A Dozen Do’s and Don’ts for Sharing Your Story

One of the best things we can do to connect with others in an authentic way is to share our story. Everyone benefits. The more we allow ourselves to be known the more we open ourselves up to be loved. Being loved and known is powerful and transforming. It frees us from shame, helps us experience God’s love and inspires others to open up their stories. Our church has been creating space for this for years.

At our little church we encourage every one of our small groups to dedicate some time sharing life stories. The structure is simple. Each gathering is dedicated to one person sharing their story until the whole group has shared. This usually takes 8-10 weeks with a new person sharing every week. Each person gets between 30-40 minutes to talk about their life and faith starting with their childhood. We have learned so much about each other. This has resulted in a fiercely loyal, loving and faithful community.

This may surprise you, but we’ve found that nobody really knows their own story. If you are like most people, you won’t know your story until you share it. Let me explain. We live our life in segments. We have our childhood, our adolescence, our twenties, our career, our kids, our tragedies, our successes, and our sufferings. We take and process each piece as it comes. We celebrate the good stuff and endure the hard stuff. We think we know our stories but we miss so much when we don’t take the time to look at how it all connects. Do we see how our childhood impacts our present relationships or our how past sufferings shape our choices? Do we see how God has pursued us, led us and been with us through all life’s madness? There are threads and patterns that won’t be discovered until we do the work of putting our story together.

Here is the biggest bonus to sharing your story. People will love you for it. Like I said before nothing will connect you to others like being known. To the extent you allow yourself to be known you open yourself up to be loved. I promise you this, if you are honest, humble and vulnerable when you tell your story you will leave the room more loved and accepted than when you walked in. This will be true no matter how ugly or boring you may feel your story is. It is worth the work and the risk.

So lets get into some do’s and don’ts for sharing your story.

1. Do organize your thoughts.

The more you put into it the more you and others will get out of it. I’ve seen people try to wing it and it doesn’t have near the same impact as the stories invested with time and thought. It is important to come prepared with some sort of outline.

2. Do be creative.

There are so many different ways to go about sharing your story. I’ve seen everything from PowerPoint presentations, to stick figure drawings, to time-lines on graph paper, to song writing used as tools for telling stories. One of the easiest formats for sharing your story can be to do it by decade. Simply talk about your relationships, environment and spiritual experience through each decade.

3. Do keep it honest.

It can be tempting to hide the ugly and share the shiny. Good stories are honest and transparent. They aren’t trying to prove something or project something.

4. Do endure the grieving.

Sometimes our pasts can be hard to look at. We may find ourselves feeling a little depressed as we put our stories together. I think it is important to recognize this as an expected part of the process. We may need to reach out for support and prayer as we work through our stuff.

5. Do tell your story again and again.

We share our stories multiple times at our church and each time we find ourselves sharing from a bit of a different angle. There are probably dozens of ways we can go about telling our story. One way may focus on a particularly hard relationship while another may focus more on family dynamics and yet another on personal fears and worries. Each time you share your story it will be different and you and others will learn something new.

6. Do invite people to interact and ask questions about your story.

This will help you be and feel understood.

7. Don’t get wordy.

Don’t spend more than 40 minutes sharing your story. You will lose people’s attention. This is why organizing your thoughts is so important to the process. You won’t be able to say everything so choose carefully what you will focus on.

8. Don’t get preachy.

This isn’t the time to impart your moral lessons to others. Don’t let your story turn into a sermon.

9. Don’t tidy what isn’t tidy.

This is so important. Don’t resolve what isn’t resolved. Did you hear that? Don’t tidy what isn’t tidy. Your story doesn’t have to have resolution or a happy ending. It will be tempting to fabricate something but you need to resist this. It is OK to be in process and not have everything figured out.

10. Don’t get lost in the details.

It can be easy to drift into the details. I heard one lady spend 10 minutes telling us all about her second grade teacher. It had little to do with her story and she lost the attention of the group and struggled to get it back.

11. Don’t think your story is boring or insignificant.

Almost everyone feels their story isn’t nearly as interesting or valuable as the stories of others. People with little trauma and a lovely childhood often feel they have little to offer while people with difficult childhoods and lots of trauma want to spare the group their story. All stories are significant. I haven’t yet been bored or traumatized by someone’s honest story.

12. Don’t forget to talk about your spiritual journey.

Even if you didn’t have a spiritual childhood you likely had thoughts that made you draw towards God and his people or led you to resist God and his people. Make sure to share your spiritual journey and experiences throughout your story.