Why Your Story Needs to Be Told

By: RTC Team in Storytelling Advice

Human beings have used storytelling throughout time to create connection, facilitate healing, and coax transformation. As storytellers, we engage with this art every day. We work with storytellers—with you—to collaboratively pull apart the fabric of your life and the events therein, and we look at the pieces together, thread by thread. Through that practice, we pay homage to the colors and textures of your life—whether bold, silky reds; shaggy, tattered grays; or flimsy, sun-faded bits that seem not to belong.

We support you in the pulling apart of your story in a safe space, one where we can laugh and cry together and, yes, even shake our heads and shout. We weave our fingers through each other's tapestry—this fabric made of each other's beliefs, experiences, perspectives, dreams, and fears. Consistent shapes and predictable lines emerge, and we see each story’s pattern revealing itself. Your story has been dying—for as many years as you’ve been alive—to be seen.

Your Storytelling Superpower

At some point, likely before we crossed paths, you asked out loud, “Who am I to share my story? What makes me think my story is more important than anyone else’s? You worried that perhaps you’re too ordinary, too boring, too cocky to think that someone else would want to read or hear your words. We listen to you and we nod our heads. We know this one well. And we tell you, with the loose threads of your entire life strewn in mad chaos across our laps, that “We, fellow human, are storytellers.”

Storytellers embrace the idea that every person’s words are as important as anyone else’s, not because they’re inherently more fascinating, but because they capture the vast yet universal experiences of being alive. For the storyteller and their audience, storytelling serves as a conduit for seeing and being seen, holding out one’s hand and having it held, connecting one heart to another until community sparks and arises. Storytelling offers a way of creating and being in the world, richly and fully, no matter who you are and what you have or haven’t done.

The Secrets of Storytelling

Storytelling, we show you—as we bend and spin our fingers, weaving with you a new picture from your life’s original threads—is your birthright. It is a revealing of and the reveling in the events that made you who you are; it is an invitation to others to reach out their long fingers and to touch with trembling tips the threads that they see in themselves. Storytelling, as a birthright, welcomes others to widen their eyes in recognition and open their hearts in hope. Storytelling, as a birthright, curates a space in which people—living, breathing human beings—can finally feel seen, heard, and held.

You’ll recognize your birthright as a storyteller. We will coax you through this process of transformation. We will invite you to trust that the unraveling of who you’ve known yourself to be is safe and secure, a necessary part of connecting, healing, and transforming. Eventually, through many sweaty nights, ah-ha moments, and hands clenched tightly around your most beloved threads, you’ll collectively let go and declare your story complete, ready for another’s eyes, ears, and heart. You will have shapeshifted, and together, we will invite so many beloved others to do the same.

Your Storytelling Journey

In truth, your story isn’t any more or less worthwhile than anyone else’s. But all of our stories are woven with threads of pure gold. When we deny the value of our experiences, we tighten the threads of our humanity and keep the warmth of its fabric to ourselves. We steal from others the chance to connect. To heal. To transform.

Why would we do that?

You wouldn’t, would you?

And so you tell your story. You pick up the thread of storytelling.

This power to transform is already inside you.

Pick up the thread