good morning everyone
now we’re going to talk a little bit
about one of my great passions in life
storytelling and in that spirit I would
like all of you to indulge me for a
second so if you would all please close
your eyes take a deep breath if I would
ask you to come up here with me on this
stage and tell a story about the most
significant event of your life which
story would you choose to tell take a
minute to think about that okay you can
open your eyes now I don’t know what you
all thought about but it can be really
difficult to identify the significant
events of one’s own life there are of
course some important events that we all
recognize like for instance moving away
from home or choosing your career path
having a baby also less enjoyable but
still important events like death of a
loved one or maybe life altering
sickness but what about the smaller more
everyday type of events the things that
happen all the time in our life that
changed us in smaller or bigger ways
sometimes even without us noticing them
those are the kinds of stories that I’m
mainly interested in my background is as
a medical doctor which has given me the
opportunity to speak to a lot of people
often during these life-altering periods
of sickness and a big part of that job
is listening to people’s stories and try
to figure out how to help them where
they are right now but in addition to
that I also work as a story producer for
live storytelling shows
my hometown in Oslo Norway and that
means that I regularly invite people to
go up on a stage and share very very
intimate details about themselves to a
crowd of strangers who expect to be
entertained and I do this because I love
stories and I loves personal
storytelling and the reason for this is
primarily that life is very very funny
but life can also be sad and it can be
aggravating and confusing and it can be
very very beautiful and these are
qualities that make for great stories
and great entertainment I also do this
because I believe that stories have the
ability to create change and development
in us as human beings and I think we’ve
seen that very recently with a me-too
campaign where women all over the world
used their personal stories under the
hashtag me too to tell about sexual
harassment and together they created a
systematic picture that was very
difficult to ignore I also believe that
in this world where a lot of the human
stories that we experience are filtered
through a gloss of social media we
really need alternate platforms to tell
about our lives to each other so today I
would like to focus a bit on personal
storytelling and how we as human beings
can use the way we speak about our own
lives to change how we see ourselves and
to kick things off I would like to give
you an example one of the storytelling
shows I work with is called mortified
and in this show we invite people to go
onstage and tell stories about their
teenage years and we want them to do
this by reading aloud from Diaries and
other things they wrote when they were
young and this is really really funny
teenagers can be exceptionally clueless
when they’re trying to figure out how to
do everything in life for the first time
but it can also be really angst
provoking to tell these kinds of stories
something that I got to experience
personally the first time I shared a
story on stage because the story about
my teenage years is not a very happy one
I was a huge nerd with a very very
where I grew up I had a really hard time
making friends and I experienced a lot
of rejection both from my peers but also
from adults that I was surrounded by and
this made me very sad and I spent a lot
of time being lonely and even depressed
and I when I was going to revisit that
story those same feelings came back and
it made me feel very uncomfortable to
think about going on stage and present
myself as some kind of lonely and
depressed person because that’s not at
all how I see myself today and it
brought a lot of feelings of shame and
also pity for my past self but as I sat
down with another story producer and
started working on my material a very
very different narrative started
emerging because as I read my own
diaries and my emails and letters that I
wrote I realized that 13-year old me yes
she was sad yes she was lonely but she
didn’t really accept that situation she
went out and she looked for solutions
she tried to find different social
circles she joined an NGO and started
volunteering and she looked for
different places to make friends and I
had never thought about my own narrative
like that before it was a completely new
realisation that I took agency and tried
to change my life and as I continued
working with other people’s stories
also discovered that this happened for
them as well
and this kind of woke the scientist and
the researcher in me because I’d thought
about stories as something you tell to
an audience and you’re trying to move
them but my experience also told me that
the stories I tell can have an effect on
me as a storyteller and as I drove a bit
deeper into this material I discovered
that in personality psychology there’s a
thing called narrative identity a
narrative identity is the idea that we
as human beings tell a continuous story
an internalized story about our lives
with ourselves as the protagonist and
this story is a retrospective
understanding of our past it’s an
ongoing understanding of our present but
it’s also an imagined direction of our
future and the core idea of this is that
we use story to create order and meaning
in a sometimes very chaotic world where
life throws all kinds of random things
when researchers have looked at
narrative identity there is one thing
that is really clear and that is that
you can really learn a lot about a
person from how they speak about
themselves and not only how they’re
doing right now but also how they might
be doing long-term because there seems
to be a really close connection between
the words we use when we speak about our
lives and our long-term mental
well-being and there are especially
three things that seem to be important
firstly agency how much control do you
give yourself over the events that
happen in your life and not only control
to decide what happens but also control
over how you react to things that happen
to you the second thing that seemed to
be important was your degree of
connectivity that is how much you feel
connected to other people around you
instead of a feeling of isolation and
the third thing that seemed to be
important is your ability to designate
meaning to things that happen and
especially meaning to negative things
that happen in your long-term narrative
and these things actually seem to be
much more important than a lot of other
indicators of how you’ll do long-term
like what you’re working with or how
much money you make or your personality
traits and that is really cool because
it can be very difficult to change a lot
of your circumstances in life but the
way you tell stories about yourself
is something that’s definitely under
your control and when I discovered this
I started thinking about some of the
things I learned back in med school
about how the human brain works and
especially how human memory works
because a lot of people think about
memory as some kind of filing cabinet
that is stored in a memory center in
your brain and you experience something
and it’s written down in a file and then
the file is put into that cabinet and
then you remember it and you take the
file back out and you read it like some
kind of photocopy but that’s not at all
how human memory works because human
memory is a very complex process of
cognitive and sensory and emotional
input and it happens all over your brain
in many different centers a very cool
Norwegian neurologist called kaya
millennium even went as far as calling
the recollection of memory a creative
process in the brain I think it’s much
more useful to think about memory like
this your memory of a certain event is
like a skeleton or a grid where you’ve
stored some important key aspects of
what happened but you need to fill in
the gaps and when you remember something
your brain fills in those gaps but it
does that right now in the present
which means that your memory will be
influenced by your present emotional
state and if you then move on to enforce
that memory for instance by putting
words to it or telling a story about it
it will be even more enforced in the
present and then when you store that
memory it will look different than it
did when you began so what’s my point
here if we go back to the story about my
teenage years I think it illustrates
very well how this process works because
if you think about it I changed my
narrative I changed my narrative from
one of sadness and hopelessness into one
of agency and control over the situation
I was in I increased my degree of
connectivity with other people when I
presented my story on stage because the
people who were watching they laughed at
the funny parts but they also listened
very attentively to the more emotional
parts and they recognized my emotions
thirdly I began recognizing myself in my
story and now when I think about that
memory it has much more meaning in my
long-term narrative as a formative part
of the puzzle who created Who I am
today and when I think about it now it
looks completely different than when I
began so what can we all learn from this
I think that we could all use a little
bit more storytelling in our lives
because that if we know that human
beings use stories to create meaning and
we also know that the way we tell those
stories impact how we do over time I
think we can use that we can use that as
a power tool to change how we see
ourselves and our self perception and
you don’t have to do this by going on
stage and sharing a story this is
something you can do in your everyday
life when you’re talking to your friends
or your family by paying a little bit
more attention to your own narrative
and I believe this is very important
because we live in a world where it’s
very easy to feel insignificant it’s
very easy to get lost and we’re
constantly bombarded with standards that
seem impossible to live up to and by
reclaiming our narrative I think that we
can challenge those standards and by
telling our stories about ourselves like
we matter we can really perform a great
act of everyday subversion thank you [Applause]
now we’re going to talk a little bit
about one of my great passions in life
storytelling and in that spirit I would
like all of you to indulge me for a
second so if you would all please close
your eyes take a deep breath if I would
ask you to come up here with me on this
stage and tell a story about the most
significant event of your life which
story would you choose to tell take a
minute to think about that okay you can
open your eyes now I don’t know what you
all thought about but it can be really
difficult to identify the significant
events of one’s own life there are of
course some important events that we all
recognize like for instance moving away
from home or choosing your career path
having a baby also less enjoyable but
still important events like death of a
loved one or maybe life altering
sickness but what about the smaller more
everyday type of events the things that
happen all the time in our life that
changed us in smaller or bigger ways
sometimes even without us noticing them
those are the kinds of stories that I’m
mainly interested in my background is as
a medical doctor which has given me the
opportunity to speak to a lot of people
often during these life-altering periods
of sickness and a big part of that job
is listening to people’s stories and try
to figure out how to help them where
they are right now but in addition to
that I also work as a story producer for
live storytelling shows
my hometown in Oslo Norway and that
means that I regularly invite people to
go up on a stage and share very very
intimate details about themselves to a
crowd of strangers who expect to be
entertained and I do this because I love
stories and I loves personal
storytelling and the reason for this is
primarily that life is very very funny
but life can also be sad and it can be
aggravating and confusing and it can be
very very beautiful and these are
qualities that make for great stories
and great entertainment I also do this
because I believe that stories have the
ability to create change and development
in us as human beings and I think we’ve
seen that very recently with a me-too
campaign where women all over the world
used their personal stories under the
hashtag me too to tell about sexual
harassment and together they created a
systematic picture that was very
difficult to ignore I also believe that
in this world where a lot of the human
stories that we experience are filtered
through a gloss of social media we
really need alternate platforms to tell
about our lives to each other so today I
would like to focus a bit on personal
storytelling and how we as human beings
can use the way we speak about our own
lives to change how we see ourselves and
to kick things off I would like to give
you an example one of the storytelling
shows I work with is called mortified
and in this show we invite people to go
onstage and tell stories about their
teenage years and we want them to do
this by reading aloud from Diaries and
other things they wrote when they were
young and this is really really funny
teenagers can be exceptionally clueless
when they’re trying to figure out how to
do everything in life for the first time
but it can also be really angst
provoking to tell these kinds of stories
something that I got to experience
personally the first time I shared a
story on stage because the story about
my teenage years is not a very happy one
I was a huge nerd with a very very
where I grew up I had a really hard time
making friends and I experienced a lot
of rejection both from my peers but also
from adults that I was surrounded by and
this made me very sad and I spent a lot
of time being lonely and even depressed
and I when I was going to revisit that
story those same feelings came back and
it made me feel very uncomfortable to
think about going on stage and present
myself as some kind of lonely and
depressed person because that’s not at
all how I see myself today and it
brought a lot of feelings of shame and
also pity for my past self but as I sat
down with another story producer and
started working on my material a very
very different narrative started
emerging because as I read my own
diaries and my emails and letters that I
wrote I realized that 13-year old me yes
she was sad yes she was lonely but she
didn’t really accept that situation she
went out and she looked for solutions
she tried to find different social
circles she joined an NGO and started
volunteering and she looked for
different places to make friends and I
had never thought about my own narrative
like that before it was a completely new
realisation that I took agency and tried
to change my life and as I continued
working with other people’s stories
also discovered that this happened for
them as well
and this kind of woke the scientist and
the researcher in me because I’d thought
about stories as something you tell to
an audience and you’re trying to move
them but my experience also told me that
the stories I tell can have an effect on
me as a storyteller and as I drove a bit
deeper into this material I discovered
that in personality psychology there’s a
thing called narrative identity a
narrative identity is the idea that we
as human beings tell a continuous story
an internalized story about our lives
with ourselves as the protagonist and
this story is a retrospective
understanding of our past it’s an
ongoing understanding of our present but
it’s also an imagined direction of our
future and the core idea of this is that
we use story to create order and meaning
in a sometimes very chaotic world where
life throws all kinds of random things
when researchers have looked at
narrative identity there is one thing
that is really clear and that is that
you can really learn a lot about a
person from how they speak about
themselves and not only how they’re
doing right now but also how they might
be doing long-term because there seems
to be a really close connection between
the words we use when we speak about our
lives and our long-term mental
well-being and there are especially
three things that seem to be important
firstly agency how much control do you
give yourself over the events that
happen in your life and not only control
to decide what happens but also control
over how you react to things that happen
to you the second thing that seemed to
be important was your degree of
connectivity that is how much you feel
connected to other people around you
instead of a feeling of isolation and
the third thing that seemed to be
important is your ability to designate
meaning to things that happen and
especially meaning to negative things
that happen in your long-term narrative
and these things actually seem to be
much more important than a lot of other
indicators of how you’ll do long-term
like what you’re working with or how
much money you make or your personality
traits and that is really cool because
it can be very difficult to change a lot
of your circumstances in life but the
way you tell stories about yourself
is something that’s definitely under
your control and when I discovered this
I started thinking about some of the
things I learned back in med school
about how the human brain works and
especially how human memory works
because a lot of people think about
memory as some kind of filing cabinet
that is stored in a memory center in
your brain and you experience something
and it’s written down in a file and then
the file is put into that cabinet and
then you remember it and you take the
file back out and you read it like some
kind of photocopy but that’s not at all
how human memory works because human
memory is a very complex process of
cognitive and sensory and emotional
input and it happens all over your brain
in many different centers a very cool
Norwegian neurologist called kaya
millennium even went as far as calling
the recollection of memory a creative
process in the brain I think it’s much
more useful to think about memory like
this your memory of a certain event is
like a skeleton or a grid where you’ve
stored some important key aspects of
what happened but you need to fill in
the gaps and when you remember something
your brain fills in those gaps but it
does that right now in the present
which means that your memory will be
influenced by your present emotional
state and if you then move on to enforce
that memory for instance by putting
words to it or telling a story about it
it will be even more enforced in the
present and then when you store that
memory it will look different than it
did when you began so what’s my point
here if we go back to the story about my
teenage years I think it illustrates
very well how this process works because
if you think about it I changed my
narrative I changed my narrative from
one of sadness and hopelessness into one
of agency and control over the situation
I was in I increased my degree of
connectivity with other people when I
presented my story on stage because the
people who were watching they laughed at
the funny parts but they also listened
very attentively to the more emotional
parts and they recognized my emotions
thirdly I began recognizing myself in my
story and now when I think about that
memory it has much more meaning in my
long-term narrative as a formative part
of the puzzle who created Who I am
today and when I think about it now it
looks completely different than when I
began so what can we all learn from this
I think that we could all use a little
bit more storytelling in our lives
because that if we know that human
beings use stories to create meaning and
we also know that the way we tell those
stories impact how we do over time I
think we can use that we can use that as
a power tool to change how we see
ourselves and our self perception and
you don’t have to do this by going on
stage and sharing a story this is
something you can do in your everyday
life when you’re talking to your friends
or your family by paying a little bit
more attention to your own narrative
and I believe this is very important
because we live in a world where it’s
very easy to feel insignificant it’s
very easy to get lost and we’re
constantly bombarded with standards that
seem impossible to live up to and by
reclaiming our narrative I think that we
can challenge those standards and by
telling our stories about ourselves like
we matter we can really perform a great
act of everyday subversion thank you [Applause]
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