Feel Good TA Moment

I interviewed Mary Balluff about her use of story and storytelling skills since the training they had in March. Here's what she had to say:


"Oh, of course. We love you guys. We’re hoping that we get an opportunity again to work with you because for us this was a real winfall. And I think the other thing that I want to say is, you all made it so easy. I mean, I’ve been through a million storytelling workshops before, not a million but, every time people would go through the parts of a story and it seemed so cumbersome. And the process that you used made it seem so easy. Not to get involved with it, you have part one, part two, part three, part four, but rather you taught us to think about it. There’s something innate about how you helped us tell a story as opposed to “Fill in part one, fill in part two, who’s the protagonist?” And that’s very different. I think that’s why we were having so much trouble is because we knew what the parts of the story were and we knew how to fill in those blanks but it didn’t feel genuine. And the work that you helped us do helped us create what felt like a more genuine story. So somehow in the way you take people through that, it didn’t feel like I was filling in blanks, it felt like I was developing a genuine story. I have that story to tell and it wasn’t a formal structure. And that formal structure was, personally, getting in my way of telling a story. Because I would worry about, “Do I have the right protagonist? Is this the right moment?” And it didn’t feel like that, particularly in the training. And I think when people feel like they’ve told a genuine story that they worry less, they can then take that structure and use that structure but not be encumbered by the structure."