Once upon a time author and business consultant Claire Taylor wrote a “wisdom memoir” about her life. She tells Jaine Blackman the story

We all have tales to tell and the way we do can have a big impact on our lives, according to author and storyteller Claire Taylor.

“Our stories are simply the way that we have interpreted sets of facts and they are windows into our belief systems and the way we see the world.

“I believe the stories we tell and buy into are the stories we live by.

“Two people with similar circumstances can interpret those in very different ways,” she says.

She gives an example of two people with similar educational backgrounds, skill levels and age being made redundant.

“One tells a story about giving the best years of their life to an ungrateful company who didn’t care about them and as a result their self-esteem plummets and they feel victimised and find it hard to move forward into the next step of their life,” says Claire, 46.

“The other person tells a story about their redundancy being a message to tell them it’s time to change and follow their heart – fulfill some dream that they may have secretly had – and so they’re grateful to have a sum of money and the time to try something new.

“This person will find it easier to take the next step from this more empowered place.”

And she says it’s not just individuals who can benefit from the power of storytelling.

Mum-of-one Claire, who has worked as a senior marketing executive with multi-national pharmaceutical companies and as an international business consultant, is a master practitioner in Neuro-linguistic programming (which tries to change people’s patterns of mental and emotional behaviour) and has trained as a storyteller with The International School of Storytelling.

She was writing a book The Tao of Storytelling, using her personal stories to prompt people to look at their own lives when she decided to combine her areas of expertise to co-create The Story Mill, based in Bloxham, near Banbury, last year.

“I believe that at the heart of every business problem is a communication challenge and that storytelling is therefore a dynamic tool to solve business problems in innovative ways,” says Claire, who moved to the area in 1997 when husband David was working for a company in Oxfordshire.

“The Story Mill supports both internal relationships among leadership and teams, and external communication with their customers. I want The Story Mill to be a catalyst for change, innovation and creating organisations that are ecologically sound.

“For example if an organisation wants its employees to be more innovative or more effective it needs to set a culture that can engender and nurture that, not simply demand it. If businesses value customer loyalty then operating not just to the letter of the truth but to the spirit of the truth is the way forward.

“I see storytelling as central to that because it is a powerful way both to understand people’s beliefs and values and to communicate in a way that resonates with them.”

It’s taken many years for Claire to get to the point she’s at now and her book contains 30 of the important stories in her life’s journey. Each contains a message and gives practical exercises for readers to “discover the treasures” from their own stories.

A personal development enthusiast since her 20s, she highlights the up and downs of significant experiences and events and found it “powerfully cathartic”.

It includes stories of her early family life on a farm in Ireland, her mother’s death when she was 14, struggles with an eating disorder and as a young unmarried mum in London as well as finding true love, her son Ryan’s graduation and the joys of motherhood.

She thought a great deal about opening up her life up to others with the book.

“I was initially fearful and then when I decided to write my book as a wisdom memoir those fears subsided and it felt like an important body of work to inspire others.

“Every story that I told needed to serve a purpose in the book and carry a message that I hoped people could resonate with.

“These stories tackle big life themes such as courage, rejection, loss, celebration, love, life purpose and such like.

“I have opened up some aspects of my life, and I’ve tried along the way to tackle it in a graceful and elegant way with just enough information to engage the reader and communicate the message.

“I have received some wonderful feedback from people who have read the book and written to me and shared how certain stories have resonated with them.

“People can say yes, me too, I’ve had that experience and I hadn’t quite looked at it in that way before. It creates a sense of connection and a shift in thinking often happens, which may be small or transformational.

“The book shows others how to discover the treasure that exists in their own lives – we all have it – and so sharing some of my stories to empower others to do that feels important.”

And the good news is that by looking at old stories we can “rewrite” the past.

“We do that all the time – we change our perspectives of situations and tell a different story about them,” she says.

“In the example about the person who felt victimised by their redundancy, they might in time get a new job doing something they had never imagined or turn a hobby into a money-making activity and then look back at their redundancy and tell a story of it being the best thing that ever happened to them.

“It’s important to say here though that we need to recognise that we are where we are and it’s not to judge the story that we or anyone else has about a situation.

“Sometimes these shifts in perspective take time and rewriting the story can become a healing journey.

“Rewriting our stories is about viewing the same set of circumstances with greater awareness within ourselves, from a more expanded level of consciousness, if you like, and sometimes getting there takes time.”

thestorymill.co.uk
the-tao-of-storytelling.com