Skywalker Payne Storyteller – Re-creating Worlds

You Want Change? Transform Your Story

On June 13, 2021

Have you found yourself feeling like your life has hit a dead end? If so, it’s time to step back and look at the story giving you the wrong directions.

Giancarlo Esposito, the actor who plays Gus Fring in “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” is Italian and black. In early auditions, directors rejected him. His skin color didn’t match what they expected to see based on his last name.

Feeling worthless and defeated, he just walked away. Finally, Esposito decided to change his story and said, “Why not give me a try, why does this character have to be white?” He drove out of his dead end life. Esposito transformed his story and helped directors and casting agents see beyond race and name into his humanity and talent.

Your story isn’t inside of you. It’s you, your voice, your manner of dressing, how you walk, what you do, who and what you listen to, and how you look at the world.

When you step back, you see everything in life is a story, from how you were conceived to the person you’re sleeping with, to your last job. Your failure to see life and events as stories can result with you becoming a character in a story leading to a dead end.

Transform your story to transform your life.

Trapped in a dead end has made you forget the story of the life you’ve dreamed about, once had, or aspired to live. It’s never too late, or too early, to transform your story.

Changing your story isn’t easy. The process involves

recognizing attachments to overcome your fear of loss
contemplation, meditation, and reflection on yourself and what is most important to you
finding equanimity to achieve balance
being compassionate with yourself and generous to others
recognizing your abundant talents and gratefully sharing them

Carol Goodman, the author of the novel, The Seduction of Water, explained how the power of oral storytelling influenced her writing and life.

It’s what my mother gave to me through a lifetime of storytelling: the ability to make sense out of one’s own life and, out of that sense, craft the best life.

Next time you’re feeling trapped, depressed, or limited, make time to listen to the story you’re telling yourself. Look for the tools, resources, and people you may need to help you transform your story into one you want to tell and to live.

If you don’t need to change your story now, maybe you know someone who does. Share this article with them. And comment below on how your life changed when you transformed your story.

Photo from http://www.videtteonline.com/

Storytelling – A Multifaceted Jewel

By Skywalker Payne

On June 10, 2021

In Dreams, Goals, Storytelling, Writing

You may wonder why a person would want to start a storytelling business in this increasingly technological age. How can a live storyteller beat the power of virtual reality or an app you have access to 24/7 on your cell phone?

When your battery fails, or the grid gets overloaded, or you’re “out of range” what remains is the human storyteller.

Storytelling is the thread connecting the varied and colorful blocks of people, cultures, countries, nature, and experiences into the quilt of humanity.

Like many of you, when I was a child I wanted to be many things based on whatever book I was reading at that moment. But this multiplicity of interests continued into adulthood. I wanted to be a published writer, but writing college courses were unsatisfactory. I wanted to be a dancer but I couldn’t learn the teacher’s choreography. I wanted to be an actress but couldn’t be directed. And always I wanted to help people.

I kept writing and was published in magazines and edited a weekly newspaper in my twenties. My love for dance and theater combined and led me to become a performance artist presenting my own dances and writings in Washington, DC, Chicago, IL, Greenville, SC, and Los Angeles, CA. As I lived a creative gypsy life, I worked for non-profit organizations and did help people.

When I returned to college, to complete my degree everyone assured me would increase my income, I discovered storytelling and made it my major. After graduation, I built up a resume of storytelling performances in a few states but was still working part-time for a non-profit. When the financial security that job provided ended I had a mid-life crisis and became a registered nurse.

But I never stopped writing or storytelling. As I worked in my last nursing job, as a case manager, I knew I could do more with the talents and knowledge given to me. I pursued countless online classes, webinars, and tribes. Finally, I discovered, the business I have to offer the world has always been with me – storytelling.

Storytelling enables me to share all of my talents, interests, skills, knowledge, experience and abilities to be of service. As a storyteller, I am a

performing artist
healer
teacher
reporter
scholar
activist
researcher
leader
spiritual guide
marketer
sales person

Maybe I can meet your needs, in one or more of those storytelling roles. Do you need

an interesting and entertaining speaker
an enlightening and enjoyable employee motivation session
a way to craft a new story for yourself or your organization
someone to present a complex topic in an engaging manner
to learn how to tell a better story?

Just call 907-229-0187 or e-mail skywalker@skywalkerpayne.com to discuss how storytelling can help you achieve your goals.

How Stories Create Your Immortality

By Skywalker Payne

On June 1, 2021

In Storytelling

Admit it, you’d love to be immortal. Maybe not physically, you’ve seen too many frightening vampire movies, but you’d like your work to last forever. Possibly not the actual physical creations, but what you did. You’d like to be remembered like Ford, or Rockefeller, or Shakespeare. You may not say it aloud but every entrepreneur, artist, inventor, or businessperson begins his or her journey because immortality is a deep-seated, if unconscious, motivation.

How do you achieve immortality? Your immortality rests in the stories you tell and leave for posterity. Who else could better summarize this, than a leading storyteller and creator of immortality?

The thing we do most of all is tell stories to each other. And in the telling of stories, in the making of things, we create a kind of immortality. Ken Burns, interview in September 2017, Entrepreneur

“O.K.,” you say. That’s all good and well for Ken Burns, his business is telling stories through films. But your business is different. You’re a marketer, or salesperson, or software developer, or coach, or investment advisor, or yoga teacher, or political consultant, or non-profit director.

You’ve heard storytelling is an essential 21st-century organization tool. You’ve seen it touted by Branson of Virgin Records and articles in Entrepreneur and the Harvard Business Review. And maybe you’ve even looked at a few websites of high-priced storytelling consultants. Your business doesn’t provide the time to read every storytelling article or the budget for a storytelling consultant.

Photo by Daniel H. Tong, Unsplash

Fears and Doubts, Obstacles or Incentives?

By Skywalker Payne

On May 29, 2021

In Dreams, Goals, Mindfulness, Writing

Preparing to start a new venture is like jumping off a diving board. You’re flying off into space with the trust of a graceful landing. Like a dolphin at play, you’ll burst through the water’s surface.

But some dives aren’t a cinematic success. I didn’t learn to swim until I was in fourth grade and jumping off a board was scary. But I did it, as I headed toward the light of the surface, I opened my mouth. The lifeguard pulled me out of the water before I choked to death. But, I never jumped off a diving board again.

Throughout my life, I’ve followed a cycle. I dove into learning a skill or subject I was interested in and as soon as it became uncomfortable or challenging, I dropped it. I didn’t know, until recently, that this implicit memory kept me in a holding pattern.

Essentially implicit memory is a memory that you don’t realize you are retrieving from the past.

Debra Burdick, in Mindfulness Skills Workbook, further explains that perceptions, emotions, bodily sensations, and behavior contribute to implicit memory. When implicit memory is tied to past trauma it can emotionally “hijack” you in the present.

My fear of drowning left me standing at the shore. The beauty and mystery of water appeal to me but I never went snorkeling as my youngest sister did. And now, as I reflect on my life, I see how this one implicit memory kept me from fulfilling my deepest dreams.

In high school, I wanted to be a doctor until I took a biology class. My dislike of dissection and feeling sick from the teacher’s vivid descriptions of burns and other physical illness led me to abandon that ambition. But forty years later, I became a nurse.

I began college with a major in dance and drama. Feeling alone and isolated, struggling with movements, and gaining weight, I dropped those classes after the first semester. Yet most of my thirties I was a performing artist and in my forties earned a degree in storytelling.

Since I was in third grade I’ve been writing. In my twenties, I worked as a writer for brief periods. But when the work didn’t come easily and rejections piled up, I sought other ways of sharing my writings by performing.

A gypsy lifestyle, combined with an unconscious implicit memory, prevented me from reaching a level of stability and consistency recognized as a success. Still, I was fortunate to have many interesting and creative experiences even if they didn’t make for an impressive professional resume.

Often when you articulate your frustrations, your doubts and your fears people think you’re weak, struggling, confused. Unless you see the obstacles blocking your way can’t find a new path or remove the barriers.

Sometimes you don’t know you’re going in the right direction, you just know you have to try another route. When I began blogging in December 2011, I had no idea it would be the compass leading me straight to my life destination. I am a writer and storyteller.

What forgotten traumatic experience, in your past, prevents you from doing what you know you were put on this planet to do?

Photo by Laurie-Anne Robert on Unsplash