Good storytelling is a product of good self-awareness

How do you know if someone has very high self-awareness? For me, I notice that the most self-aware people I know are typically master storytellers. This is because our sense of identity is framed by the stories we tell, and come to believe, about ourselves. If you are able to tell a great story, you probably know yourself very well.

Good stories = Strong sense of self-identity = Good self-awareness.

When I speak of good storytelling, I don't mean the funny-but-shallow "butt-joke at the dinner table" type of stories, nor those experiential-but-inconsequential "Drinking piña coladas on a Puerto Rico beach changed my life" type of stories. Instead, I'm referring to meaningful life stories that narrates the depths of one's being, like one's from The Moth.

Crafting a great story requires a number of ingredients, and to get to those ingredients you need to be conscientious on a number of things:

1. Who you were before an incident, and circumstantial details that demonstrate that state.
2. Sequence of factors that led to a pivotal moment.
3. Describing a '5 second climactic moment' and why that was so significant.
4. What kind of emotional response that elicited in you.
5. How your reality, habits, identity was changed as a result of that moment.

That's an awful lot of reflective work. And most generic stories don't require this, but the very best ones, the ones that hold a listener at the edge of their seat, the ones that move and stir the soul, that make a lasting impact, they almost always possess these details at a very fine grain.

Storytelling doesn't come naturally to me. I didn't come from a storytelling culture, and I don't often naturally notice the details of my circumstances. That's why I write. I often get excited about what new elements of my identity I might find if I sit down and mine my life for stories. ([[mining your life for stories]])