Stories are an inherent part of who I am. I grew up in a family that spent a lot of time telling stories on each other and on grandparents and cousins. I guess where some families argue politics or talk sports or literature, my family told stories. Some were famous enough to have names like Why Burrusses Hate Whiners and When John Fernando Threw the Horse Over the Fence and others were obscure footnotes and remembrances; stories were and are the vernacular of my family. So much of my use of stories is from this tradition and was never a conscious decision. I have certainly doubted the efficacy of particular stories and stories in general, but I think a lot of that is my willingness to doubt the efficacy of everything. (If you never doubt your assumptions, how do you know they are worthwhile?) But since you asked me about stories, I’ve been digging into and pondering the whys and wherefores, retrospectively looking back at how I used stories and taking account.
When you are explaining something to someone, it isn’t enough to merely tell them the thing because it is very difficult for an idea in the abstract to stick and hold – the human brain doesn’t work like that. An idea needs to have context and structure and it needs to be able to attach to the existing context and structure within a person’s consciousness in order for it to hold. A story is a beautiful way to make this happen because it provides beauty and depth and complexity and a mental pictures; all of which make the point of the story easier to understand, embrace and remember. I am certainly not the first nor last practitioner of this. There is a reason that 1 Kings is easier to remember than Leviticus. Scheherazade lived. Stories are on a human scale and within the scope of human understanding.
There are some common themes that run through a lot of the stories I tell. There are probably some that I don’t know as there are certainly biases and implications that I haven’t seen or considered, but there are some that are more or less intentional. I always want to try to convey a sense of we’ve-been-here-before. Experience breeds calm and confidence and stories are a great way to gain experience without actually living it. To take a half step back, I am often trying to project a sense of confidence and inject a sense of confidence – doubt is fatal. The other piece is humor. A ton of my stories are little riffs or pranks or funny happenings. I’m not sure how necessary this is, but laughing at pretty much everything is so much a part of who I am it’d be hard to really separate it out. To take a big step back from thinking about ultimate, the world is such a mess and there is so much that is awful why would you make it worse by taking it seriously? Or more correctly, since you are obligated to take it seriously, why would you make it worse by being frowny-face all the time? The world we want is one where people laugh, so laugh sometimes. Stepping back in to ultimate, we are putting a ton of work, effort, emotion, sacrifice into a sport. A sport that involves running around after a piece of plastic. That’s absurd. Sport itself has no inherent value, it is the effort and sacrifice that we put in that give it worth. But given the underlying ridiculousness of sport in general and frisbee in particular, you’d better be laughing sometimes. I’ve drifted awfully far afield, but any time you dig down into the roots of a thing, you’ll be underground.
There is another way in which I use story which isn’t so obvious. One of the primary jobs of a coach is to get the entire team lined up and going in the same direction. Once you’ve done this, the rest of the work is really easy; in fact, it’s just details at that point. One of the tools (there are many) I use to make this happen is narrative. I am constantly trying to build a story for the team, for the season, that the team can fit into. This narrative should be comfortable (even including the idea that discomfort is comfortable) in that it should fit the team, both where the team is and where the team would like to go. This narrative necessarily changes with each team and necessarily changes within the season. To go all the way back to 2008, we had lost something like 6 or 8 games by 1, 2 or 3 points. We just couldn’t close. So I intentionally built a narrative that was “this is our demon, we must face it and know that to win these games will be doubly difficult because we have to beat the other team and our demon both.” This narrative accepts the present situation without judgement and provides a path forward. In the end we did win one of these games, beating Stanford 13-12 to go to Nationals. I don’t want to take too much credit, because most should go to Venus for willing us there, but a little goes to the story because it gave us a vision of what could be and more importantly how it could be. If you reflect back over the teams and organizations you’ve been a part of, you will see that those with a strong self-narrative were eminently more rewarding to be a part of and more successful.
I thought I’d finish with a story about stories, but unfortunately, I can’t think of one.
-Lou Burruss
fuguefamily 