Page 48 - ENGLISH SPEAKING E-MODULE

Start with the moral

What is it that you want the audience to learn? Write or type out the moral of the story. This

is your starting point. Examples might include:

• You have to listen to people with ‘mental illness’ if you want to be supportive. If you don’t

listen, you will make terrible mistakes.

• If you treat me like I am a 10-year-old, I will resent it and I won’t be ‘co-operative’.

• If you ask me 10 minutes before my interview with you in the acute unit whether I would

mind students coming in I am most likely to say I don’t mind when I mean ‘yes, I do mind’.
Power relations in acute units get in the way of good communication.

Develop your story

Now it’s time to start pulling all the threads together. Keep it simple. Concentrate on the

parts of your story which best lead towards the message.

Parables work best when they are short so try to tell your story in 400 words or less. If you

are delivering your story in a setting that requires something longer, try to knit together two
or more parables (though this will work best if the stories you tell complement each other and

they each reach, in sometimes quite different ways, towards the overriding moral).

There are strategies you can use that will allow you to stay honest to the spirit of the story

while fudging details, either to protect people’s privacy or to make the story ‘work’ more
smoothly.

An example of a sophisticated story:

Mary O’Hagan is a very experienced consumer leader from New Zealand who often uses

stories in her public speaking.

A few years ago, Mary presented one part of her story at a conference in Melbourne. She
divided up different roles in her story. Mary herself spoke as the commentator. Another

consumer played the role of a younger Mary as a terrified teenager in an acute unit – this text
was taken straight out of the diary Mary had kept at the time.

A second consumer played the voice of clinicians who were ‘caring’ for her – she
obtained the text for this part from her clinical files (which she obtained through Freedom of

Information legislation). In the storytelling, Mary melded together the voices of several

individual clinicians into a “clinical voice.”

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