A while back, while trying to making sense of creativity applied to your life as a whole in a social sense, I defined it as connecting, empowering, and inspiring.
Initially I described this like having a intrapersonal relationship with yourself, whereby you are connecting with someone unknown within you, beginning to interact and make sense of them which is empowering, and finally you fully accept them as a larger part of yourself which is inspiring.
A metaphor I used for this is one of a journey whereby one is exploring, navigating, and storytelling, as though this larger aspect of yourself was like a new world you were discovering and making sense of it in a meaningful narrative way. In a previous post, I described it as follows in relationship to vertical development.
In this way, one learns to become an explorer, navigator, and storyteller, as they creatively traverse these different realms of being which collectively provide a greater, fuller expression of what it means to be a human being.
Nollind Whachell
There’s just one catch though. The storytelling aspect of your journey isn’t one whereby you just tell your new story of the new you but rather one in which you live your new story (which is why it feels so inspiring as an experience). And authentically leading by example by living your new story gets to the heart of my Be Real Creative mantra, as the “Be” embodies leadership, the “Real” embodies authenticity, and the “Creative” obviously embodies creativity.
What’s interesting about this is that today I decided to do a simply search on the Web using the keywords “not storytelling but storyliving” and a lot of the articles relating to it resonated with similar themes.
For example, the main benefit of storyliving over storytelling is that you are creating an immersive environment that people can step within, observe, and even interact with to fully understand in an easier way. Think of it like someone telling you of another country and its culture versus actually travelling to it and immersing yourself within it. By just being told of the country and culture, you may probably misinterpret the meaning of it and think it strange. But by being immersed within it, you get the nuances of it and understand the context of its culture.
In terms of The Future of Work, this is why so many companies have a difficult time trying to communicate how they work in different ways because you really have to be immersed within the organizational environment to fully make sense of how all the aspects of it function together in a relational way, working on a level that’s often beyond the comprehension of someone with just conventional business experiences.
At the same time though, storyliving embodies authenticity. So you’re not just someone preaching something others should do but rather someone who is actually living their evolved beliefs, again leading by example. And in terms of myself, this is something I struggle with daily. In effect, I’m able to envision fleeting aspects of who I want to be in a larger sense but the bigger picture as a whole is still not fully revealed to me, again because I think I’m not fully able to articulate this identity of my self in this larger sense.
All said and done though, I find it interesting how my intuition sees things that intuitively makes sense to me in the moment but it often takes years later to articulate the logic of what it actually means to others.
