The story matters more than the words
Howdy,
Did that "howdy" make you double take? Hi, hello, hey, yoo-hoo, yo, howdy - so many possible one-word greetings. Don't they each make you feel a little bit different?
I love words. As an avid reader, a writer, and just a human in this world, I love words.
And I do think they matter. As our little greeting exercise shows, words do evoke feelings, and they communicate all kinds of things (the mood you're in, how well you know the person you're talking to, how formal the context is, and so on and so forth).
BUT I don’t think words matter as much as policy or practice. It goes back to the old saying, actions speak louder than words.
If you’ve seen the conversation around whether to use the term unhoused or homeless or persons experiencing homelessness - I always come out of it thinking: 1) ask the people themselves (Folks have. The vast majority of them continue to prefer the term homeless.) and 2) WHO CARES if you aren’t DOING something about it?
As usual, McSweeney’s sarcasm captures it better than I can - “Our City’s New Initiative Will End Homelessness by Calling It Something Else”. Changing our words doesn’t mean we’re changing our actions - in fact, changing words often distracts from the fact that we’re not changing our actions. Much of the time, changing our words is a whole lot of virtue signaling and not much else.
When it comes to community health and well-being, changing actions - changing policy and practice - is what matters. That requires changing minds. And that, in turn, requires a compelling story.
This is where public health - and movements to advance public health - have fallen very, very short.
We should be FAR more obsessed with shaping the narrative than with word choice. As I’ve said before, we need to tell more stories (it's why PoP Health hosts a "Story Space" at the annual community health event we co-organize, sharing stories with kids about our minds, emotions, and connections to others).
But it's not just our kids who need stories. Our communities do too.
How do we tell compelling stories that place the blame on the system and not the individual? How do we tell powerful stories that make the case for prevention instead of after-the-fact treatment? How do we tell stories that build community and bring more people under our tent, instead of further alienating those we need to persuade?
THIS is what we should be obsessing about.
Words can evoke emotions, but stories are what change minds.
I find the work of organizations like Frameworks Institute and Hollywood, Health, and Society to be quite compelling on this front.
In my little corner of the world, I’ve tried to shape a story around our approach to health and am currently working on shaping a story around the impact of corporate power on our health and environment and what we can do about it.
How are you shaping stories in your work and in your communities? Or, if you aren’t yet, how might you want to moving forward? Drop me a line and let me know!
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