My sons tell fantastic stories about what they’re going to do and be when they’re grown up: spies, taxi drivers, race-car drivers, generals, fathers of improbably large numbers of children (!), expert fighters, designers, inventors…
The stories are a wonderful mix of the improbable and the impossible with a smattering of the realistic and the actual thrown in for good measure.
I’ve been wondering how the stories I tell compare to theirs, and how I might change them.
Who do you (consciously) tell stories to?
What other stories do you tell to the people who are important to you?
Which side of the balance of probabilities do you favour in your storytelling?
How might you benefit from more outlandish dreams?
Could you do with a dose of the five-year-old’s enthusiasm?
Story telling is therapeutic. The improbable tales that children share are born of creativity that has saving qualities. I was very surprised to read about an imaginary trampoline drawn at the foot of the World Trade Tower as a 911 child eyewitness retold what he saw through his drawing. That imagination was what helped him overcome the traumAtic encounter.