Unleashing the Power of Your Story

By Steven P. Ober

Our lives are full of stories. They are, like the air we breathe, so much a part of who we are and what we do that we often don’t notice their presence.
Stories are the bases of our movies, television, books, communication, work, religion, humor, conversation, and thinking. They are the primary way we pass our experience, wisdom, and foibles from group to group, generation to generation. And, most powerfully, our stories are a reflection of who we are at our core – as individuals, and as a species.
Stories cover the whole gamut of human experience, from our descriptions of the universe, e.g. the Big Bang story, to expressions of our deep inner selves – our core personal stories.
While taking the whole range into account, this book focuses on the latter, our deep personal stories, how we can learn to know them more clearly, how they help us, how they can constrain us, and how we can, if we wish, learn to see them anew and create even more powerful personal stories ... stories that reflect not only our life experiences, but empower us to reach our highest aspirations for the future.
Stories are critical for leaders. Every leader has a deep personal story, a systemic story that shapes his/her patterns of leadership. And, recent work in leadership and leadership development suggests a new answer to the age-old question, “What makes a leader?”
We have searched for, among other things, common traits, patterns of behavior, and core competencies that characterize leaders. But, we are discovering that what makes the most powerful leaders, the authentic leaders, are not necessarily common abilities or ways of behaving.
What makes the most powerful leaders is that they live/operate, consistently, from who they deeply are. Put another way, they live in congruence with and become the masters of their own personal stories.
This book is intended to help leaders, coaches and others learn to become clear about their core, and to live from it creatively.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steven P. Ober
• Release date: Jul 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310292279

Book preview

Unleashing the Power of Your Story

Dr. Steven P. Ober

Copyright 2015 Dr. Steven P. Ober

Smashwords Edition

License Notes

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When we know the facts about ourselves, we know what we are.

When we know our stories, we know who we are.

John Quincy Adams

For David Kantor, whose work and mentoring made this work and this book possible.

I also want to acknowledge the following people, all of who, in spirit and in substance, supported me in this work:

My wife Ellen Herlihy, who has put up with me for 40 years.

Our kids, now great adults, Damien, Jedediah, and Ariana, who grew up with a weird dad and came out OK

Kate, Lauren, and Mike, our GREAT kids-in-law, who still laugh at my jokes.

Bridget, and all those other kids, now adults, who were our kids too.

Our three grandchildren, William Pride and Aviendha Marie O’Neill and Zebulon Alden Ober, all hope for the future.

And

Bruce Singer, who showed us how to be a good human being

Nana, Shirley O’Brien Herlihy, who showed us how to live with spunk and gusto.

About the Author

Dr. Steven Ober is a senior practitioner in Executive Coaching, Leadership Development, Organizational Learning and Change, and Executive Team Learning.

He has worked successfully with senior executives and managers at multiple levels in high tech, business and industry, health care, government, and education.

The focus of Dr. Ober's work is helping individual executives, executive teams, and their organizations achieve outstanding results in complex systems, especially in periods of major change.

Table of Contents

Preface: The Presence and Power of Stories

Chapter 1: About this Book and Story Work

Why this Book? Why Now?

Who Should Read this Book?

What this Book Contains

How to Read and Use this Material

What You Might Gain

How this Work, and this Book, Came About

Chapter 2: Context - Ideas and Meaning

How We Co-Create Our Reality

The Uncertainty Principle

The Observer Effect

From Linear to Systemic

Examples in the Social Sciences

Social Constructionism

Symbolic Interactionism

The Ladder of Inference

Time after Time, Good after Bad

How We Frame Negative Experiences

Chapter 3: Context -The World of Stories

Cultural Stories and Myths - What Are They About?

Why Do We Tell These Stories?

Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Journey

Examples of Hero's Journey Stories

Your own Hero's Journey

The Tapestry of Life

Chapter 4: Working With Stories - Your Own And Others

Your Story And Your Leadership

Can We Work Effectively With Our Own Stories?

What Is A Systemic Story?

Premises That Shape Leadership Story Work

Three Ways To Understand Yourself In Systems

The Essence of Story Work — The Eight Steps

Examples of Related Events, Patterns, and Structures

Guidelines For Doing story workStory Work With Yourself And Others

Chapter 5: Dancing with the Butterfly

Reflections on Stories and Systems

Creating a Model: The Never Ending Story

The Butterfly Model of Complex Human Systems

As the Stakes Go Up

Chapter 6: What have we Learned about Stories and Story workStory Work

Our Stories in the Workplace

How Long Does it Take to Explore your Story?

Forms Story Work Can Take

Content and Structure

Common Characteristics of our Systemic Stories

Our Stories Can Become Self Fulfilling Prophesies

The Hard and the Soft

Holographic Moments

Going In to Get Out

Stories in Organizational Change

Chapter 7: The Ongoing Journey

The Story of Ged

Integration

GraceGrace

Transformation

Footnotes

Appendix - Kantor's Life Cycle Model

How to Get Help

Preface: The Presence and Power of Stories

Our lives are full of stories. They are, like the air we breathe, so much a part of who we are and what we do that we often don't notice their presence.

Stories are the bases of our movies, television, books, communication, work, religion, humor, conversation, and thinking. They are the primary way we pass our experience, wisdom, and foibles from group to group, generation to generation. And, most powerfully, our stories are a reflection of who we are at our core - as individuals, and as a species.

Stories cover the whole gamut of human experience, from our descriptions of the universe, e.g. the Big Bang story, to expressions of our deep inner selves - our core personal stories.

While taking the whole range into account, this book focuses on the latter, our deep personal stories, how we can learn to know them more clearly, how they help us, how they can constrain us, and how we can, if we wish, learn to see them anew and create even more powerful personal stories ... stories that reflect not only our life experiences, but empower us to reach our highest aspirations for the future.

Stories are critical for leaders. Every leader has a deep personal story, a systemic story that shapes his/her patterns of leadership. And, recent work in leadership and leadership development suggests a new answer to the age-old question, What makes a leader?

We have searched for, among other things, common traits, patterns of behavior, and core competencies that characterize leaders. But, we are discovering that what makes the most powerful leaders, the authentic leaders, are not necessarily common abilities or ways of behaving.

What makes the most powerful leaders is that they live/operate, consistently, from who they deeply are. Put another way, they live in congruence with and become the masters of their own personal stories.

This book is intended to help leaders, coaches and others learn to become clear about their core, and to live from it creatively.

Chapter One

About this Book and Story Work

Why this book? Why now?

The world seems to be in a major state of transition. Many describe our present situation, as a planet and as a species, as one of great turmoil.

We experience constant wars and rumors of wars; we hover on the verge of economic collapse; and, our political systems seem unable to address a wide range of societal problems.

Even more profoundly, the ecosystem necessary to sustain human life on our planet is at risk. We have created a major threat to our civilization, and to our survival as a species. Our climate is changing, extreme weather events are occurring more frequently, and time may be running out.

As Kurt Vonnegut stated so poignantly, these realities are having a powerful effect on our consciousness: There is one thing I miss so much that I can hardly stand it, which is freedom from the certain knowledge that human beings will very soon have made this moist, blue-green planet uninhabitable by human beings. (Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. Gore, Albert, Bloomsbury Publishing, New York, NY, 2009.)

To be sure, earlier civilizations have experienced economic, political and environmental collapse. (See 1491, New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. Mann, Charles C., Vintage Books, New York, NY, 2005, about Central and South American civilizations that had come and gone over thousands of years before Columbus arrived at islands off the shores of this continent.) Some earlier civilizations destroyed themselves through war, greed, and, yes, even the destruction of their environment. Others were destroyed by disease brought by visitors from across the oceans. (Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond, Jared, W.W. Norton, New York, New York, 1997.)

The difference, now, is not that humankind is encountering these cataclysmic shifts for the first time. The difference is the scale on which they are being experienced.

Our species has become so large in number, and so interconnected, that we now face these challenges on a global scale. We are regarded by many people, and I think accurately so, as a species out of control - a species in danger of destroying not only ourselves, but also the ecosystem on which we depend for survival.

Some refer to this current period as The Great Turning; and, many believe that we are at a critical, make-or-break turning point.

One fork in the road leads to disaster, to conditions in which our planet would no longer be able to support human