sure you have realized that storytelling is about much more than entertaining an audience.

It’s a method to discover yourself in a way that most people never will. It’s a form of therapy, much like journaling.

Even if you never tell a story to an audience, it’s very valuable to tell it to yourself. Doing so can help you uncover things about yourself and why you are the way you are, and once you uncover these things you can use them to heal and improve.

Read the next chapter here.

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