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If you’re just tuning in, this is the 3rd episode in a series on storytelling, as we explore why it’s important for TCKs and CCKs and their parents – expats in general – and people in general really. Why it’s important, and how we can go about it, whether through art processing activities, or journaling, or the words we speak, or by engaging with a character through acting. So if you haven’t caught the whole series, start at episode 21.

These two episodes (22 and 23) really complement each other. Seriously. So many gems. And the things Kate and Christine say, it’s almost like we had a 3-way conversation. I’ve had several “aha” moments and shifts in the way I think about my own story and how I do and how I can convey my story, and shifts in the way I think about my kids’ stories and how I can set the stage for them to excavate and craft and communicate their own stories. I would love to hear what pieces of these two interview stand out to you or give you a new way to approach your life abroad or your life after living abroad or your life with others who have not lived abroad.

And stay tuned for the next couple of episodes as this series on storytelling continues. Next time we’ll be shifting from verbal stories to drama and theatre skills.

Kim: [00:00:55] Christine Taylor is with me today. This is a very special guest for me because she came to me with a little piece of fan mail, which was so exciting. So I think we’re just going to start by letting you, Christine, share a little bit about your story and how that prompted you to reach out to me. This was after I had published an episode on my story of unresolved grief. You wrote to me to say that you were touched by that. So I’m just going to let you tell us a little bit about your growing up and some of that grief story and how that has morphed or evolved or changed and shifted for you over the years.

Christine: [00:01:45] Thank you so much, first of all, this is like the reason we should all write letters to the people that we admire because you never know what can happen. So encouraging anyone is listening: if you like what you’re hearing, send Kim an email,

Kim: [00:01:56] Yes.

Christine: [00:01:58] I guess I until I was 12, I thought I was going to leave a very boring life. I grew up in South Dakota – in Rapid City, South Dakota, and my dad got out of the military and got a job in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. And the adventure began. And for a girl living in Saudi … in South Dakota, moving to Saudi Arabia was adventure enough, except that we moved the same year that Saddam Hussein decided to invade Kuwait. And three days after that invasion happened, the company my dad was working for evacuated all of the women and children of our compound.

Christine: [00:02:33] And we didn’t go back to Saudi for almost a year, for a full school year we were gone. And because of my family circumstance, which is we didn’t have family in the States anymore, we ended up in a new place in the state. So I started in South Dakota. Then I went to Saudi Arabia and then I went back. But we ended up in Washington State.

Christine: [00:02:54] Spent a year there and then flew back to Saudi via Taiwan, where unfortunately, very, very, very shortly after we arrived, my uncle passed away. And so we had to deal with that. Funerals in Taiwan are complex and postdated. So that was about six to eight weeks after he passed away, my mother was back in Taiwan dealing with that. And about two weeks after that, I went to boarding school.

Christine: [00:03:23] So in terms of unprocessed grief, it was something I had really boxed up and put away and not looked at for many, many, many years until I started to realize what an impact it had on me and my ability to just be myself with people and to talk to people and let them see me and allow me to see them. And it has really been only the past maybe three or four years (four might be stretching it) that I have started to work on processing that and understanding all the different kinds of loss that I felt. And it’s been incredibly healing and has put me in a position to connect with people in ways I never could before. And I didn’t think that that was the case. But having learned that it is the case, I’m kind of going through a whole new cycle of feeling sorry for all the missed opportunities. But those are a lot of people I’m still in touch with, and I can just connect with them in a different way now. So, yeah, that’s what you triggered.

Kim: [00:04:23] Well, you just you kind of glossed over this point, but you were 12 when this adventure began, so that happened in the span of like puberty and early teenage years.

Christine: [00:04:37] Yeah.

Kim: [00:04:37] That’s that’s a really critical time as well for all of that to be happening.

Christine: [00:04:42] It was it was very, very intense. I was 12 or 13 when we left Rapid City. I was 14 when I arrived at boarding school and 17 when I left. And I didn’t look between 14 and 17, I didn’t set foot in the States. So I just went between Switzerland and Saudi Arabia, see my parents and vacations. And so when I arrived in the States at 17 to start college, I was like the weirdest creature on campus and had enormous difficulty finding anyone I could relate to at all. Because if I told anyone where I was from, it was South Dakota. I was in North Carolina at the University of North Carolina, which is 90 percent in-state student population. So in four years there, I met one other guy from South Dakota and he came in as a wrestler. So everybody knew who he was and that was it. You know, if people asked me where I’d gone to high school, it was Switzerland and boarding school. That’ll shut down a conversation in a quick minute.

Kim: [00:05:40] Yeah, they don’t know how to relate.

Christine: [00:05:42] Yeah, and if they asked where I lived, I told them Saudi Arabia. Like it just got worse and worse and worse. And so ultimately, I ended up not ever answering the question. And if people asked me where I was from, I would tell them my parents live in Carrboro, which is a neighboring town where my parents lived starting September of the year that I started university. And nobody ever asked a follow up question, I would say for many, many years.

Kim: [00:06:05] Oh, wow. So that’s quite a process of learning which parts of your story you want to tell and which parts to put to the side.

Christine: [00:06:15] Yeah, yeah, and it was a lot for very long time.

Kim: [00:06:19] And now you are finding extra joy in helping people tell their stories. Tell us a little bit about what you do now.

Christine: [00:06:28] So what I do now, in like really nice, cute terms, is help women in transition use stories to find their voice so they can communicate and connect with confidence. The key there being that once you understand the story that you want to tell about yourself and how you want to tell people your story, it’s so much easier to say who you are. People ask you who you are, you’re no longer searching because you know what you’re trying to say. And that’s the key for me, because understanding what my story is has enabled me to tell people this is the version for you, that’s the version for you, and that makes it easier to answer those questions.

Christine: [00:07:02] I started out wanting to do academic storytelling. My husband’s in academics. I was working at a university. I am one of those kids who wish they could stay at the university for the rest of their lives. But real life happened and it kind of evolved into something else based on a combination of my life experiences and my professional experiences, which have been, you know, I’ve moved a lot. I was studying literature endlessly at the university for as long as I could, and also ended up doing intercultural work by accident for five years. And it’s always pulled me back. And so now I’m doing story in storytelling work and story work in those contexts with women who are also in transition, doing the moving a lot, having to figure out who you are again. And the idea for young professionals or students of how do I talk about who I am, how do I introduce myself, how do I make a memorable first impression, those kinds of things.

Kim: [00:07:57] Ok, primarily women who are in transition. And are you’re speaking about professional transition or every kind of transition?

Christine: [00:08:05] I think that women go through three key kinds of transitions. One is the student to working life transition, and that can be when you’re in your 20s at that point. It can also be if you have decided to go to a Ph.D. and get out of academics at that moment. Women also go through career transitions that they either choose for themselves or don’t choose for themselves. So maybe you’ve been in marketing forever and decided that’s not for you. What, you want to go do something else? There’s a reshaping of your story that needs to happen for you to feel good about doing that. Then all the women who are going from doing the hardest job of mothering to entering the workforce again, and I think we overlook that one a lot and the huge number of skills that women develop, managing a whole living creature before they come back into work.

Kim: [00:08:58] Are there some key moments in life that we tell stories without even really realizing that that’s what we’re doing?

Christine: [00:09:08] I think the thing about stories is that we’re telling them all the time. So that if you go back and think about the last time you sat around a table with people or Zoom call with people, you were telling stories. You were telling stories about what you did or you were telling stories about the past, bringing up good memories will bring up stories. I think what’s happened is that we now think of stories in a different context. You know, it used to be you would go for a job interview or you’d write a cover letter and you would talk about yourself. But we didn’t think about it as telling a story. So I think the interest in storytelling as a medium of communication or as the way to think about the way we communicate has changed the way we think about these stories. But we’ve been doing it all along. We don’t really have a different way to communicate. I think that we’re telling stories all the time and the ones that matter are the ones that we tell to people who don’t know us already.

Christine: [00:10:07] So it’s those stories when you’re first getting to know people. It’s those stories when you are revealing something about yourself that people may not have known about you. There are stories we tell that reframe the context in which people see us. You know, I mean, you and I have had a couple of conversations. We know each other a little bit. But if I came up and told you a story about I don’t know, I worked backstage at a Neil Young concert, the guy travels with three Harley Davidson. It was amazing. It was also the first time I ever heard Neil Young and knew it was him. That does something to the way you see who I am, because the girl who lives in the Netherlands that does storytelling is not the same as this person who worked backstage at concert. Wait a minute, who does that? So those reframing stories are really the ones that I think we don’t think about and the ones that matter a lot. They’re often hard to tell. Also, the Neil Young thing is true.

Kim: [00:11:08] Can you give me some examples of how how we use storytelling in parenting? I ask that because I think it IS a natural thing we do all the time, but I don’t think of myself as a storyteller. My default is to go to factual, linear sequences of events as the best way to communicate. And I know intellectually that that’s not always true.

Christine: [00:11:34] I love this question. I have to add, my children went to a Waldorf school, so part of the Waldorf education is that you get a different set of stories for every age group. So when you are a kindergartener, basically you do fairy tales and you get older, you do stories of the Bible, and then you move on to the stories from the region, tales. Then you move on to the Greek gods. So there’s this whole progression of stories that are related to the progression in a child’s development and consciousness of the world. So that is something they were embedded in. And that was part of the reason I became more interested in what stories can do as well.

Christine: [00:12:12] And so, like trying to be a good Waldorf mom, I at one point got a book called Healing Stories for Challenging Behavior, and it’s by Susan Perrow. The book talks about how when we communicate with children (and she’s talking about kind of lower elementary school age children) trying to teach them a lesson like you shouldn’t lie to people because they won’t believe you. They don’t have, they’re not there yet to understand what that means. And instead, if we tell them stories, we give them an experience and something they can retain and learn the lessons from. We don’t have to tell them what the story means. We can tell them the story and they can understand develop in their understanding of stories. Plus, kids love repetition so they’ll get there. She also has a whole bunch of stories in there that you could tell your kids if you want, all categorized by different situations. So it’s a really cool resource.

Christine: [00:13:02] I, however, tend to never like the stories people offer me because I don’t know why. It’s a bizarre resistance that doesn’t do anything productive for me. So the stories are actually good.

Christine: [00:13:12] But there was a time when my kid was on a bike on his own, so he is maybe six or so. He lied about something once or twice within a week. He thinks he was trying it out of how it’s going to work. I didn’t want it to work. And so I got, I did all the mom things. I got angry at him. I got angry at me. I was convinced I was going to raise a child who’s going to be an awful human being. And you know what I ended up actually doing? We had this bike ride to school every day. It’s about twenty minutes. And I said, “Let me tell you a story,” one day. And I told him the story of Peter and the Wolf. You know, Peter takes the sheep out, he cries wolf. And the third… The first time people come from the city. The second time everyone from the city comes. The third time there’s actually a wolf and nobody turns up. “Let me tell you a story.” And I told him the story. And the next day he wanted to hear it again. And the next day he wanted to hear it again. And this went on for a while. But he didn’t lie anymore. We didn’t talk about what it was. But later, months, years later, I could say, “Remember what happened to Peter?” Oh yeah, they didn’t believe him anymore. And so it gave us a reference that wasn’t me telling, giving him a lesson, but for him a story reference to understand things.

Christine: [00:14:29] And my kids still really, you know, they’re ten and twelve now. And we still use kind of imagination and storytelling to deal with some of the emotional stuff, because it’s hard to talk to me about stuff that’s hard and sometimes it’s hard to hear lessons from me. But if you hear it from a character, those are easier to take because there’s just a bit of distance. And these, to be clear, are sometimes super cheap IKEA hand puppets that have developed personalities in our house. And they live, you know, we still talk about them and we’ll talk about, “what would…” We have one called Wilson. Wilson’s a bit slow. He’s a pig and he… Sometimes, “oh, Wilson wouldn’t like this very much.” But those things, they’ll come up in conversation. So there doesn’t, there isn’t an age limit on when stories can be useful. And I’m really curious to see what it’s going to be as they get older.

Kim: [00:15:21] Very interesting. Do you think that when we’re in a period of transition, that our needs for storytelling are different than at other times in our lives?

Christine: [00:15:36] Yeah, absolutely, I mean, I’m you know, full disclosure, going through a massive transition right now. The movers are coming two weeks from today to pack up my house. And in this moment, you’re trying to figure out, I’m trying to figure out, you know, what is the story of the last 10 years of my life that I’ve lived in this town, in this place? Is it that I was unhappy and I’m leaving? Is it that I learned I made great friends and things are wonderful and I’m leaving and I’m sad about it. And somehow we’re trying to feel through the material and figure out what the story is. I think that’s a sorting process that we go through.

Christine: [00:16:10] And at the same time, people are asking 7000 questions about what the next chapter is. What’s going to happen next? What do you do with your business? What are your plans? Why are you moving? Everyone trying to fill things in for you. They want to know what’s going on. Are you ever coming back? How long are you leaving for? Anyone who’s listening to this podcast has heard all of these questions and like all of the rest that go with it.

Christine: [00:16:31] And so you keep having to, like, articulate something for people where you may not have an answer. And that demand for story plus your own need to understand what happened and where you’re going. I think it means the story matters a lot when we’re in transition. And at the same time, we don’t have a story to tell. And that sucks. Like that, you know, because I’m a child of the 90s, it just sucks. It’s like going to the buffet and the buffet is perpetually only half full. The only thing left is like the onions from the sweet and sour chicken. You know, that’s not enough.

Kim: [00:17:07] What a picture.

Christine: [00:17:07] And so, you know that feeling when you’re going, “Ohhh.”

Christine: [00:17:14] And so I think the need is great and the answers aren’t there and the story isn’t there. And somehow in this moment of — I’m starting to think of it as the muddle — what we have to be OK with doing is, “Not sure. But I have faith it’ll turn out OK.” You know, “I’m not sure, but I’m willing to go for the ride.” And I think that also is a bit of releasing ourselves from responsibility of having a story right now.

Christine: [00:17:43] When you’re in the middle of the story, you can’t tell it. You have to wait and see how things are going to play out. And I say that, well, you know, there are a lot of people out there who like to psychologize the hero’s journey and figure out where they are in the hero’s journey to figure out what’s coming next, which I’m actually adamantly against because that stuff feels funny to me. At the same time, the truth in storytelling and the truth about storytelling is you can’t really tell a story until you’ve processed it. You have to process it yourself before you can deliver something satisfactory to your audience.

Christine: [00:18:12] So you know my story about all of the crazy things that happened between when I was 12 and 14, that’s not a story I told for twenty, twenty five years. I didn’t tell that story because I couldn’t. Because I couldn’t even get through the facts of it without tearing up. And I think in that same way, the story of what’s happening to me now, if I have to try to tell it, I get flustered, I get frustrated. And in the middle of it, when I realize because I don’t have an ending, I don’t have a direction, I start to feel like I failed at something.

Christine: [00:18:45] You know, I haven’t failed at anything. I’m packing a whole house to move. I am getting things done. But what I’m trying to answer questions that I can’t answer, I work myself into this position I don’t need to be and nobody needs to be in that position. It’s OK. I don’t know what’s going to happen next.

Kim: [00:19:00] Do you find yourself reverting back to the previous story of drawing on “OK Well, I did, I’ve made a move, a big move before,” and drawing on that story arc to kind of fill in some of the gaps? Or do… It sounds like you just kind of find yourself feeling like, oh, I don’t, I can’t tell you this story. And so it kind of puts your brain in like, shut-down mode.

Christine: [00:19:24] Yes…. No…. What it…. OK, so here’s the thing. At this point, I’m not really worried about my story because I know that I don’t know what it’s going to be. And I started to enjoy watching other people be uncomfortable with it.

Christine: [00:19:37] So it’s really fun when people are saying, “so you’re coming back, right?” You go, I don’t know. “How long are you staying?” I dunno. For the foreseeable future, does that work for you? And I think it’s, you know, and this is me and it’s definitely not going to work for everybody. But, you know, I don’t need to come up with a story to make you comfortable. You’re not moving. I’m going.

Kim: [00:19:59] Right, exactly. It’s not your responsibility to satisfy everyone else.

Christine: [00:20:04] Yeah, and so that’s what it is for me. At the same time, professionally, it’s a very weird time. It’s me. I’m a one person business. I do. I have clients here. A lot of people want to know what’s going on there. And I tend to say something like, “Turns out I’ve got a couple of long term projects that are percolating right now and I’ll be working in the fall, so I’m happy with that.” Which isn’t really a story. It’s just like, it’s kind of a stopper, right? It’s like the cotton in the top of the bottle. You don’t know what’s inside. You don’t even care. You just shake the bottle, you know something’s there, you’re satisfied. And that’s what a lot of people are looking for. They just want to be satisfied that, you know, you have a plan and that’s OK with them.

Kim: [00:20:47] Yeah. Tell us more about the hero’s journey, you’re not so hip on that.

Christine: [00:20:53] I think the hero’s journey is fascinating from a story perspective. It’s 17 stages of the hero’s journey, it starts with.

Kim: [00:20:59] Oh, it’s a lot.

Christine: [00:21:00] Oh, yeah, it’s a book by Joseph Campbell. He is an anthropologist who was working in the 1940s through the 1960s, and he looked at all these myths across all these cultures and they found a pattern in these stories, which he called the hero’s journey. It is really 17 stages of getting ready for the journey, in the middle of the journey, and the return. And it is the base of the idea that there is structure to the story. But 17 stages is a lot. I looked at Christopher Vogler in The Writer’s Journey, has a shorter version, only 12. And it’s about what do you, what does the protagonist of the hero’s story go through in order to make a story a story? You have essentially kind of a setting the scene, and a call to action, and then things happen, and you meet people, and then you almost achieve things, and you don’t quite get there, and then you get there, but then you have to come back, and you just learn things. So it’s all, It’s all of this all put together.

Christine: [00:21:54] What I’ve seen in the psychologizing of it is that people say, well, you could look at your situation and try to understand where are you on the hero’s journey. And look at the people around you, because there’s the steps of the journey and there’s also the archetypes, which are the characters in the stories. And look at people and say, is this person a mentor for me or are they a friend or is this person a shapeshifter who might turn into an enemy? Or is it someone they can trust that? This kind of way…. And also looking at, you know, is this a call to a journey that I’m experiencing or is it something else?

Christine: [00:22:27] And I just don’t believe in applying it to my personal life or to understand where someone is in their journey in life. Because stories are constructions. We make them up. Even if everything in the story is true.

Christine: [00:22:41] When you read Michelle Obama’s biography, her memoir, Becoming. It’s all true. It all happened. And she picked the stuff that was going to be in there and left out 99 percent of everything else.

Christine: [00:22:56] So to take a model for a story which is very carefully constructed and say I can use this to understand my life, leaves out the fact that a storyteller left out all the details. they absolutely cherry pick the thing that would make a great story. Your life doesn’t have to be a great story in its totality, but I promise you, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. We can go then and make an amazing story out of things that happened.

Kim: [00:23:20] That’s wonderful. I love that. What do you think is the first step if we’re wanting to craft a story? Because you’ve said that it’s highly constructed and we’re going to create a story, we’re going to create a narrative. So what’s the first step? Or if we want to say it another way, what are mistakes that you see people making?

Christine: [00:24:56] The mistake people make is they come to me and they say, “I want to do storytelling,” but they don’t know what story they want to tell yet. So what I’ve learned in doing, you know, four years of storytelling work is that the thing people actually need to do is find the story. And that’s harder than telling the story because we all have practice telling stories and some people are going to be better at it than others. But the real challenge is in finding the story. In order to find the story you need to figure out: For what purpose am I telling the story? What do I want to achieve with this story? Which is really ugly-strategic.

Christine: [00:25:32] In terms of everybody wants to think that stories are like natural and they flow. No, no, no. Stories serve a purpose for you when it comes to storytelling. So what am I trying to achieve? What’s the purpose of my story? Do I want to get hired for a job? Do I want to build a network? Do I want to make friends in a new community? Do I want to have a close story, so maybe I don’t want, maybe I want to be able to hold the person really close and just try to feel things out. What are you trying to do? So that’s number one.

Christine: [00:26:06] And then the next thing is to try to figure out: Think carefully about who are you going to tell your story to, and what do you want them to take away from the story telling? And those are the things we take when we are telling our story.

Christine: [00:26:19] As an example, I give storytelling workshops. I broadly work with either academic audiences or non academic audiences. A lot of the academic audiences I work with are in science faculties and I walk in the door and they just think, oh yeah, here’s another arts yahoo. We can stop now. And so I always tell them the story of working with my husband, who is an M.D. PhD and has been giving scientific presentations since I met him. And they’ve been, you know, back then it was really amazed by what was considered communication in the scientific community.

Christine: [00:26:54] It’s gotten better, but people actually get jobs as science communication specialists right now. So clearly science has recognized that they can, there are ways they could improve. But I will tell a science, any kind of science audience, the story of working with my husband and I will speak specifically to having worked on grant applications with him, having worked on presentations for non scientific audiences with him. And I have a set of of moments that I will talk about because I’m constructing a story. I’ve been working with him for 18 years, ever since I met him, on things. But I pick three or four things and I weave those into a story. And by the time I’ve gotten to the end of that five to eight minutes, my audience goes, oh, she might know what she’s talking about when it comes to science. And they’ll believe me.

Christine: [00:27:39] But if I were to, you know, if I was speaking to a group of international women, that is a terrible starting point. So I’m going to tell them about how I accidentally ended up teaching intercultural awareness. Or the way that I spoke to strangers at the market in order to make friends, because they were speaking English so why not give it a try? I’m going to pick different stories about myself to share with them in order to create, to give them the idea that we can connect. Because that’s what we’re looking for in stories. Stories are just a method to connect with people to show that we have the same humanity underneath it all.

Kim: [00:28:17] So if we have figured out what we want to tell and who we want to tell it to, then what’s next?

Christine: [00:28:25] Then you’re going to start going through and figure out what are, what are some of the specifics you want to convey? Maybe you want to talk about characteristics about yourself, or skills that you have, or experiences that you’ve had. And you’re going to find ways to put those events together using a story structure to show some kind of, you know, the emotional ups and downs that go with that.

Christine: [00:28:45] And you might be talking, you know, I can tell a story that’s about the moment in which I met people at the market. I can also weave that into a part of a larger story about the strategies I use to kind of build a community, having moved to the Netherlands. So you could use the same material in different ways. You can compress it, you can expand it. It’s super flexible.

Kim: [00:29:06] Ok, how do we know if we’ve landed with a good story — or an effective story.

Christine: [00:29:14] Well, I mean, the good thing is because you were thinking strategically about what you want your story to do, your story is effective if it does what you want to do: If people are asking you the question that you want them to ask you when you get to the end of it.

Christine: [00:29:27] So, you know, there was a story I told that was about all the different you know… One of the reasons I’m good at talking about myself professionally is I keep applying for jobs that have nothing to do with anything I’ve ever done before. And constructing these like, “This is why I’m the person you should hire.” And amazingly, it keeps working. So there’s something to this. And in testing the story with an audience, because you should test your stories, your audience can be your kids, could be your neighbors, can be your friends, it can be strangers. In testing the story in my storytelling, I had said, you know, I applied for one job, X, Y, Z, and it didn’t go very well. Then I applied for another job, but it went great.

Christine: [00:30:05] When I finished the story, the question someone asked was, what’s the time gap between the first application and second application? That’s not the question I want them to ask me. I want them to ask me, like, wait a minute, could you help me tell a story like that? And so now that I know my story has a problem, the next time I tell a story, I say, you know, I applied for a job. It didn’t go well, blah, blah, blah. 20 years later, I applied for this job. And so slowly over many, many tellings, I develop a story that takes care of all the gaps of information in the middle and leads people to hopefully asking me a question like, “Well, that’s really interesting. Can you tell me more about your storytelling techniques or how do you know something more along the lines of what I want to talk about at the end of the story?”

Kim: [00:30:50] Yeah, and you had another example of this that I thought was really great. You were talking about how there’s the information we’re trying to convey and there’s the information that the other person wants or needs to receive. And we have to kind of dance between these two and make them work together. And you were giving an example of, like answering the question, where are you from? Can you talk about that again? Because I really loved that.

Christine: [00:31:17] I love it. So when when people ask me, where are you from? Sometimes they want to know, they want a geography question and sometimes they want to know what makes you you. And I think that happens with all of us. And I think often we can feel the difference with the, you know, the casual conversation that someone wants to figure out where to put their pin in their map. So: I know Christine and she’s from North Carolina. And other people want to know what makes you like you are. And those are the people who want to know more about, you know, an international background or the experiences that formed you. And I think part of what we do as storytellers is pay attention to our audience to see what they’re responding to – and not. And some of that is physical feedback we’re getting from people. (And this works online, too, so there’s no excuses.) But, you know, is somebody looking at me as I tell the story, are they looking away? Can I tell by the look on their face that they’re starting to think about what they want to say? Have I got them with me? Those are all cues I can use to try to figure out what the question really means.

Christine: [00:32:17] And there’s also the fact that I might be in a situation where I want, you know, if I speak to you, Kim, with the expat podcast, I want you to know about my experience. If I have met a new mom at school who is – I live in Nijmegen in the Netherlands – who is probably from around here, and we’re really just like our kids are in school together. And can we be nice? She doesn’t care. Like who? What does she care that I got evacuated from Riyadh. That does nothing to improve the situation or help our relationship. If I tell her that, in fact, if I tell her that, I’m just going to emphasize the fact that there’s a pretty big gap between her life experience and mine. So instead, I would probably say, oh, I’ve been living here for ten years. Because that will probably more likely get someone in the Dutch context I’m reassuring people that I am based here. I’m staying here for a while. It’s OK to invest in making even casual friends with me because I’m not going to take off next year. (Which I am doing! But don’t tell anyone.)

Kim: [00:33:20] I won’t tell.

Christine: [00:33:21] But it’s that kind of gauging. And again, it’s being strategic about what you want to tell people in terms of figuring out how does it go to the next step. I found so, so disingenuous when I say this, “I’m strategic about how I communicate with people.”

Kim: [00:33:36] No, but I loved the way you said it when we were talking before about how if you give certain details that just confuse people and they are trying to make it make sense and they don’t have the context to make it make sense. Based on their life experience, they cannot hear what you’re trying to tell them because they’re completely occupied trying to figure out, “But… But why? Or how?” And meanwhile, you’re going on with your story and they didn’t catch any of it.

Christine: [00:34:06] Yeah, that this for me is a lot of especially if I speak to Americans, if I say moved around a lot, Americans, they are all, “your dad was in the military. Oh, you’re a military brat” when I tell my story. And I did it at the beginning of this show. When you go back on the recording you’ll notice that I said, “my dad got out of the military and then we started moving.” Because that’s become a permanent, like little phrase I have to put in there so that I could detach myself from that version of the story people have for me, because that’s not my story.

Christine: [00:34:34] Also, when I talk about boarding school, I will usually say “there were no boarding schools, so everyone got sent there,” because I don’t want, it’s too difficult to explain. You know, if you say I went to a Swiss boarding school, people get particular images and none of them are related to my actual life that I was living when I was going to boarding school. So those are things that as you go through the experience of telling your story over and over, you learn to add the facts that people need so that your story is actually about you and not just tapping into some idea they have about what a thing is.

Kim: [00:35:10] Yeah, and you had an important little phrase in there about when you tell it over and over, and I think that’s that piece. Like, I’m sort of, I’m asking you this because, well, how can we do this and how can we do that? Because I’m looking for what’s the shortcut? And I think part of what you’re saying is there’s not really a shortcut for some of this. It’s just trial and error. And you learn in different contexts what works and what doesn’t work. And there’s that, there’s some pain involved as we go through that trial and error. And it can be fun to.

Christine: [00:35:44] If there’s a real misunderstanding of storytelling, it’s that people think if I teach them story structure, they can go tell stories and it’ll be fine. And the reality is I could teach a story structure in 20 minutes. You’ll remember it. You’ll remember it for the next 20 years. It’s simple. But to get good at storytelling is going to take you all those 20 years and longer. And stories aren’t ever finished. Stories are always evolving. Because you are evolving and you have a different thing you want to say with the stories that are the same.

Kim: [00:36:16] That is so true.

Christine: [00:36:17] I sound like I talk a lot about myself. I tell to like the same 16 stories ad nauseum. There’s nothing new. I’ve told a zillion people I went to boarding school, you know. But there are also a lot of boarding school stories I’ve never told, and won’t, because either they’re boring or they are painful or they’re embarr…. I don’t tell the embarrassing stories. I tell the laugh-at-me stories, but not the I’m-ashamed-of stories.

Christine: [00:36:42] So, you know, it’s not a quick fix. And if there’s something I’m, that I get upset about, angry about, is that storytelling is not a quick route to better communication. It’s probably the longest route to better communication. Because stories are hard. Good stories are incredibly difficult. And good stories are often the stories that sit on this very, very careful, teetering between extremely personal and wildly universal. They’re the stories that I can tell that you’d listen to me and go, you know, I’ve never been in a market in Nijmegen in the Netherlands and maybe never will be. But that experience of: I feel myself among strangers. And I see one thing that looks familiar and I jump on it, and that moment of do I do anything or do I not? And the nervousness of speaking to a stranger and trying to make a connection. You can connect with all of that because that’s the universal in my very, very personal story.

Christine: [00:37:47] And those are the stories that, you know, if you’re talking about a bigger stage, if you want to get into speaking or professionally having a story that you use over and over those stories that are personal about you and show people the kind of person you are and speak to something universal where everyone can understand the emotions that are going on. Those are the most successful stories.

Christine: [00:38:09] And if we look at, you know, a lot of the things that are coming out that are very cool, like the f-up stories that people do, like, you know, the I messed up story night, that kind of event is all about tapping into the shared feeling of I don’t want to be the one who messed up, but I know I’ve messed up and I don’t know how to talk about it and can I be proud of it and how it turned into a successful story. And that’s the balance. That’s what I think is really beautiful about storytelling, is that you can bring that instant, very personal connection. Because I’m going to tell you something that’s about me in my life and only me. But I’m going to tell it to you in a way that you’re going to feel that it’s about you too. That’s when we connect.

Kim: [00:38:52] Yes, that was very beautifully put, it makes sense right here.

Christine: [00:38:59] Thank you.

Kim: [00:39:01] Do you have any controversial opinions on storytelling, unpopular?

Christine: [00:39:08] I think I just said it. The one where I think storytelling is a sham. I tend to look at all books that are marketing-plus-storytelling and basically want to throw them in the trash.

Kim: [00:39:20] Marketing.

Christine: [00:39:21] Yeah, because there’s not a shortcut. And often, you know, it’s about constructing a story I don’t believe in. If you’re a fiction writer, fantastic. Build the story. But constructing a story to sell things, essentially people feel it. A lot of origin stories that aren’t really genuinely about a personal experience, a thing that happened, they don’t last in the long term. One of the interesting things is that when I work with people, entrepreneurs, and try to get them to tell the personal story that’s behind what they’re doing, a lot of them are like, oh, that’s not interesting, that’s just me. But in the end, it’s right back to when I was just saying it’s that personal that borders on the universal. It’s where they overlap, that we all get really, really interested. And it’s not capitalizing on your personal story to share your story in the service of your work. It’s letting people know who you are. It’s actually a moment of vulnerability. And I think you can’t tell a story that doesn’t include vulnerability. Because when you tell a story, I believe they should always somehow be about you. That’s always going to leave you open to all kinds of things happening. So, yeah.

Christine: [00:40:34] Oh, yeah, and the other the other thing I think is, you know, everybody wants to give a TED talk. Which is wonderful and spectacular. They’re awesome to listen to. I don’t know. But at this point, they’re also like, it’s “a thing,” right? Like they’re all starting to get a little similar.

Kim: [00:40:52] Yeah.

Christine: [00:40:53] And they’re hot and exciting right now, but. If you are talking about a TED talk and then you say Cinderella, I mean, look at the Cinderella story, how many people are gonna do a TED Talk? And I always go back to fairy tales when we talk about storytelling. When I teach storytelling, my gosh, even when I’m teaching the science PhDs about storytelling, we do Cinderella. And you can see…. You know, I speak to people who, people who are going to book a workshop with me, they’ll be admin people who work with all these poor PhD’ers working their tails off and, “Oh, but the fairy tales, that’s going to be really weird for them.” But those are the stories that have endured. You know, if we talk about Little Red Riding Hood, I can sit in a room with 40 people from 15, 16 different countries or more and say, what’s the name of Little Red Riding Hood where you come from? And everyone’s got an answer. Because everyone knows the story. It is just broad, it’s familiar and it’s lasted. And we’re still continuing to dig into those stories and find meaning. Angela Carter wrote Red Riding Hood x3 in one of her collections. And then there’s a whole two or three different series that have come out on Netflix or whatever is doing shows that are based on fairy tales and remixing fairy tales. How is it that those stories have lasted? Because they’re great stories. So I really think that going back to that is really where it’s at. If you could tell a story that lasts as long as Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood have lasted? Far surpassed a TED Talk.

Kim: [00:42:26] That is true. That would be a different goal.

Christine: [00:42:28] Yes.

Kim: [00:42:33] Tell me, what do you do for fun?

Christine: [00:42:35] Read a lot of books.

Kim: [00:42:37] Do you have a book recommendation?

Christine: [00:42:40] Any time somebody asked me, I say, “What do you like?” There’s no universal recommendation.

Kim: [00:42:46] It’s really hard for me to answer. I like a well-written story. A well-written book.

Christine: [00:42:51] A well-written story. Like if you had, if you were on a desert island with the book, what are the three books you’re taking with you?

Kim: [00:42:59] I’m so bad with names. One that really struck me was A Prayer for Owen Meany.

Christine: [00:43:06] Yes.

Kim: [00:43:07] A totally different genre: I really enjoyed I Am Pilgrim.

Christine: [00:43:11] I want to read that one. But it sounds like you like big books, lots of characters also about kind of life and things happening. Do you like things about different cultures as well?

Kim: [00:43:22] Yes.

Christine: [00:43:24] So I just read Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee, which is the story of Koreans in the United States. Wealthy Korean families on the East Coast of the United States very specifically. And it’s told mainly focusing on one daughter, but it includes like her and schoolmates and cousins and all these kinds of things. And there’s conflict and there’s love and there’s all whatever is going on in it. But I have to say that I was reading this book for a book club, and when it arrived, I discovered that it was one of those this thick kind of books and like six hundred pages. And I immediately sent everyone a text message. I know there’s no way I can finish this in time. Can we just do half, please? And then when I open it up, it was so good that I got to half in two and a half days and had to not let myself read the rest of it so that I wouldn’t do spoilers. So if you want a book that you’re going to open up and just want to keep turning the pages when you get to the end, that’s the one that I would recommend right now.

Kim: [00:44:21] That’s good. Excellent. Tell us about what you have coming up, what – you already said you’re moving.

Christine: [00:44:29] I’m moving to Canada, which is a bit unexpected for all of us — in a good way. But we’ve been living here for 10 years, the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere. And as of somewhere in the middle of July, I’ll be living in Edmonton, Canada. So that’s going to be an exciting new adventure. It’s wild. It’s also funny to be moving after 10 years because I’ve forgotten how to do it. And so it’s all scary again.

Kim: [00:44:51] I think it feels scary every time for me.

Christine: [00:44:54] Yeah, well, it’s interesting because my husband has never done a big household international moves, so we’re having lots of discussions about whether or not to take this old couch with us or that table. Yeah, you all have had these conversations. That is my life right now, times seven hundred. So I’m doing that. In terms of my storytelling work, I’m going to be starting a cohort for the first time, hopefully about five or six women to work together, starting in the end of September to work on developing their stories. I’m very excited because it’s going to be a new format. I’ve done one-on-one work. I have done an online course, and this is going to be a bit of a hybrid that will be a mini online course to cover the basics of story structure. But we’re going to talk together about how to fill that it and it’s really going to focus on international women in transition. So I am very, very excited to do that.

Kim: [00:45:46] That sounds fantastic.

Christine: [00:45:49] It’s going to be cool. I will continue doing diversity and inclusion work, which I haven’t talked about much, but I did – I got sucked into, is what I always say – intercultural work. As in I told the people who were trying to hire me to do it that I didn’t know how to do it. And they insisted that I would be OK. And I ended up doing it for five years, teaching intercultural awareness. And then I left it for good (I thought), except the last two or three years and pulled me back in. And so now I also do some diversity inclusion work. And on the 23rd of June, I don’t know if this will be out in time, but I will be giving a webinar for SIETAR, the Society of Intercultural Educators, Trainers and Researchers in the Netherlands, a webinar there called Embrace Your Ignorance. And I’m looking at where does intercultural work and diversity work intersect? And I think it’s an embracing our ignorance. I’ll expand on that on that day. And I will also continue doing lots of writing and journaling, which is something that keeps me alive, but I’m also managing to turn into what I do. So I have plans there.

Kim: [00:46:56] Exciting.

Christine: [00:46:56] It’ll be coming along. Yeah.

Kim: [00:46:58] Yes.

Christine: [00:47:00] I want to thank you for taking my emails seriously and turning this into a really lovely conversation and a very unexpected platform for me, but it’s been a real joy to speak to you every time. And I love yeah, you are such a wonderfully curious person.

Christine: [00:47:18] And it’s really neat to be able to share. I like speaking to people because I can see what other people are interested in. And if I don’t get to have, without the interaction, it’s just me in my head. And that’s a really scary place to be all by myself. So it’s wonderful. Thank you so much for having me.

Kim: [00:47:36] Oh, it has been a pleasure talking with you every time and such a pleasure to receive your email. And yeah, this is grown into something and I hope that we stay in touch and continue.

Christine: [00:47:48] Yes, I hope one day I got better weather than you. That’s my only real dream right now.

If you liked what Christine had to say and you’d like to dive into your own story (or stories) a bit, check out her free resource, called The Perfect Story Every Time Checklist. It’s designed to help you choose the story you want to tell for a specific moment. It’s a great tool to sift through your life stories to pick the one that fits the occasion. And she has lots of great resources on her website, whether you’re looking for help with crafting your story, or a dive into antiracism, or just some really beautiful and thought provoking writing, you’re in for a treat. There’s a link in the show notes for The Perfect Story Every Time Checklist, to get you started, and if you’re interested in her new cohort starting in September be sure to reach out to Christine.

As always, I would love to hear from you about what you’re taking away from this podcast. Send me an email at kim @ resilientexpats .com and let me know. And do your friends a favor and send them this way too. Talk soon!