The Story Isn't A, B, C

The short version: When people tell their stories, they give you A, B, C: "We met in a bar. A few months later we were dating." But life never goes A, B, C. The story lives in the letters they skip. To find them, ask:

• Where it happened. What did it look like, smell like, sound like?

• What was going on in their life at that time.

• What was going on in the world around them.

And when they go quiet, let them. It's not an awkward silence. It's giving the story room to breathe.

A few years ago I was coaching a speaker before her TEDx talk. She was a citizen scientist working to link fertilizer and other chemicals to Parkinson's. Her why was her husband, who'd been diagnosed years before.

I asked her where they met. "In a bar," she said. Which totally tracked. If you'd met her, this is exactly how you'd expect this woman to meet somebody. She was a get-shit-done type of person. She could probably throw back more Jack than most guys and still hold a conversation at a PhD level.

Then she kept going, straight into the courtship. I had to stop her. "Hold on. Tell me about the bar."

It was older. Lots of wood. Smoky, she thought. I kept asking. Eventually we got there: the first time she ever saw her husband was through a haze of smoke. She was attracted to him. Something was playing on the radio. She couldn't remember what, but it definitely didn't detract from the moment.

That's the story. Not "we met in a bar."

When we relive a memory, we tend to stick to just the facts, ma'am. A, then B, then C. Except life never goes A, B, C. It's A, then B, then a little bit of M, possibly all the way to Z, maybe back to A, and eventually, somehow, you get to C.

The lesson: Don't rush to C. The beauty is in the details, and they're usually what gets skipped on the way to the big juicy bits. Slow down. Ask where they were.