How Your Stories Can Unite Divided People

Why is happiness elusive? Why can’t it be as easy as knowing what makes you happy and doing exactly that? Think about it. Later, you’ll come to realize your important role in resolving this dilemma. In the pursuit of elusive happiness, we can use stories to connect even the greatest divides.

It is a privilege to have Jonathan Haidt on this week's Business of Story podcast. Jonathan is an American social psychologist who wrote the book The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. In this book, he explored the relationship between modern science and ancient philosophies like Buddhism and Stoicism. Using the metaphor of the elephant and the rider, he rationalized that the subconscious mind is constantly at war with our conscious mind. That's the reason why our actions are often the exact opposite of what we're thinking or feeling.

What is it that divides us? Jonathan touches on the subject in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided By Politics and Religion, showcasing how moral judgments arise from gut feelings, and why many of us have such different intuitions about right and wrong.

In his new book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Haidt, with his co-author Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, reveal how we can overcome the polarization we’re now seeing in universities as the iGen. Or Gen Z, kids born in 1995 and beyond.

How can we conquer this division through storytelling and link our worlds together? In this episode, find out how the stories we tell ourselves influence the varying truths we live in our everyday lives.  How can you use storytelling to connect our internal and external divides?

Become a Master Storyteller

Grab your free copy of The 5 Stages of Grief in Telling YOUR Business Story: http://bit.ly/StorytellingTools

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