Dyslexic people can remember facts as experiences, examples or stories, rather than abstractions. This is one of our greatest skills. This is the final episode of the breaking it down season, which has explored our communication strengths.
I am fascinated by the power of storytelling in relationship building, but also its pivotal role in activism and communication. Researchers such as Brene Brown have utilised storytelling as a way to disseminate their research and connect with their audience. I am sure, like me, you don't often forget the essence of Brene Brown's messages. Due to the emotional connection, we gain through storytelling, we connect and we don't forget. We live the experience with her, connect it with one of our own and share the experience and stories with others.
Therefore, today I felt it was important to understand how our narrative reasoning can support us in our practice as social workers. If one of our M.I.N.D strengths is Narrative Reasoning, we are in for a treat!
Narrative reasoning and communication
Narrative reasoning is one of the M.I.N.D strengths. Having narrative reasoning on your side may help improve your memory, help integrate contextual information better and, importantly, enable communication to be more enjoyable for everyone involved.
For example, I often tell stories when I communicate with children, families or colleagues. Whilst I was working in an assessment team with children and families, the first thing I would do is explain who I was/what my role was, why I was visiting and what the process of our work together would look like. Narrative communication meant I wasn’t regurgitating facts about timescales, I communicated through storytelling.
From my experience, this has helped communication feel like it is a dual dance as opposed to the social worker just regurgitating information. Communicating to and not with the children and families they work with.
Moreover, with narrative reasoning and storytelling facilitating better memory recall, taking a narrative approach can improve our work with children and families. If we model and encourage communicating through storytelling, we can be more present when communicating instead of focusing on taking notes to writing up later. Knowing your M.I.N.D strengths is important because of this. If you know narrative reasoning is your strength, it may be beneficial to have a list of prompts instead of a list of questions.
Finally, we can use storytelling in our written work: assessments, case notes, reviews and direct work. By using storytelling as a golden thread throughout all of our written practice, we can clearly communicate a family's journey and experiences. Often my team manager would call this a snapshot in time. However as I have reflected on the role of storytelling in my practice, I have realised people's individual worlds are not static like a picture, they are fluid and dynamic and they interact with other people's worlds. In order to communicate these moving parts with interlinked relationships which influence one another storytelling is key.
By using storytelling to communicate a family's journey we can try and give a holistic view of what was happening from each family member's perspective. We can capture what people were thinking and feeling, why this was, and how it influenced their world at that time (ensuring this is an accurate representation at that time and not just your view). In the future, it could give children and families the opportunity to read it back. Reading something that has heart and emotion, care and compassion. Not coldly written or rushed.
‘The combination of being able to make sense of the bigger picture, simplify complex ideas, use our emotional intelligence and inspire people with our passion and curiosity means we are great at engaging hearts and minds.
Look out for the next bite-size series. If you would like to contribute to this series, please get in touch at: thesocialworkworld@gmail.com
Thank you for reading!
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