Stories can heal and stories can harm.
And when you become a conscious storyteller, you become aware of the power to interpret events.
Because stories are a snapshot of our emotional evolution.
They're also a tool for emotional regulation.
And once you recognize that you have this kind of superpower inside of you, it changes everything.
How you relate to yourself, how loving and kind you are to yourself, and how loving and kind you are to everyone else.
Hey, so have you ever felt like the story you're telling yourself about your life is holding you back?
Maybe it's a narrative about your capabilities, your relationships, or the possibilities of your future that really don't quite align with who you really are.
We all have these inner narratives running on repeat, shaping our perception of reality.
But what if we could rewrite those limiting stories and craft brave new ones that unlock our full potential and let the world know who we really are?
And what if you could tell the story of who you are to others in a way that captivated and drew them in?
That'd be pretty cool, right?
Well, that's where we're going with today's guest, Vika Victoria.
Vika is a Ukrainian American, Moth-winning storyteller, speaker, and strategist.
She teaches the transformative power of personal narrative to everyone and anyone who wants to learn how to tell stories, especially theirs, in a powerful and compelling way.
And Vika's really unique approach dives deep into re-examining the stories that we tell ourselves in order to reimagine the stories we then share with the world.
In this conversation, she shares her own journey, rising up the corporate ladder, then shedding the trappings of that corporate grind, to reclaim the art of storytelling that had been imprinted on her soul since childhood.
Drawing from her Ukrainian roots and a lifelong passion for dance, she reveals how storytelling is just this almost erotic seduction that awakens all senses and how mastering this primal skill allows us to become what she calls a DJ of human emotion.
You learn her simple yet powerful story framework for crafting authentic narratives that move people.
And Vika will guide you really to peel back the layers of inherited stories from family, the culture, society itself, so you can observe which still serve you and which may be limiting your growth and expression.
Because as she shares, the work of cultivating self-awareness and curiosity is the path to unlocking purposeful by basis living.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Budget.
Good Life Budget. Hey, it's McKayla from Sidehouse of Pro, from a local business to a global corporation.
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It's super excited, Devin, there's so many places that I think we could jump in.
And I do want to get a lot into your work around storytelling because it's so central and I think it's such an interesting topic to explore.
Now, both on an individual level, what are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves but also what are the stories that we tell the world.
I think we all need a lot of help with that as well.
But your story is powerful and unique.
You from what I understand born in Ukraine came to Atlanta with your family, raised largely in Atlanta.
And even as a young kid, it sounds like one of the through lines that still to this day has been in your life is competitive ballroom and Latin dancing.
Maybe not competitive these days, but it's like it's something that's in your DNA.
Yeah, I dance every day because our first language was dancing.
Preverble humans communicated emotion through the body.
What does it do for you? Oh, it's a practice of not forgetting myself.
It's because I started dancing at eight years old.
It also taps me into this inner kid energy.
And many sinews have been here from LA for the last week.
And we just turn on Motown and we start dancing.
And you can just feel the energy shift in the room.
And so dancing is the closest that I feel to coming home to the littlest version of myself.
Mm-hmm. Now that's beautiful.
I mean, it's interesting to you, the I agree with you.
And at the same time, I feel like so many of us had that freedom and danced around playfully as kids.
And yet, if you ask the typical adults, how do you feel about dancing?
Like the immediate answer for most people is, oh, either I don't do it or on self-conscious or I'm terrible at it.
And we lose this sense of just, it's okay to just move the way you move.
And be fully present in that and enjoy it.
And it goes out the window.
And I've often wondered about that.
Like, what happens there?
I really think it's judgment.
Little kids don't care that anybody's watching them.
They have this total self appreciation and disregard of other people's opinions.
And I think as we get older, we try to be cool.
And suddenly, everything we do from the way that we talk to the way that we dance becomes up for public scrutiny.
And it takes a really strong character to rebel against that kind of conditioning.
Especially I noticed this with guys.
I grew up European, I'm Ukrainian Jewish, and the bottom dancing academy was all Russian and Ukrainian kids.
And then I would go to school and I would have a bunch of American boys at the school dance, just like too cool for schools standing on the side of the wall.
It didn't make any sense to me because I was like, you're missing out on the joy of relating to yourself and to women.
Like, dancing is one of the most primal forms of relational intelligence.
Storytelling is probably the second.
Once we became verbal, it was not just how do I move my body in relation to another person.
I was like, how do I tell a story to another person?
Yeah, do you think there's really a difference between storytelling and dancing?
It seems like there's kind of the same thing to me.
It really is. And when I was just teaching a group of CEOs and a retreat in upstate New York and one of the first things I do is I try to deconstruct storytelling the way that a Michelin chef would deconstruct one ingredient.
And so they're expecting to walk in and have these like top 10 hacks of how to be a better storyteller.
And I'm like, I'm not gonna give you that because if I give you that, it's just putting a bandaid on a bullet wound.
The thing that connects us between storytelling and dancing is ease in our own skin.
And so I've got to have you feel comfortable in your skin to dance as much as to tell a story.
And statistically speaking, there was a study.
It's called the 738-55 rule.
And I'm gonna have you take a gander at what percentage when human beings are relating?
Did researchers find we focus on tone, which is how you say something versus content, which is what you say versus body language, which is how are you holding your body, your presence, your energy when you speak?
So between 738 and 55, where do you think it falls?
I would say content is seven, tone is 38 and body is 55.
A plus, you got it. But most people think 55% is content.
And it's just not the case.
Whether you believe in the spiritual or material world, there is this oric field.
The HeartMath Institute talks about it, where there's a frequency that we emit when we walk into a room.
And the reason why dancing and storytelling are the same is because you're creating resonance.
And when you're dancing with somebody, you're also mimicking them.
And those are some of the most primal behaviors that we had as we were evolving from apes to humans.
And when you're telling stories, you're also mimicking and you're watching, do their eyes light up?
Are they present? Can you tell that they're disengaged?
And once you understand that to be a great storyteller is just to be a DJ of human emotion, then it changes the way you talk.
And once you understand that to be a great dancer is just to be a DJ of human emotion, it changes the way you dance.
That makes so much sense to me.
It also makes sense to me in a completely different way.
Tell me more. I worked my way through college as a DJ.
You're team, I was a club DJ.
You are so full of stories.
I love this. People like look at me now that I like dude.
Seriously, you know, like Milleleague's ball did.
I'm like, yeah, and I had hair.
One of the things, and it's so interesting, you bring this up because one of the things that I keyed in on really early in that was that, you know, I had four or five hours behind a booth with tables.
And there was a sea of humanity, quote, out there.
But I could largely control the social dynamic on even a microscopic level, like a second by second level of what was happening in this sea of humanity by the choices that I was making behind the table, you know, by subtle shifts in pitch on a particular track, by the way, that the things that I chose to put in this certain way in a certain sequence, and it was such a powerful
lesson that what goes into us, that in my world back then, it was the beats and the music.
But seeing what happens to people, this state of what, you know, Mille Durkheim describes as effervescence, you know, collective effervescence.
What, when you have all these people, somehow moving and breathing together, letting go, it's astonishing what happens.
And you can also build like a narrative arc around that, that's not even spoken word.
It's just, it's movement and breath and feeling.
Ooh, you just gave me chills.
Absolutely. You nailed it when you talked about the nuance.
You know, when we think about DJing, or we think about dancing, or storytelling, if you have the same BPM going for an hour, people are going to get bored.
If you're just doing a side to side shuffle dancing, people are going to get bored.
If you're speaking at the same tone, people are going to get bored.
And so how do you go from good to unforgettable is you've got to keep people on their toes.
You know, great storytelling, like great DJing, is about building emotion and then releasing tension, dropping that beat.
And it's so, it's so awesome that you understand this from totally different lines.
Yeah, it's so fun. I don't want to skip over something that you also shared, which is this notion that so much of this also comes from.
And I don't want to mess up your words, but I heard was you really connecting with your authentic self and finding space to allow that to take the lead, rather than necessarily like, here's the lines of the story.
Here's the scene and the next scene, which I think is probably a bit of a foreign notion for most people.
Yeah, I think we live in a culture that's obsessed with frameworks.
We want the top 10 hacks.
And what we fail to recognize is that the greatest teachers actually teach you how to resource yourself.
There's a lot of charlatans out in the market.
And I've been very lucky to train with some brilliant teachers from Esther Peral to Stephen Kotler to Ido Portal because I wanted to understand the intersectionality of story.
If I understand how transformative the power of story is to build new visions for companies or to break into the impossible for individuals, then it behooves me to understand the neuroscience, the psychology, movement, all of it together.
And as I was doing that, what I realized is most of us are born into, if not all of us, into what I call the nesting dolls of stories.
So I do this exercise with my students where I have them close their eyes.
And it's like a real deep meditation.
And imagine that there's a tiny wooden nugget.
And that is who you were before the world told you who to be.
And that alone is revelatory because how often do we ever ask ourselves that question.
And then the next nesting doll clicks in.
And it is all of the stories of your family that you inherited.
The next nesting doll is all of the stories of your culture.
The next is all of the stories of your society.
And the work of a lifetime is to open up each of these nesting dolls.
Look at the stories. As Krishna Murdi says, the highest form of enlightenment is observation.
And simply observe them and say, first of all, did I consciously choose this story?
And second, is this story generative to the person that I'm becoming?
And if it's not, let it go with grace and gratitude and build a brave new story.
And that process, I think the reason why people are so scared of doing it is because it's deeply confronting.
It's deeply uncomfortable.
It's so much easier to live in the stories that you've always lived in.
That's why we take storytelling for granted.
Yeah, that makes so much sense.
I mean, I love those questions in the model of the nesting dolls.
When you think about even that inner nugget, even that I would imagine you can parse.
If you look at Dick Schwartz internal family systems, the ideology, it's like, even within that, what are the parts of you?
Because each of the five different identities that live inside just that original, they have their own.
Yes, sort of like essence as well.
It's almost like, how fucking you go.
Absolutely. Down that rabbit hole with parsing identity.
Yeah, Dick and I had a wonderful conversation about this in Costa Rica.
I was studying with him two years back.
And I didn't know what he did.
And he didn't know what I did.
But if we both looked at each other, we were like, you should write a book.
You should write a book.
That's hilarious. And it also speaks to what you've all Harari talks about, which is that storytelling is part of our evolutionary toolkit.
And when we were in a space before the internet, before the printing press, when we were really living in cave and tribe, and there was, for instance, like a poisonous berry, how did we communicate that?
We created a myth about it.
We created a story. And storytelling saved our lives faster than physiology could catch up to.
And so Harari calls us the story making animals.
And it's because everything is a story.
Like every 35 seconds, you are involuntarily creating a narrative.
And when I read that statistic and wired for story by Lisa Krohn, she said, we can go three weeks without food, three days without water.
But only 35 seconds that are brain involuntarily creating a narrative.
And it struck me that I could hold my breath longer than 35 seconds.
And so it was like this eureka moment, like, hold on a second.
I can't hold a story longer than I can hold my breath.
And yet the first thing I do when I'm born, the last thing I do when I die, is breathe.
And so storytelling is as critical to our orientation and survival as breathing.
And now that makes so much sense, you know, and we are fundamentally meaning making beasts.
And I think one of the ways that we try and make meaning is by figuring out what is the story of this thing that's happening.
I do want to drop back into your story as well.
You end up as you become an adult in New York, in the ad in the media industry, building a really powerful living, coming extraordinary, successful at what you do.
And then you hit a moment where you do something really odd.
Well, at least odd probably to a lot of people who from the outside looking in and say, but this is the path and you're doing so well and you're checking all the boxes inside that wasn't your experience.
Yeah, I was pretty devastating.
I think all of us grow up living into a story that we accept it as a truth.
Because if you tell a story over and over and enough times it becomes a truth, but it's a half-baked truth and my half-baked truth was money equals happiness.
We immigrated from the heart of Ukraine, the former Soviet Union, grew up with very little and yet this vibrant tradition of storytelling for my Ukrainian Jewish lineage helped me understand that I could do almost anything if I understood how to communicate what I wanted to people.
And so by the time that I got to New York, I was breaking records and closing deals, multi-million dollar deals that I had no business of doing.
People twice my age hadn't done that.
And there was this one moment.
I'll never forget. It was the day after Super Bowl Sunday, freezing cold, February.
I'm in my office. I look at the screen and I get a commission check because I just broke company records for this one technology we had.
And I'm staring at a check that has more zeros than I've ever seen in my life.
And that was my bonus for closing that deal.
And I felt nothing, Jonathan.
I was like dead and sad. I didn't even want to call my mom.
And that was like the whole house of cards falling down because if money equals happiness and yet I have more money in my bank account than I've ever had and I'm miserable, what the hell is going on?
And if that story is untrue, what other stories aren't true?
And have I just been living my entire life buying into this story?
Holy shit, what's going to make me happy now?
And so I walked downstairs in the middle of flat iron and the wind was whipping and whispering between my ears.
And I was like, you know what?
Just go buy something, treat yourself.
Because we didn't have a lot of money growing up.
So treating myself felt like the right thing to do.
And I bought a pair of disgusting gladiators handles.
And I felt nothing. Again, I called my mom that day.
And I was like, I have to leave this industry.
This is soul sucking. And she was like, honey, this is the American dream we work for.
Please don't do anything crazy.
And I had saved up for seven years knowing that at some point I would buy my freedom.
And so when that moment happened, I became really interested in being a student of story because right before that, one of my clients said, Vika, I think you should do the math.
And I was like, listen, there is no way I'm getting up in front of 300 strangers and telling a true story.
And I had no idea that the math was one of the most serious storytelling competitions in New York, much less the US.
But I did it. And when I got off that stage, an old man hugged me and choked back tears.
And a group of girls from Harlem high school hugged me and told me that my story mattered to them.
And all of a sudden it was this kind of shift turning point moment when I recognized that this wasn't just me gabbing.
This was a universal thread that stories connect us, that they are the glue that bind us.
And it wasn't an accident that by sharing my story people opened up because that kept happening over and over again.
And so someone found me on YouTube and asked me to teach storytelling at a conference.
And I just said yes. Because I was like, I quit my job.
I don't want to work. I'm burnt out.
I have developed an autoimmune condition.
I really need to take care of myself.
Let me just enjoy this new hobby.
And it turned out a complete new life.
It fundamentally understanding the power of story for myself transformed the way I related to myself.
And once I saw that I could not only do this for myself, but teach it to other people, I was like, oh, I'm never going back to advertising again.
I've got to open up an advisory and teach people how to do this.
And that's what I've been doing for the last five years.
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And I know part of that also for you was you leaving New York, you sort of going out and journeying the world for a chunk of time.
As we have this conversation right now, I'm in Boulder and you're in Lisbon, Portugal.
I'm curious what role that played.
So when you decide, yes, this thing story, it is my thing.
And you start to realize how do I deepen into it?
How do I share what I know?
How do I learn more so that I can share an understanding of what I know and then figure out what is worth sharing?
What does travel have to do with the journey that you began to take?
Hmm. Travel is one of the most direct ways that we gain perspective.
The first kind of world tour that I did was when the economy crashed in 2008, my dad walked out on the family, the job that I had gotten from a fortune 500 company, dropped, and I found myself completely barren and depressed and grief stricken by all of this change.
And so instead of going to therapy, I bought a one way ticket to Vietnam and I started backpacking.
And in every kind of town I asked where the orphanage was and I would visit these kids and I thought to myself, holy cow, I thought I had it bad, but they don't even know who their dads are.
And some of them don't even have limbs because Cambodia had the highest UXO ordinance coming out of the Vietnam War.
And it just made me realize how much I had in my life and it shifted the story.
And travel is also not just perspective shifting, but it's relational wealth building.
The ability when you travel to make friends with somebody in five minutes and decide that you're gonna live together for the next two weeks and travel down the coast of Laos.
I did this with five Irish guys who I'm still in touch with 16 years later.
It reaffirms your faith in humanity.
And the other part of travel, I'd say the third part is you get a glimpse into other people's traditions, the way that they cook, I tried to take a cooking class in every city I went to, the way that they pray, the way that they read.
And suddenly you realize that you are just a speck of dust and we are just living on this pale blue dot as Carl Sagan says.
And the enormity of yourself observes problems, dissipate in the awe of travel.
And I studied with Datcher Keltner who talked about kind of the eight pillars of awe.
He did this big study. Collective effervescence was one of them.
But travel hits upon all eight of those pillars of awe.
And what travel gave me was permission to break all of the old stories that I had inherited because I saw that I could live my life totally differently.
And you know, my angel who says, when you know better, you do better.
Travel helped me do better.
I'm curious about the impulse when you first land in Vietnam.
I think a lot of people would say, okay, so I get it.
You want to go to some place that is profoundly different than where you are, you, you're backpacking.
So you're living sort of like in a much more basic way.
You really want to be a part of what you're experiencing.
What was the impulse if you recall that said, actually want to go to orphanages?
What was underneath that?
Yeah, I think the little kid in me was really hurting.
And the only thing that has ever made me feel better is playing with kids.
I think my childhood was really tough in some ways, you know, as a child that's plucked out of their origin and going through the immigration process and dealing with kind of the emotional chaos of two parents that are learning a language they've never spoken before and having to figure out how to make money and all of it.
I definitely had a wonderful childhood in many respects, but I felt like kids connecting with kids was the purest form of love.
And so from the age of 10 years old, I had a babysitting empire.
And every summer my mom would try to send me to summer camp, but instead I just wanted to babysit for $4 an hour.
And that money I saved for seven years was the money that helped me go to Southeast Asia.
And so I had just this like deep love of being a kid with kids.
And there's nothing more heartbreaking than seeing kids disadvantaged.
And right before I left to Vietnam, I had an internship with Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, which is the largest pediatric cancer hospital in the Southeast.
And so I was the right arm to the fundraising director.
And I thought, well, that's what I want to do with my life.
I just want to raise money to help kids who are suffering.
And when my dad walked out, I could no longer intern there, because I was only making $7.50 an hour.
And so the story of money had to change in my mind, but the kind of story of children and being in service and paying it forward never left me, no matter how much money I was making.
So it seems like everything really comes together in this moment where you've had experience with travel already reclaiming what really mattered to you.
But then ended up really chasing what is sort of like me on the very common definition of success, the dream for many years.
And then it's like there was an inciting incident where everything just kind of said, okay, it's time for a bigger reclamation.
It's time for me to, in part discover who I am, but also reclaim who you've always been.
Yeah, I think when you're just surviving, you don't get to indulge in those fantasies.
And often the most painful thing that happens to us, that changes the entire trajectory of our story is also the most liberating.
You find out who you are in crisis.
And so had my dad not left, had the 2008 financial crisis not happened.
I probably would be working at a children's cancer hospital as director of fundraising.
And that's one way that I could have lived that story.
But what I find so much richer now is that by living a multiplicity of stories, by studying with teachers, and really seeing storytelling as the most ancient form of technology that has helped humans since the beginning of time, adapt and face adversity and redefine reality, I feel like I'm living a bigger, deeper, richer life than the one that was originally given
to me. And that's my highest hope is that everybody wake up to the realization that you are the author of your story, that you are directing the sales through the storms as much as through the sunny days.
And that comes with this resolution to not give up agency.
You know, Sam Harris talks about free will being an illusion and it doesn't matter where you are on the spectrum of free will to determinism, whether you believe on one end that life is a series of neutral events or on the other that everything happens for a reason.
What matters is that you have the courage to examine the stories that have shaped you.
And then you have the conviction to reimagine a brave news story.
So beautiful. I remember years ago working on some writing and just thinking to myself, a good life is a story life or a well-stored life.
So many of us opt out of, I guess it's not even saying that we opt out of telling those stories that we would love to read or see or hear about because you never opt out of a story.
Like you are at every moment, every second of your life, you are telling a story, you are in a story, you're part of the, you're co-creating a story.
And if it's a story of living in, you know, like that gray twilight, that doesn't mean nothing's happening.
That means that that's the story that you're participating in.
And I love the notion that you can say, okay, so what if I want to actually tell a different story?
When you start to deepen into this, because you're coming from a place where it seems like there's a lot intrinsic in you that just is, okay, I'm a storyteller, you get up on the mall stage and it sounds like, and maybe I'm wrong here, tell me if I am, like without, you know, the extensive training and storytelling, you get on a mall stage, tell your story and all of a sudden
you're just opening minds and hearts and that has been this persistent through line since then for you.
How do you then go from there to say, this is stunningly powerful?
I want to do this. I want this to be my thing to feeling like, I know what I'm doing.
Like I actually, I'm not just a great storyteller, but I understand what story is and what's underneath it and how to then turn around and teach others about this.
Yeah, I got chills when you were just describing my story because it's a beautiful thing to be witnessed in your own story, so thank you for that.
I told them off 10 years ago, it's taken me a decade to firmly believe that I can and do transform people's lives because now there is proof.
I think when I told them off, I was just doing it out of a place of catharsis.
If you watch it, it's on YouTube, I break down crying on stage, the very first time that I'm on stage because there's so much energy.
It's hard to explain what it's like to have 300 people watching you with warmth and generosity of spirit in a city where you feel so disposable and invincible and I was really in the midst of so much heartbreak.
My adopted mom had died of cancer.
I broke up with the guy that I thought I was gonna marry after three years of living together and I went to the mouth to feel that my life mattered, that maybe if I told my story, it would release something in me and it did.
What I didn't anticipate was that it wasn't just a release, it was an opening for other people to come and tell me their story.
And so that fundamentally shifted it from being, I'm doing this for me to, oh, I'm doing this and we get to have this collective experience together.
When somebody found me on YouTube a few months later and asked me to teach, I said yes, but I had no idea what I was doing.
And I was on a flight down to Costa Rica to teach, sitting next to a Navy SEAL.
And I was telling him like, hey, I'm teaching for the first time, storytelling, and it's this thing that my grandpa did since I was a kid.
We didn't have a lot of money, but my entire childhood is speckled with memories of me and my grandpa dear, though walking through the woods, and him blowing up my imagination with stories.
We would go to the cemetery and he would tell stories about these people that had died.
And so how do I relay this gift that was given to me through this oral tradition of my ancestors onto other people?
And the Navy SEAL turned to me and he's like, he's like, well, you just, you got to create a system.
And you know, you got to like abbreviate it.
And so I created the brave system and each letter stood for something.
And then I went on stage and I taught.
And that was the first time when people came up to me after I taught and they asked me to work with them.
I realized that there's something here.
Now I was not an entrepreneur.
I was intimidated by entrepreneurs because coming from my culture, Jewish Ukrainian culture, it's like, if you're a doctor, a lawyer, or an advertising, you're making six figures, you're a success.
Entrepreneurs is not a territory that even in my inner or close outer circle I had experience with.
And the only person that had tried to be an entrepreneur was my father.
And he failed miserably.
And I was like, well, he's already a challenging character.
The last thing I want to do is fail as bad as he did.
And my mom said something to me and she was like, Victoria, what are you?
The laughing stock of the Ukrainian community, what are you doing with your life?
Go get the job in advertising, make good money.
And I was like, mom, if this is what I have to do to be accepted into this community, I don't want it.
And so the second part of it was cutting off that primal sense of belonging to everybody and everything.
You go from being super successful and making a lot of money and people are rooting for you and proud of you.
But then it gets real quiet and lonely when you're building from scratch.
And I found myself traveling to escape the prying eyes of family and of culture.
And so I'd say the first two years of speaking, they don't pay you.
This is kind of like an insider thing.
It's an honor to be on stage.
So luckily I had saved up for seven years and I had enough money to get me through.
And when I was on stage, people would often come up to me after and executives or entrepreneurs, they wanted me to coach them.
Now the word coach is like a dirty word in my world because again, lots of charlatans.
I said, I can't coach you, but I can create a curriculum custom and I can help accelerate your process of self-awareness of self-belief, of courage through understanding your stories.
And so that was the first time that I took myself seriously because I started to see that it worked.
Fast forward five years, I'm now working with top strategy firms, like Boston Consulting Group and Big Fortune 500 brands and speaking at conferences, I never dreamed of with my heroes.
And I would not have gotten here if I didn't wake up for a decade with a delusional belief in myself and in my mission.
And on the days when I didn't believe in myself, I counted on, I'd say, a handful of best friends that breathed belief into me until I could believe in myself again.
So it has not been easy. There were months I didn't know how I was gonna pay rent.
I mean, it is also the most spiritually confronting process becoming an entrepreneur.
And so also the most rewarding.
So yeah, I just wanna share that because sometimes when we see people on podcast, we think like, oh, it just happened.
No, it's a decade in the making to get here.
Jonathan, when you sent me that email, I thought it was spam.
I really did. It's this kind of full circle moment because your podcast saved me during COVID.
And there was this one episode that I listened to over and over again and seeing what you have done with media is a thing of beauty.
Because if we're gonna have our attention hijacked, make it worth my while.
And so that has been my prevailing philosophies that I will only create the media that I would consume.
And now we're here. Well, thank you so much for those kind words.
I appreciate it and I agree.
I think entrepreneurship is one of the most powerful call trends for the development of like your humanity, your spirituality, your identity that has ever existed.
It is brutal and beautiful and all the things in between.
And you often don't see what happens behind the scenes.
I appreciate you sharing that.
And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.
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As we have this conversation, you're living internationally, you're speaking no longer for free, but as a very established keynote speaker facilitating leading programming, you have very well-defined points of view and from my lens methodologies.
I don't know if you could call them systems formulas.
When I look at the work that you do, I see these two different things.
One is really looking at the stories that we tell ourselves, often about ourselves or about the world around us or about the circumstances, and also the stories that we tell others often again about ourselves in the world around us or what we might want it to become.
I'd love to parse those a little bit.
I'd love to sort of dip into each one of those and explore a little bit more.
When we think about the stories that we tell ourselves, it seems like before we can even get to the stories that we tell others, we've really got to drop into what are those stories that I'm telling myself about myself, about the world around me, because it's going to inform how you bring yourself to anything that you might then turn outward towards the world.
Does that make sense? Yeah, it absolutely makes sense.
It's a core philosophy of my teaching is that it's an inside out job that in order for you to be as effective as you want to be, you've got to do the inner work of weeding and seeding the garden of your life.
I love nature, and I think we are nature, and I try when I teach to bring us back to nature.
One of the things that do with my students is I say, let's walk into a beautiful garden.
And imagine that it's broken up into a few quadrants.
There's health, there's relationships, there's wealth, and there's creativity.
And the garden is blooming.
In each quadrant, there are flowers and plants, and it's just such fertile soil.
But as you walk around one part of the garden, you notice that there's a weed growing, and that weed is sucking out vital nutrients from the soil of your soul.
And if you cut that weed at the top, it'll just grow back.
So you've got to get down on your hands and knees, and really be a gardener, and pull it out.
And in this moment that you're pulling out this weed, get a tap on the shoulder.
And as you look up, there's this ancient elder standing above you, and the sun is creating a halo around them, and they have a tiny little golden seedling.
So now you have this gaping hole in your garden, and a little seedling, and you ask them, what is this for?
And they whisper in your ear, and they tell you that this is the seedling of a brave new story that's going to replace the weed of that half-truth story that you have accepted in this part of your garden.
And people do that, and then they just often cry, because it's the first time that they recognize that they don't have to live with the stories that harm, because stories can heal and stories can harm, and when you become a conscious storyteller, you become aware of the power to interpret events.
And so when I ask you, Jonathan, tell me about a breakup a week after it happened.
You'll have one version of the story, but when I say, Jonathan, tell me about that breakup a year later, you'll have a totally different story, because stories are a snapshot of our emotional evolution.
They're also a tool for emotional regulation, and we've been telling stories since we were kids to calm us down.
We've lost that, but we can tell stories to calm us down as adults.
We can do that at work, and we can do that at home.
And once you recognize that you have this kind of superpower inside of you, it changes everything, how you relate to yourself, how loving and kind you are to yourself, and how loving and kind you are to everyone else.
I mean, it feels very similar to what the therapist call cognitive re-apraisal.
What occurs to me is there's a metascale here, and that metascale is awareness.
Yes. You know, we've got to actually be aware that there's a garden that exists.
We've got to be aware that there's, oh, that's actually a weed down there, and that what is the weed is the weed of half truth?
And then we've got to be aware of the fact that there is this person standing behind us with a seedling in its palm, and so often, I wonder if we move through life, having all of these things available to us at all times, yet being utterly unaware of their presence.
Yeah. You're absolutely spot on cultivating self-awareness in the age of AI, and quantum computing, and a massive upheaval of technology is the most profound thing we can do for our emotional well-being and ability to live a purposeful life.
If you cannot see yourself, you are just walking blindly in the dark forest of your mind, and people can't find you.
And so you feel really lonely and isolated.
And I, listen, I was a tornado when I was a kid.
I had zero self-awareness.
It is the work of a lifetime to see the self, and the cool part is that today is richer than ever with the internet, with modalities, to really understand who you are.
You know, I think back on Soviet era parenting, very little self-awareness.
My best friends and I talk about what our parents put us through, they just had no idea because they were raised by parents that were coming out of a war that also had no self-awareness.
So I get really excited when I see my friends now who have cultivated self-awareness through meditation and journaling and somatic practices and dance and storytelling, the kind of parents that exist from a place of self-awareness, are parents that create children who are generation shifters.
So it's your responsibility to become self-aware, and if you're not going to do it for yourself, do it for your kids.
Or if you're not a parent for anyone who might even be looking at you or towards you as a model of how to be in the world.
Totally. I'm not a parent, but I think I am a motherly figure to people.
So yes, when I say parents, I also mean like you're just a figure where somebody is inspired by you or looks to you for comfort.
One of the things I've heard you talk about also, and I think it sort of touches into, is use the phrase curiosity intelligence.
You did your homework. We tried.
Which is really sort of, you know, it seems like this has become an evolving methodology for you to say like, how do we actually get to the root of all of these things?
Like what is their process here that is distillable and shareable in some sort of methodical way?
Yeah. Curiosity intelligence is one of my favorite things to teach.
And it came from really right around kind of COVID and recognizing that increasingly we're becoming very polarizing.
And there is a lack of compassion where there is a dominance of judgment.
And so when I started researching what happens to the mind when we're curious, it became kind of foundational for all my teaching on communication because it is the ultimate flow state.
So there was a research study done out of UCLA, and they had subjects put on FMRI scans on their brains and they exposed them to a trivia question.
And then they waited like 15 seconds.
And in those 15 seconds they showed them some random images.
And the next day they gave a pop quiz.
And those that had the highest memory recall of images were also those that showed the highest curiosity in their brain, inextricably linking memory recall and learning to curiosity.
And if we take this a step further, you know, there was a study out of Harvard that showed that children from the age of two to five ask, guess how many questions?
Hmm. I can't read imagine how many?
30,000. 30,000 questions.
How many questions have you asked yourself today?
Curiosity is the learning machine.
It comes out with a question, but what it is actually just trying to make sense of the world.
And so if we think about like what do we want to create as leaders, as teams, as companies, it occurred to me that curiosity would be the engine to fuel innovation.
And if we could show people that you were born curious, you lost it because you were institutionalized.
And now here's a way to think about curiosity as a critical life skill to bring forth an eroticism of life again to wake you up to the awe of this one human experience, then maybe people wouldn't be so depressed because when I was depressed, I was not curious.
And so curiosity for me personally was a buoy in a very dark sea.
And I find that that's the case with a lot of people.
When you're in a dark place, it's very hard to be curious.
But curiosity is a muscle.
And if we keep practicing curiosity every day in micro moments, like yesterday, I got into a fight with my mom, you know, 4'11 Ukrainian Spitfire of a woman.
Why? Because I made an assumption instead of getting curious.
And it could have saved us a fight.
And that's just on a familial scale.
Imagine if we could do that with friends with coworkers.
So I feel like curiosity intelligence, just like storytelling.
I like to go for the underdog.
I like to teach the underrated invisible life skills that aren't sexy.
But are so critical to living a meaningful connected, vivacious life.
I mean, curiosity really is so powerful.
I remember actually the first time I sat down with Liz Gilbert, which is I think back in 2017.
And we had this conversation about how she had walked away from telling people that they needed to find their passion because she had this encounter with a woman who said like that was devastating to me.
Like I don't have it. And now I feel a sense of brokenness and shame.
And she's like, wow. And she said from that moment on, she replaced it with curiosity.
You know, like that is the thing that she's constantly seeking.
And now also like encouraging people to inquire into.
It also reminds me of there's a study that was done by Richard Weissman, which is kind of related to this in terms of how curiosity can open the door to possibility.
He literally had newspapers printed where on the inside front cover of the newspaper in two-inch block letters, there was a particular message.
But he gave people the newspapers and said, tell me how many pictures, how many photos are in this newspaper.
And then before that, he had people identify, self-identify as either people who were lucky or unlucky.
And what he found was that the people who are self-identified as being lucky, from the most part, they would say there are 43 pictures and it took them about 10 seconds.
The people who identified as unlucky, they would come up with the same number of pictures, 43 pictures, but took about three minutes.
And what he found was that, so on the inside of that front cover, the newspaper and those two-inch block letters were the words, there are 43 pictures in this newspaper stop reading.
The people who were lucky, they had a level of openness and curiosity to not just count, but to see everything that was coming at them, that let them see this thing that was not just the photo.
People who identified as being unlucky, all they became myopic, all they looked for was a photo, say ignored everything else, they weren't curious about anything but the immediate task, rather than a more expansive sense of openness and curiosity.
And you wonder how much that shift can just make a profound shift.
Literally, this was the difference between people who felt like everything was lucky in their lives versus everyone.
People who thought everything is unlucky, nothing good happens to me.
If it's a shift in openness or curiosity that can make such a...
If it did that in the context of a newspaper, by the way, a couple pages in also, there was another message that said, basically, when you're done with this, ask for your $200 bonus.
The people who identified as being lucky also, a lot of them got $200, the unlucky ones did not because they didn't see it.
I mean, this is the power of internal narratives shaping your external world, exactly.
And that's just, like you said, that's one magazine article.
What if that's the difference between getting a job interview or not, or being on a date, and that being, you know, a lifelong partnership or not, or just your entire experience of life being narrated by unlucky feels like a life-half lived?
Is there a particular exercise or prompt that you would invite people into to start to explore being more often in a state of curiosity?
Yeah. If you want to be in a state of curiosity, this is an exercise.
Keep a journal underneath your pillow.
Wake up. First thing you do before you get out of bed is you stream of consciousness right down.
Eight questions. Do that for two weeks straight.
Do not look at them. And on the 15th day, make yourself a really nice meal.
Have a few highlighters in front of you and start looking at the questions.
Because what happens is right when we're coming out of our sleep state, our brain is still in theta.
We haven't been hit up by our phones or by people that need something from us.
We're in this kind of like dreamy state.
And like you said, we are pattern making machines.
And so your your highest curiosities are not a coincidence.
I totally agree with Liz Gilbert.
And when people started telling me follow your passions, I said, no, I'm going to follow a breadcrumb trail of my highest curiosities.
And I started a men's dinner salon talking about emerging narratives of masculinity that made no sense for five years until now, it has hugely practical applications to a business world where 69% of executives are male, right?
My curiosities led me there.
So there are questions that are brewing inside all of us that have never had the space to be seen.
And when you write it down and you see it, there will be a threat that arises.
It might be about your sense of purpose.
It might be about your partner.
It might be about whether to have kids or not.
Whatever it is, you now have real solid snapshots of what you're curious about every single day for two weeks.
And back to what you were saying about making deliberate choices, you can make more informed, more conscious decisions from that bank of your curiosities than you could have when it was all kind of mud in your mind.
I love that morning. And now I know what I'm doing for the next 15 days and first thing in the morning, I'm adding it into my morning routine.
I follow up. I'm very curious what your threads are.
100%. I mean, I already have a pretty extensive morning routine, but this sounds like I'll keep that journal right next to me.
I also want to we've been talking really a lot about the internal stuff, the stories you tell ourselves and had a really deep and into that.
And at the same time, a lot of the work that you do is like what are the stories that we tell other people?
We show up and be seen in a particular way, acknowledge in a particular way and tell the stories that we want told so that they land.
So when you think about, okay, when it's time for us to actually then turn our insights out toward the world.
And as you described earlier, you know, in a conversation, we all have this primal need to be seen to be known and stories are such a powerful way to do that.
And I think everybody we tend to really stumble when it comes to this or head start to spend we have no idea where to start.
And yes, everything that you've been talking about internally first get all that alignment really dialed in, but when we decide it's time to actually step out and turn outward.
How do we actually even begin to know?
And I guess this is a question that's come up for me.
It's a question that I've actually asked some of the folks at the mouth and other, you know, I think one of the big things that people struggle with is what story do I tell?
And what story is worthy of being told?
Oh, those are such great questions.
I think every story is worthy of being told.
It just depends on the audience.
There are some stories that you will only ever tell yourself and they will go to the grave with you.
There are some stories you can entrust to the closest people to you.
And then there are some stories that if you tell them well and you tell the right story at the right time to the right audience.
It's a big breakthrough at a dinner, at a conference, at work.
I think the thing that people do when they tell stories is they go into performative mode.
So I recognize that people need frameworks.
And so I created a framework called story and I'll run you through it real quick.
But basically I listened to that Navy seal.
And so story framework starts with S.
S is for sincerity. There is no stronger quality of resonance than authenticity.
And so when you're telling a story, being in a space of living that story is the most effective way you can transmit the meaning of that story, the emotional quality of that story, what it did for you.
One of the greatest compliments you can ever get as a storyteller is, wow, I feel like I was right there in the room with you.
It's this quality of vicariousness.
That's why we love great storytellers.
It's no surprise storytellers are usually incredibly relationally wealthy, are usually salespeople are usually really rich in ecosystems of community because everybody wants to be entertained.
But what I think makes an unforgettable storyteller is this trifecta of can you be as entertaining as you are educational as you are enlightening can't really promise the enlightening piece that's up to them.
But if you can tell a story with wit and humor and intensity and you can educate someone in that process, there's a riddle, there's something for them to glean and take on this journey of life that will alleviate their pain and some unforeseen experience moving forward.
They'll remember your story.
That's a real jewel. So S is for sincerity.
T is for tension and that's what a lot of people miss when they're telling stories.
They'll just like start and they'll forget about the narrative arc and then they'll go off and it turns into a spiral.
Think about when you're telling a story, what was that moment that like really got you and then build up to it and then share it and tell a story with tension is to kind of be clever and to be seductive of the senses.
It's to pull people into what was I feeling and instead of saying something like like my palms were sweaty, you can say like you could hear a pin drop.
I could barely breathe.
Right. So you're telling this interoceptive experience of self which highlights your level of self awareness.
So the O is double in the story framework.
There's offer and there's omission.
Every story that you tell has the capacity to offer something valuable and chances are the stories that you love the most were the ones that like a great joke just got you thinking deeper about life.
So make sure that when you're telling a story, you're adding a gift of wisdom, a pearl of knowledge on the other side of the O is omission.
So we don't want to be Jackson Pollock with our stories.
We want to be more of Mirro we want to recognize that when you're telling a story just like a painter is guiding the eye with a line.
You are guiding the listener with their ears with their imagination and we live in a world of way too much cognitive overload.
So less is definitely more and slower is better and cadence is everything.
So when we go into the R and the R part of the story framework is relationships.
So this really speaks to context intersectionality.
Who is your audience? How much time do you have?
I cannot tell you how many times I have been at a dinner party and somebody just dominates the conversation with a story that's 10 minutes long.
And you're like listen, there's like 14 other people here.
We all want to talk. You know, so not having that awareness of context really easy way to mess up a great story.
Relationship also means how are you delivering the story is this an email is this spoken is this a PowerPoint is this a pitch.
So relationship is having the EQ to understand all of the facets that go into this communication.
And then the last thing is why and that is you you are the instrument through which story comes through and so your energy your vibrance your eye contact your body language is going to make a story go from good to unforgettable.
And the people that understand that they speak full sentences with their eyes first before a word ever comes out of their mouth.
So that's the story framework.
I hope that helped. No, that is incredibly helpful.
Each one of those I literally think could be like a detailed conversation with sub conversations around it.
But it's great to just have sort of like that the metal ends of that framework to really start thinking about the tension part of it.
I think also is something that so many of us get wrong when we're trying to figure out how to bring it to us.
But if you read anything you know whether it's a book on story there's science of story like that whether it's speaking there's always this question in the end which you're asked to you know like which is like like a story happens when somebody wants something.
Exactly. And there's a tension between like where you are and what you want.
Yes. So like the craft is how do you convey that in a way that invites people in rather than pushes them out and I feel like that can be really delicate balance I'm curious what your take is.
Yeah, I think you know when I read a lot of books about storytelling and one of the statistics that struck me was that researchers were trying to define story and there were over 80 different definitions.
But ultimately it came to a character who is overcoming obstacles in search of resolution.
And so as long as you're sincere in your explanation of that attempt to resolve you can get away with a lot.
Because the cool part about storytelling is no matter if you're telling a story about trying to put your kid to bed or trying to close a series B.
The human experience is universal and so themes of effort themes of success themes of failure will show up in every story that you tell people can connect to a theme you got them.
So when you think about I get this question a lot how much is too much and what do I cut out and what do I keep.
Imagine that you're dead and that this story is being retold years and years after you're gone by your co-workers, by your friends, by your family.
And once you want that story retold about you you are a curator of stories and you are living your legacy by sharing each of these stories.
You know when my grandpa did the die the rabbi said the dead are only dead when they're forgotten.
And in that moment I recognize that's why telling stories about him is going to be so important because stories are the way we remember the dead.
And so if stories are the way we remember the dead stories are also the way we remember the living.
I've heard that described as the second death by the way there's the first death when somebody actually passes in the second where their story is no longer being told.
You used to are when you're sharing the story framework also you use the word seduction which makes me curious about the relationship between storytelling and seduction.
Ooh storytelling is incredibly erotic storytelling is an appeal to all of the senses.
When we experience a really great storyteller telling a story we can smell it we can taste it we can see it we're right there with them.
And so the capacity to tell great stories is is really connected to your capacity to feel that a liveness inside of yourself and transmit that aliveness through the story.
Does that make sense? It does it does I think seduction also.
So seduction I think often people have a weird feeling about the word you know it's sort of like one person is doing this thing to another person and often for the purpose of their own pleasure.
Rather than what if we could actually just experience the sort of like the ecstasy of a collective seduction know that this is not about like oh I'm trying to lower someone into a particular situation to do a certain act but there's a certain bliss.
That comes from the state of just being in the experience of seduction that I think can be so rich in our lives that we we never really explore it.
Just this is sort of standalone thing you know like just an exquisite experience that we get to drop into.
Oh I love the way that you phrase that because what this articulates is that we have a whole story about one word.
You and I hear seduction we get excited about it that's our story.
Somebody else here is seduction and because of their cultural societal conditioning they think of it as manipulation.
And so when I think of seduction I think what a moment of grandeur to be fully present to have someone's attention we live in an attention economy.
So you're going to be seduced by apps and by social media or you're going to be seduced by a great story.
Choose. And maybe we just allow ourselves to be seduced by the possibility of our own story in the world and inviting others into it.
Yeah. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well.
So in this container of good life project if I offer up the phrase to live a good life what comes up.
To live a good life means to have the courage to recognize the stories that are holding you back and the wisdom to redefine your reality.
And then the second part of that I'd say to live a good life means to be in awe of the present and present to the awe.
And from that state of awe the greatest stories will unfold.
Thank you. Hey, before you leave if you love this episode safe that you'll also love the conversation we had with Katherine Burns about the craft of storytelling.
You can find a link to that episode in the show notes.
This episode of Good Life project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me Jonathan Fields editing help by Alejandro Ramirez, Christopher Carter, crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Del for her research on this episode.
And of course if you haven't already done so please go ahead and follow Good Life project in your favorite listening app.
And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable and chances are you did since you're still listening here would you do me a personal favorite a seven second favorite and share it maybe on social or by text or by email just with one person just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those you know those you love those you want to help
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Tell them to listen then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action that's how we all come alive together.
Until next time I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life project.
Thank you.
