NATHAN YOUNG ON SHAKE THE COSMOS
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How can you tell a good story? What are the A,B,C's of authentic storytelling? How can we reshape our own narrative?
In this newest episode of Shake The Cosmos, Nathan Young discusses storytelling and offers his own story, and also tips for great storytelling. Nathan leads New Narrative, which offers various events, workshops, and a community to provide business and individuals support in taking control of their narrative. Links to some of the references in the podcast:
Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind (book)
Brené Brown - Power of Vulnerability (Ted Talk)
Thanks for your patience with some of the background sounds in this episode.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
ABHISHEK: Hi, everyone. This is Abhishek from shakethecosmos.com. Today’s guest is Nathan Young from The New Narrative. Hey, Nathan. How are you?
NATHAN: I’m good, how are you? Thanks for having me.
ABHISHEK: Thanks for making the time.
NATHAN: Of course.
ABHISHEK: When I think about stories, I think about you.
NATHAN: Okay. That’s good.
ABHISHEK: I came to one of your workshops, and as I was just saying, that I didn’t know we would be doing a podcast together.
NATHAN: And I just open the door, and see what happens. Let it flow.
ABHISHEK: I feel like you have all these phrases. “Open the door.”
NATHAN: (laughing) What else do I say?
ABHISHEK: We’ll just get right to it. What are parts of a good story?
NATHAN: What are parts of a good story? If we’re gonna talk about storytelling, a lot of the approach I take as far as storytelling is, being true to yourself, and honest with yourself about who you are and what’s important to you. And then from there it’s very easy to start thinking about what your stories are. But getting to that place of vulnerability, that authenticity, is the challenge that comes up a lot.
A lot of the times, clients I coach, they want me to help them with their story. But what they end up needing more than just the ABC’s of storytelling is the ABC’s of authenticity, of vulnerability.
That’s the biggest part sometimes. And a lot of what I try and do with storytelling is sneak that in, in the context of teaching storytelling. That’s the more meta answer.
But the more straightforward answer is, stories, it’s all about sharing an experience, sharing an idea, the context of an experience. So if you have an idea that you want to share about why the work you do is important to you, or the impact you want to create in the world, you want to go back to a specific experience that reflects that. A lot of times that can be reflected in a success. You can think about a time where something was successful, and it really reflected what you’re wanting to create.
ABHISHEK: Let me try to understand. There’s this authenticity piece. How can somebody bring that out? You said you sometimes find that it becomes more important, and that’s the x-factor.
NATHAN: Yeah, that’s the tricky part about it, too. One of the big things I do is I coach people for public speaking, and sometimes it is just a matter of helping them feel confident with their story in the moment. But a lot of what it has to do with The New Narrative is more about helping us all really rise to the person we could be in the context of community.
ABHISHEK: So they both work hand in hand together.
NATHAN: Yeah. I’ve been very influenced by Brene Brown. Are you familiar with her?
ABHISHEK: I am, a little bit. I use this phrase, “Hey, the story I’m telling about myself.” If the viewers don’t know…
NATHAN: Yeah, Brene Brown is a researcher. She’s really popular right now, she’s got the most popular TED Talk ever.
ABHISHEK: What is it called?
NATHAN: It’s called “The Power of Vulnerability”.
ABHISHEK: Okay.
NATHAN: So if you search Brene Brown, “Power of Vulnerability,” TED Talk, any combination of those things, it’ll come up. And it’s so worth the 20 minutes to watch it. And it’s all about her story of learning to become more vulnerable, but it’s also about shame. We keep the things we’re ashamed of inside of ourselves. And we don’t share them, we don’t let them out. And the way to let them out is through storytelling. And part of this is becoming a more whole-hearted human being, that’s her terminology.
But I can reflect this back to my own personal experience, eight years ago. Like a lot of men are, I was caught in my own shame. I had major problems with alcohol, and all my relationships were kind of a mess, and I was just very afraid to be myself. And through telling my story and putting it out there… By telling your story you are inviting feedback on some level, but you do see what people resonate with and what they don’t. And people are always gonna resonate more and more with authenticity.
ABHISHEK: What is it about stories that makes people resonate so much? There’s data… What’s something about the story that’s so interactive?
NATHAN: What’s really fascinating about stories and storytelling is, basically, it’s the lens through which we see and interpret the world. It’s basically us asking why. It goes back to a lot of our earliest ancestors. There’s this book called Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, and he talks about storytelling as being the fundamental evolutionary advantage that we as homosapiens have.
And we see ourselves almost as an abstraction based on the stories we tell ourselves about our self. So if you see yourself as a smart, intelligent person, you’re gonna be constantly replaying moments in your head where you succeeded, where you had a good idea, where you helped people. If you see yourself as an idiot and useless, you’re gonna be constantly playing moments in your head of shame, moments where you blew it, moments where you hurt people, or you embarrassed yourself.
It’s these stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves that really shapes our identity and how we see ourselves. If we aren’t learning to understand who we are, and see ourselves from outside ourselves, and from how other people might perceive us, we’re gonna be trapped in our own negative self-talk story over, and over, and over again.
ABHISHEK: I have this image of cavemen and women sitting around the fire, back in the day, and telling each other stories. So, wow. Thanks for taking it all the way back to that level.
NATHAN: Yeah, of course. What’s interesting about that is to think on one hand, we don’t really know exactly what stories they were telling themselves or telling each other at this point, but we can speculate. And a lot of the stories that they were telling, they were just trying to explain their world. If you think about it, a lot of the earliest stories that exist in history are what we call mythology.
ABHISHEK: I was thinking more like telling people where the food is.
NATHAN: That’s a big part of it also, right? That could be a big part of it too. This is pure speculation, but they were also trying to figure out their world, and they knew that their food grew at this certain time in this certain valley. They don’t know why, per se, but they make up a story why. And maybe the story of why is because the earth goddess made the food come up.
You can see this in all different cultures, they have creation myths. Where did the earth come from? Where did the sun come from? Where did the sky come from? Where do we come from? Where did the stars come from?
These stories were what brought people together. This is how groups of people created cohesiveness around themselves. And they created communities, and these communities were how they learned how to trust and how to grow with each other.
One of the big ideas in that book, Sapiens, I talked about, was we might have thousands of Facebook friends, but really in our minds we’re only capable of holding the concept of about 130 people in our minds at a time. And this is reflected by, not only groups of humans that live in the depths of the Amazon that don’t have as much contact with modern culture, but it’s also reflected in chimpanzees. They found that these tribes of chimpanzee troupes, they max out at about 130 individuals. At that point, the group fractures, and it’ll turn into two groups, or may cause problems, or anything like that.
The reason is because, also the hypothesis, is that if you’re living in more of a survival-based situation, you get to know everybody around you that you could trust. And if you’re going strictly by memory, you can trust these 130 people you know.
When you are gathering people together under a collective story, a set of beliefs that are reflected by stories, now you know that you can trust a larger group of people. This is how we, as humans, were able to grow larger societies, building the cities, and the states. And a lot of our states throughout human history have been formed to revolve around religion.
And this happens even today. We have stories about, obviously religions, we have stories about our country, and how our country was founded, and how that reflects on who we are.
ABHISHEK: Is your point then… I’m 33, but humankind has been making stories and resonating with stories for much longer than 33, thousands and millions of years.
NATHAN: Thousands and millions of years.
ABHISHEK: So this is not a new concept. This may be even a newer concept than computers, than data, and numbers, and Excel. I guess I’m trying to relate it to what you do, though. There are these books, but then you have these workshops where people can go to. So can you tell us more about, how did you start that business, that storytelling business?
NATHAN: Yeah.
ABHISHEK: And what can people get out of attending your workshops?
NATHAN: Totally. More than just the workshops, I run this program called The New Narrative. And The New Narrative is all about taking a critical look at a lot of the standard accepted narratives that we have in our culture right now, and just deciding if we want to create…
ABHISHEK: How did you come up with that name?
NATHAN: It was something that was very much on my mind. The personal story behind it was, I grew up a white male in America, and the narrative I received is that I go to college, I get a job, I get married, I buy a house, I have kids. And if I follow these steps and do all the right things, everything will turn out fine.
And when I was 35 years old, I found myself in a place where things were very much not fine in my life. I had a lot of problems with alcohol, I was very much in debt, very much out of shape. I had just gotten out of a relationship that probably wasn’t healthy for either of us.
As I started figuring out how to reorient my life and create a new life for myself, I realized a lot of the narratives I had been hearing and receiving my whole life about what kind of person I was supposed to be were not helpful. They weren’t very good narratives for me. And the fact that I wasn’t living up to that standard narrative, the fact that I don’t have a house, or marriage, or kids, it created a lot of shame for me. Personally, I felt like a failure. I felt like I fucked up in life. This was all about the time I found Brene Brown and heard her talking.
So The New Narrative sprung out of that personal experience on some level. And just seeing the world for how it is, and how my life had been structured around narratives that I had adopted, probably when I was in like first grade, completely unwittingly.
But I was still living by these narratives that had structured my life. We do this all the time. If we don’t have answers to questions, we make up stories to answer these questions. And this can happen on the most fundamental level. The most obvious one is dating. Like, why didn’t that person call me back? They don’t like me. They’re with somebody else. I’m a horrible person. I’m ugly. We make up these stories, whereas the real reason the person didn’t call you back was maybe they didn’t feel a connection with you. Maybe they’ve got something else going on on their own. Maybe their phone broke or something.
And we do that in a bigger sense in life, too. If we don’t know what to do with our next step in life, we’re gonna fall back on these narratives that we’ve been fed our whole lives. We watch tv and we see how people live on tv. That’s a narrative that we fall back on.
So I started The New Narrative as a way for us to start telling stories, and creating stories, and narratives. And our world might reflect a different course we could all take in our lives.
Because also, let’s be honest, a big part of that standard narrative, it’s a very white, heteronormative narrative. So if you’re LGBTQ, you couldn’t get married until recently. People of color haven’t always had the same educational and economic opportunities. That’s also a very consumerist narrative, too. It creates a consumer culture that we’re realizing more and more is very detrimental to our planet, environment, and the long-term survival of us as humans, too.
ABHISHEK: So that’s how you came up with the name.
NATHAN: Yeah.
ABHISHEK: And it’s not just workshops, so thank you for correcting me.
NATHAN: Yeah.
ABHISHEK: So what kinds of things are a part of The New Narrative that you’re trying, or something in the future, that viewers can get excited about?
NATHAN: Totally. The big part of The New Narrative, when I started it, I had been working with some TEDx groups in town, TED Talks groups, and I realized that I don’t need to be working with TED. I can just do my own thing. I can create my own talk series.
ABHISHEK: Was that hard?
NATHAN: Oh yeah! It was super scary, too. And I had some background for it. I had been hosting storytelling shows at bars for fun. But this was a new thing that I was doing where I was curating stories of a different level and on different themes.
For the very first event, I rented a venue, and I was charging for tickets, and I didn’t know if anybody was going to show up. I think 50 people was like a break even thing. But then new expenses came up, and I needed to get like 80 people, or 100 people. And that was just to break even, not to even reimburse me for my time or anything like that.
The idea with that first event was, I had a theme. The theme was community. We wanted to talk about how we could be understanding and reenvisioning community in our world. And I went and I found people that had a story around community that I wanted to share, and maybe how they were challenging those standard narratives of how we think of community in our world.
One woman lived in a collective housing situation, and talked about the conflicts of that. Another woman talked about how she was involved in a political campaign to keep a sewage plant from being installed in her neighborhood, and how she rallied the community to fight back.
ABHISHEK: How did it go?
NATHAN: Oh, it went great. I ended up getting 150 people.
ABHISHEK: Oh, my goodness!
NATHAN: Showed up, bought tickets. But it was really scary, because I didn’t know.
ABHISHEK: Wow.
NATHAN: San Diego is a very last-minute town, so 70 of those tickets were sold in the last two days.
ABHISHEK: That’s good insight.
NATHAN: Yeah. So it went amazing, and I was really happy with it. It basically started off as these events that I would host once a year, so the next thing we did was communication, we did one on identity, we did one on family, we did love, sex, and relationships. And the last one we did last fall was…
ABHISHEK: It’s like no topic left behind.
NATHAN: Yeah, totally. I thought about these big pillars of our world. We all have stories about what kind of relationships we’re supposed to get into, and what love does in our world.
ABHISHEK: There’s such a diversity of topics. Is there one that you, personally, Nathan Young, is more attached to? Or just the general idea of it?
NATHAN: The general idea of it. We did one topic per year, essentially, in the early going of this all.
ABHISHEK: Who picks the topics?
NATHAN: I do. I do everything. But the topics very much reflected what I was going through in my life, too. The community topic was, I wanted to start this community. Where do communities come from? When we did the communication topic, I was at a point in my life where I was trying to figure out how I express myself most openly, and honestly, and authentically. When we did the identity topic, that was 2016, and I was seeing this uprising of disaffected white males. I was trying to grapple with that myself.
ABHISHEK: So your authentic self is very much in there.
NATHAN: Yeah, yeah.
ABHISHEK: So, New Narrative, it’s a great resource, when you think you’ve got four or five things going on right now people can go to.
NATHAN: Yeah.
ABHISHEK: What are some of those things? Can you please tell us about them?
NATHAN: Yeah. It’s all about building a community and in light of that, what I found, was creating opportunities for people to come together on a regular basis. And we essentially have something going on every week.
ABHISHEK: Oh, wow.
NATHAN: Yeah.
ABHISHEK: Did something go on this week? Did something just happen?
NATHAN: This week’s like a bye week, but last week, just the other day, on Wednesday we had our monthly open mic storytelling show called Daring Stories. And this is just an opportunity for people in the community to come out and share their story up on stage in front of a group of people. And we draw 30 to 40 people each month.
ABHISHEK: Wow.
NATHAN: I created this because being able to share your story is important. And for a lot of us, who do have a story to share, finding an audience to share it is not always easy. So I created this really low-stakes environment to go up on stage and share your story.
And baked into it is this whole idea of creating a vulnerable environment, creating an open environment, creating a really welcoming audience for these stories. That’s one aspect of what I do is open mic storytelling shows, during stories.
ABHISHEK: And then what are the other things? You said there’s something going on every week.
NATHAN: Yeah, I also host a discussion oriented event called Rethink. We pick different topics every month, that happens also on a monthly cycle. It’s all structured like a World Cafe, so you’re moving around from group to group and having different discussions with different people.
ABHISHEK: Are people having coffee, too?
NATHAN: We have La Croix, yeah. Part of what we want to do with The New Narrative is start discussing how we can create changes in our world. And it does start with events like this. Each month is a different topic. Last month we talked about work-life balance, so how we manage this in our life. Next month we’re gonna be talking about creating diverse movements, because we see it as something that’s very important in our world. We need to get a lot of people working together from diverse backgrounds that we think are important, and it’s not always easy to do, a lot of people under one tent.
ABHISHEK: So you’ve got open mic opportunities, also the Diversity Movement workshop discussion, and what else?
NATHAN: The other thing that I offer is a set of workshops around storytelling. I host one that’s also on a monthly cycle, it’s very low stakes, called Story Crafting. It’s just an opportunity to come in and learn a little bit more about storytelling.
ABHISHEK: I think that’s the one I went to, right?
NATHAN: Yeah. I just talk about a little bit of the background of storytelling, offering some basic tools, and it’s really generative. It’s more about if you want to get into the habit of learning to express yourself better, this is very much a place where you can come.
When I first rolled it out, I sort of billed it as a cooler Toastmasters focused on storytelling. It’s evolved a little bit since then, but I still like that comparison of how you can work on this skill with a group of people on a regular basis.
ABHISHEK: And what about businesses? Can they approach you in some way, or is that a relationship you already built?
NATHAN: Yeah, yeah. That’s a big part of what I do, also. That’s evolved a little bit, in my other life outside The New Narrative. It’s another thing I do, where I do go into organizations, and I help them learn how they can leverage storytelling for whatever their organizational goals are.
Most of my clients have been nonprofits, so I help them figure out what stories they can tell to further their fundraising pitches, or for creating some more cohesion amongst their team, or for understanding their branding and marketing communication of the valuable work they do.
I also work with scientists a lot, because scientists really need to learn how to communicate the work they do to the broader world. And storytelling is a really effective way for them to share the value of what’s going on and the work they do to people that maybe aren’t scientists and wouldn’t quite understand the technicalities of it all otherwise.
ABHISHEK: Wow, it sounds like the whole spectrum of storytelling. You can start with the Story Craft workshops, and get into some open mics and testing it out, and even have their employer get involved eventually, as well.
NATHAN: That’s sort of the fun, right?
ABHISHEK: That’s great.
NATHAN: I want to make this accessible to lots of different levels, just to have an easy point of entry. But then if you want to go deeper, we can do that too.
ABHISHEK: So if somebody wanted to be part of this community, The New Narrative, how can people get in touch with you?
NATHAN: The best thing is to go to the website, find us on Facebook, find us on Instagram. The website is thenewnarrative.org, and on Facebook it’s also The New Narrative. My Instagram account is just New Narrative, because I couldn’t get “The” New Narrative. But if you just do a search for The New Narrative, there’s a couple other similar things, but if you find the one based in San Diego on all the different social medias.
ABHISHEK: The guy with the beard.
NATHAN: Yeah, the guy with the beard. It’s actually just a black logo that says “The New Narrative”.
ABHISHEK: Okay.
NATHAN: That’s what it is. One of The New Narratives is actually like a ska band in Denver, so that’s not me. If you find them, you have the wrong one. And there’s a couple other different projects too. Yeah, The New Narrative, San Diego. Do that search, it’ll bring you to us.
ABHISHEK: Awesome. Well thank you so much for making the time to chat.
NATHAN: Yeah, thanks for having me. This is great. I appreciate it.
ABHISHEK: All right. Hey, everyone. Thank you for listening. Please hit the subscribe button. We’ll be back next week.