A friend introduced me to a new acquaintance with the words, “you are going to love this guy, he tells the best stories.” And indeed, he did. Exciting stories about misadventures that befell him. Funny stories about outrageous situations he found himself in. Cautionary tales based on foul luck that happened to him. The stories went on and on. He seemed to have an endless supply of these reminiscences. At least enough to keep people buying him beers for the evening.

I became less enchanted by his narration as time wore on. Each reminiscence was interesting and artfully told, but they lacked something. They were like the fast-food of stories; they went down quickly and easily but left me feeling unsatisfied. I was also bothered by how many stories he had. Could so many problems befall one person, or was he borrowing from others to fill out his repertoire? The answer turned out to be that he was not telling stories at all.

What Was Wrong with His “Stories”

I figured out what was bothering me when I tried to learn more about the craft of telling stories. What I learned is that a story needs to show change over time. As author and multiple Moth Story Slam winner Matthew Dicks puts it in his book, Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling, “Your story must reflect change over time. A story cannot simply be a series of remarkable events. You must start out as one version of yourself and end as something new.”

The one thing my new acquaintance’s stories lacked was change. He managed to bounce from one event to another without learning or growing. According to Matthew Dicks, “Stories that fail to reflect change over time are known as anecdotes.”

He wasn’t telling stories at all; instead, he traded in anecdotes, vignettes, or most accurately, drinking stories. They may have kept him supplied with beer, but they failed to help him grow. By failing to learn and change from his experience, he doomed himself to repeat the same mistakes. It was by making the same mistakes over and over again that he built his collection of vignettes. By failing to learn and change through his experience, he was dooming himself to stay in the same place.

The place he was in wasn’t great. He bounced from job to job with no discernible career path, working various dead-end positions until he got fired or quit before being let go. He dated a string of women with no deep or lasting relationships. The initial charm of his stories appeared to be enough to attract the attention of the opposite sex but not enough to hold it for long.

That might be ok if his only ambition was to sit on a barstool and trade anecdotes for beers. It was not a good plan if he wanted to make anything more out of his life. By failing to learn and grow from his experiences, he was trapping himself in the same place.

What this friend of a friend taught me is that what we experience does not automatically change us. Growth is not a passive process. To improve, we must make an active effort to learn from our experiences and to do better in the future.

Your Stories are Here to Teach You

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” is an often quoted passage from Plato’s, The Trial and Death of Socrates. But rehashing is no the same as examining. What my friend had learned from telling his anecdotes over and over was how to spin the narrative. He understood where the punchlines were and how to build up to them. What he had not learned were the lessons those experiences were there to teach him.

Every experience in our lives is an opportunity to learn. Moreover, it has been my experience that when you fail to learn, you will repeat the lesson until you do. Because he was incapable of learning, he collected drinking stories by repeating the same mistakes. If you aspire to be more than a barstool bard, you will want to figure out how to optimize the lessons your experiences are here to teach you.

How to Transform Your Experiences into Lessons

Review your experience as if it happened to someone else.

Failing to interpret the event correctly is one of the biggest impediments to learning from your experience. And it is hard to see the event clearly when you are in the middle of it. So take yourself out of the picture. Think about whatever occurred, as if it happened to someone else. I even find it helpful to write about the troubling experiences of my life in the third person. I will journal the events as if I am a fiction author telling the story of a character rather than thinking of it as something that happened to me. The distance this technique offers allows me to achieve clarity on the events themselves and remove the emotions that often cloud our perception.

Name the emotions the event produced.

The troubles in our lives do produce emotional reactions. Failing to interpret those emotions correctly can be another impediment to learning from your experience. One good strategy is to name the feelings your situation provokes. The trick is to be as specific as possible. Don’t settle for vague feelings like “good” or “bad.” Instead, give the emotion the most exact name you can. Use a thesaurus if needed to find the most accurate label for your sentiment that you can. There is a power to labeling your emotions which is why psychologists use the phrase, “Name it to tame it.”

Look at the big picture.

Get some distance from the event. Look at it in the bigger scheme of things. Ask yourself how you will feel about this in a week, a month, a year, or a decade. Will it still be a source of turmoil, or will it be forgotten? If it is not going to have a long-term impact on you, it is probably not worth getting upset about it today. If it could impact your future, you will want to sit and evaluate it carefully to make sure you get your response right.

Take responsibility.

Avoid playing the blame game. That was a significant problem for my “friend.” You could see it in how he told his stories. The boss that fired him for smoking pot on the job was a “tight ass.” The girlfriend who left him for a more ambitious man was a “gold digger.” No matter what the situation, it was always someone else’s fault. Yet, the only recurring character in all of his dramas was himself.

There will be very few situations in life that are totally outside of your ability to influence. You may not fully control them, but that does not mean you can’t exert some degree of control. If you are the team manager and Bob on your team drops the ball, rather than blame Bob, ask what you could have done better. Could you have better communicated the importance of his role to Bob? Did you adequately support Bob with the resources he needed to get the job done? When you look, you will always find that you bear some responsibility. Owning up to that will enable you to learn how you can do better next time.

Identify what could be right.

In 1928, Sir Alexander Fleming’s bacterial cultures became contaminated by mold. In trying to salvage his cultures, he noticed that the bacteria did not grow near the mold. He stopped to wonder about this and theorized that the mold interfered with bacterial growth. The result was the isolation of penicillin which has saved many lives.

Rather than assume a situation is all bad, ask, “What could be right about the situation?” Any event is rarely all bad. Asking what could be right may not result in the invention of a new, lifesaving drug, but it has done so in the past.

Isolate the lesson.

Once you have taken the time to perform the above steps, it’s time to isolate the lesson. What did you learn? What could you do differently in the future? What would you do the same? Try to reduce the experience to a lesson you can explain in just a few words.

Identify a new, more positive, and empowering way to interpret the event.

Now that you have distilled the lesson your experience was there to teach you go back and reinterpret the event in light of your new understanding. Look for a positive way to reinterpret the adverse events. Find a more empowering way to see the situation and yourself. Reflect on how you can use this new mindset to empower yourself in the future. If nothing else, recognizing that you got through the difficulty is a victory in itself. Don’t pass up the chance to pat yourself on the back.

Conclusion

Don’t waste the events of your life, especially the adverse ones. Instead, learn what the experience is there to teach you and change for the better. Those stories of growth and change are what people are really looking for in life. So take the time to examine your experiences to learn the lessons those challenges are there to teach you. Then put the lessons into practice so you can grow and create even better, more empowering stories in the future.