Storytelling, alongside clear evidence and thoughtful structure, brings us back to trust, meaning, and shared understanding. Are you prepared to share your stories? An invitation to connect.

Integrating narrative as a core tool can strengthen our sense of connection and community, meaning, and satisfaction.

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Dear friends and colleagues,

I’ve been exploring new ways for teachers and providers to connect and collaborate, and I’m convinced that storytelling will be an essential part of our collaborations. At our May 5th meeting (you’re invited), my colleague Mark will introduce a tool he’s developed that we’ll use to facilitate connection and community-building — and to create more space for sharing our stories with those who want to hear them.

I gained a renewed appreciation for storytelling in 2018, when an old friend invited me to a live storytelling event he was moderating. It was one of the most moving experiences of my life.

People showed up in all their human vulnerability, stepping up to the microphone — no notes, the eight-minute clock beginning to tick — to invite us into their lives, minds, and hearts and share a piece of themselves, often with humor, skill, and wisdom.

It brought back memories of experiences I’d had in indigenous-led circles, therapeutic healing groups, shamanic journeys, and training workshops — spaces made sacred with care and attentiveness, where people were free to give voice to their lived experience, and where truths that often have no other place to be spoken could be shared authentically.

Those experiences have been returning to me especially strongly over the past six months as I’ve reflected on what I perceive to be the most authentic and effective voices in this current moment.

When trust, meaning-making, and shared understanding are essential, storytelling brings us back to our humanity.

Storytelling is one of the oldest ways humans make sense of experience and transmit knowledge. In collaborative settings, it can bridge differences in perspective, reduce abstraction, and create a shared frame of reference. In service-oriented work — whether in health, education, or community leadership — it helps to translate complex information into something more human, relatable, and actionable.

We needn’t move away from rigorous analysis, but rather integrate narrative as a core tool for strengthening our sense of community and connection, meaning, and satisfaction.

Shall We Practice?

I’ve been taking time to review and refine our website home page, about page, and free samples, and much of it felt embarrassingly out of date. I spend countless hours on research, analysis, and building support tools, and very little on my own sales pages. As I’ve been working through what I want to say, I’m reminded how essential small stories are in helping people understand who we are.

Here’s an example I just wrote about an aspect of my interest and work: research. It’s not a vulnerable share — which I think has an important place in other contexts — but it provides a bit of context for the path that shaped my focus in this area.

I don’t know if it will mean much to anyone, but it feels more compelling than simply being another person behind a screen. If you think I can do better, let me know.

I first discovered research in college in the 1980s. As a marketing major, I was required to take a research class, which I expected to be as insufferable as the 8 a.m. statistics course I had also been forced to take. But it turned out to be quite different — in fact, I found it fascinating. I had always loved learning, and it opened up an entirely new way of thinking and working. It led me to an internship doing research for a local politician who was writing a book on the business history of our state.

After graduation, I landed a research assistant job at a large, highly competitive advertising agency in a major city. A fair amount of my time was spent riding the elevator down from our suite in a high-rise building to street level, then walking a few blocks to the public library to explore ideas and information. I would search and read and analyze — then organize what I found into reports for the execs to use in planning and communications.

My commitment to research deepened in the 1990s while working as a marketing manager at Microsoft, where I had access to specialists conducting focus groups, user experience research, and large-scale data analysis. I was captivated by the depth and subtlety of this kind of learning. In one sense, it felt like an endless well of answers — where asking the right questions could reveal magical insights with remarkable clarity and precision.

But I also became increasingly aware of the pitfalls: flawed research design, misinterpretation of results, and bias in how findings are framed and applied. I saw firsthand how research could be used to support almost any conclusion. That experience deepened my fascination with the careful evaluation of evidence and how conclusions are shaped — and I’ve been an independent evidence-based researcher ever since.

I specialize in keeping my finger on the pulse of knowledge that can inform, guide, and elevate your work — so you don’t have to spend hours chasing scattered information through a maze of establishment-curated noise.

I presume it will be helpful for me to write down the stories of my experiences with holistic healing for myself and my children, with yoga and teaching yoga, providing massage, running a business, traveling, healing trauma, and participating in various communities.

Have you prepared some of your own stories? I’d love to hear them.

Sincerely,

Shelly Thorn

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