How to Captivate People With Your Story | ViKA Viktoria

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Episode Transcript:

ViKA Victoria: [00:00:00] Stories can heal and stories can harm. And when you become a conscious storyteller, you become aware of the power to interpret events. Because stories are a snapshot of our emotional evolution, they’re also a tool for emotional regulation. And once you recognize that you have this kind of superpower inside of you, it changes everything how you relate to yourself, how loving and kind you are to yourself, and how loving and kind you are to everyone else.

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:30] Hey, so have you ever felt like the story you’re telling yourself about your life is holding you back? Maybe it’s a narrative about your capabilities, your relationships, or the possibilities of your future that really don’t quite align with who you really are. We all have these inner narratives running on repeat, shaping our perception of reality. But what if we could rewrite those limiting stories and craft brave new ones that unlock our full potential and let the world know who we really are? And what if you could tell the story of who you are to others in a way that captivated and drew them in? That’d be pretty cool, right? Well, that’s where we’re going with today’s guest, ViKA victoria. ViKA is a Ukrainian American Moth-winning storyteller, speaker, and strategist. She teaches the transformative power of personal narrative to everyone and anyone who wants to learn how to tell stories, especially theirs, in a powerful and compelling way. And ViKA’s really unique approach dives deep into reexamining the stories that we tell ourselves in order to reimagine the stories we then share with the world. In this conversation, she shares her own journey rising up the corporate ladder, then shedding the trappings of that corporate grind to reclaim the art of storytelling that had been imprinted on her soul since childhood, drawing from her Ukrainian roots and a lifelong passion for dance. She reveals how storytelling is just this almost erotic seduction that awakens all senses, and how mastering this primal skill allows us to become what she calls a DJ of human emotion.

Jonathan Fields: [00:02:04] You learn her simple yet powerful story framework for crafting authentic narratives that move people, and ViKA will guide you really to peel back the layers of inherited stories from family to culture, society itself so you can observe which still serve you and which may be limiting your growth and expression. Because, as she shares, the work of cultivating self-awareness and curiosity is the path to unlocking purposeful, vivacious living. So excited to share this conversation with you! I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

[00:02:43] I’m super excited to dive in. You know there’s so many places that I think we could jump in, and I do want to get a lot into your work around storytelling because it’s so central, and I think it’s such an interesting topic to explore now, both on an individual level. What are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, but also what are the stories that we tell the world? I think we all need a lot of help with that as well. But your story is powerful and unique. You, from what I understand. Born in Ukraine, came to Atlanta with your family, raised largely in Atlanta, and even as a young kid, it sounds like one of the throughlines that still to this day has been in your life is competitive ballroom and Latin dancing maybe not competitive these days, but it’s like it’s something that’s in your DNA.

ViKA Victoria: [00:03:28] Yeah, I dance every day because our first language was dancing. Preverbal humans communicated emotion through the body.

ViKA Victoria: [00:03:38] Mhm. What does it do for you?

ViKA Victoria: [00:03:40] Ooph, it’s, uh It’s a practice of not forgetting myself. It’s because I started dancing at eight years old. It also taps me into this inner kid energy. And my niece and nephew have been here from LA for the last week, and we just turn on Motown and we start dancing, and you can just feel the energy shift in the room. And so dancing is the closest that I feel to coming home to the littlest version of myself.

Jonathan Fields: [00:04:09] Hmm. Now that’s beautiful. I mean, it’s interesting to the, um, I agree with you. And at the same time, I feel like so many of us have that freedom and danced around playfully as kids. And yet if you ask the typical adult, how do you feel about dancing? Like the immediate answer for most people is, oh, either I don’t do it or I’m self-conscious, or I’m, oh, I’m terrible at it. And we lose this sense of just, it’s okay to just move the way you move and, and be fully present in that and enjoy it. And it goes out the window. And I’ve often wondered about that, like what happens there?

ViKA Victoria: [00:04:42] I really think it’s judgment. Little kids don’t care that anybody’s watching them. They have this total self-appreciation and disregard of other people’s opinions. And I think as we get older, we try to be cool and suddenly everything we do from the way that we talk to the way that we dance, becomes up for public scrutiny. And it takes a really strong character to rebel against that kind of conditioning. Especially. I noticed this with guys, you know, I grew up European, I’m Ukrainian, Jewish, and the ballroom dancing academy was all Russian and Ukrainian kids. And then I would go to school and I would have a bunch of American boys at the school dance. Just like too cool for school standing on the side of the wall. It didn’t make any sense to me because I was like, you are missing out on the joy of relating to yourself and to women. Like dancing is one of the most primal forms of relational intelligence. Storytelling is probably the second. Once we became verbal, it was not just how do I move my body in relation to another person? It was like, how do I tell a story to another person?

Jonathan Fields: [00:05:55] Mhm. Yeah. Do you think there’s really a difference between storytelling and dancing? It seems like there’s kind of the same thing to me.

ViKA Victoria: [00:06:02] It really is. And when I was just teaching a group of CEOs in a retreat in upstate New York, and one of the first things I do is I try to deconstruct storytelling the way that a Michelin chef would deconstruct one ingredient. And so they’re expecting to walk in and have these, like, top ten hacks of how to be a better storyteller. And I’m like, I’m not going to give you that, because if I give you that, it’s just putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. The thing that connects us between storytelling and dancing is ease in our own skin. And so I’ve got to have you feel comfortable in your skin to dance as much as to tell a story. And statistically speaking, there was a study. It’s called the seven 3855 rule. And I’m going to have you take a gander at what percentage when human beings are relating, did researchers find we focus on tone, which is how you say something versus content, which is what you say, versus body language, which is how are you holding your body, your presence, your energy when you speak. So between 738 and 55, where do you think it falls?

Jonathan Fields: [00:07:09] I would say, um, content is seven, tone is 38 and body is 55 a plus.

ViKA Victoria: [00:07:16] Yeah, you got it. But most people think 55% is content and it’s just not the case. You know, we whether you believe in the spiritual or material world, there is this auric field. The Heartmath Institute talks about it where there’s a frequency that we emit when we walk into a room. And the reason why dancing and storytelling are the same is because you’re creating resonance. And when you’re dancing with somebody, you’re also mimicking them. And those are some of the most primal behaviors that we had as we were evolving from apes to humans. And when you’re telling stories, you’re also mimicking and you’re watching, do their eyes light up? Are they present? Can you tell that they’re disengaged? And once you understand that to be a great storyteller is just to be a DJ of human emotion. Then it changes the way you talk. And once you understand that to be a great dancer is just to be a DJ of human emotion, it changes the way you dance.

Jonathan Fields: [00:08:15] Mhm. That makes so much sense to me. Um, it also makes sense to me in a completely different way.

ViKA Victoria: [00:08:20] Um, tell me more.

Jonathan Fields: [00:08:21] I worked my way through college as a DJ. You did. I was I was a club DJ.

ViKA Victoria: [00:08:26] You are so full of stories I love this.

Jonathan Fields: [00:08:29] People like, look at me now. They’re like, dude, seriously, you like middle-aged bald dude? I’m like, yeah, and I had hair. Um, one of the things and it’s so interesting that you bring this up because one of the things that I keyed in on really early in that was that, you know, I had 4 or 5 hours behind a booth with tables, and there was a sea of humanity quote out there. But I could largely control the social dynamic on even a microscopic level, like a second-by-second level of what was happening in this sea of humanity, by the choices that I was making behind the table, you know, by subtle shifts in pitch on a particular track, by the way, that the, the things that I chose to put in a certain way in a certain sequence, and it was such a powerful lesson that what goes into us, that in my world back then, it was the beats and the music, But seeing what happens to people, the state of what you know, Emile Durkheim describes as effervescence, you know, collective effervescence. When you have all these people somehow moving and breathing together, letting go, it’s astonishing what happens. And you can also build like a narrative arc around that. That’s not even spoken word. It’s just it’s movement and breath and feeling.

ViKA Victoria: [00:09:41] Oh, you just gave me chills. Absolutely. You nailed it when you talked about the nuance. You know, when we think about deejaying or we think about dancing or storytelling, if you have the same BPM going for an hour, people are going to get bored. If you’re just doing a side-to-side shuffle dancing, people are going to get bored. If you’re speaking at the same tone, people are going to get bored. And so how do you go from good to unforgettable is you got to keep people on their toes, you know, great storytelling, like great deejaying is about building emotion and then releasing tension, dropping that beat. And it’s so it’s so awesome that you understand this from a totally different lens.

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:22] Yeah, it’s so fun. I don’t want to skip over something that you also shared, which is this notion that so much of this also comes from. And I don’t want to mess up your words, but I heard was you really connecting with your authentic self and finding space to allow that to take the lead, rather than necessarily like, here’s the lines of the story, here’s the scene and the next scene and the next scene, which I think is probably a bit of a foreign notion for most people.

ViKA Victoria: [00:10:48] Yeah, I think we live in a culture that’s obsessed with frameworks. We want the top ten hacks, and what we fail to recognize is that the greatest teachers actually teach you how to resource yourself. There’s a lot of charlatans out in the market, and I’ve been very lucky to train with some brilliant teachers, from Esther Pearl to Steven Kotler to Ido Portal, because I wanted to understand the intersectionality of story. If I understand how transformative the power of story is to build new visions for companies or or to break into the impossible for individuals, then it behooves me to understand the neuroscience, the psychology movement, all of it together. And as I was doing that, what I realized is most of us are born into, if not all of us into what I call the nesting dolls of stories. So I do this exercise with my students where I have them close their eyes, and it’s like a real deep meditation. And imagine that there’s a tiny wooden nugget. And that is who you were before the world told you who to be. And that alone is revelatory, because how often do we ever ask ourselves that question? And then the next nesting doll clicks in. And it is all of the stories of your family that you inherited. The next nesting doll is all of the stories of your culture. The next is all of the stories of your society, and the work of a lifetime is to open up each of these nesting dolls. Look at the stories. As Krishnamurti says, the highest form of enlightenment is observation and and simply observe them and say, first of all, did I consciously choose this story? And second, is this story generative to the person that I’m becoming? And if it’s not, let it go with grace and gratitude and build a brave new story and that process. I think the reason why people are so scared of doing it is because it’s deeply confronting. It’s deeply uncomfortable. It’s so much easier to live in the stories that you’ve always lived in. That’s why we take storytelling for granted.

Jonathan Fields: [00:12:59] Yeah, that makes so much sense to me. I love those questions and the model of the nesting dolls. You know, when you think about even that, that inner nugget, even that I would imagine you can parse, you know, if you look at, you know, like Dick Schwartz, internal family systems and ideology, it’s like even within that, like, what are the parts of you because each of the five different identities that live inside, just that original, they have their own.

ViKA Victoria: [00:13:21] Yeah

Jonathan Fields: [00:13:21] Sort of like essence as well. It’s almost like, you know, how far can you go? Absolutely. Down that rabbit hole of parsing identity. Yeah.

ViKA Victoria: [00:13:30] Dick and I had a wonderful conversation about this in Costa Rica. I was studying with him two years back, and I didn’t know what he did, and he didn’t know what I did, but we both looked at each other. We were like, you should write a book, you should write a book. And it was hilarious. And it also speaks to what Yuval Harari talks about, which is that storytelling is part of our evolutionary toolkit. And when we were in a space before the internet, before the printing press, when we were really living in cave and tribe, and there was, for instance, like a poisonous berry, how did we communicate that? We created a myth about it. We created a story, and storytelling saved our lives faster than physiology could catch up to. And so, you know, Harari calls us the story-making animals. And it’s because everything is a story. Like every 35 seconds, you are involuntarily creating a narrative. And when I read that statistic in, um, wired for Story by Lisa Kron, she said, we can go three weeks without food, three days without water, but only 35 seconds without our brain involuntarily creating a narrative. And it struck me that I could hold my breath longer than 35 seconds. And so it was like this eureka moment, like, hold on a second. I can’t hold a story longer than I can hold my breath. And yet, the first thing I do when I’m born, the last thing I do when I die, is breathe. And so storytelling is as critical to our orientation and survival as breathing.

Jonathan Fields: [00:15:06] Mm. No, that makes so much sense, you know, and we are fundamentally meaning-making beasts. And I think one of the ways that we try and make meaning is by like figuring out what is the story of this thing that’s happening. I do want to drop back into your story as well. You end up as you become an adult in New York, in the ad in the media industry, building a really powerful living, becoming extraordinarily successful at what you do. And then you hit a moment where you do something really odd. Well, at least odd, probably to a lot of people who from the outside looking in say, but this is the path and you’re doing so well and you’re checking all the boxes inside. That wasn’t your experience.

ViKA Victoria: [00:15:48] Yeah, it was pretty devastating. I think all of us grow up living into a story that we accepted as a truth. Because if you tell a story over and over again, enough times, it becomes a truth. But it’s a half-baked truth, and my half-baked truth was money equals happiness. You know, we immigrated from Kharkiv, Ukraine the former Soviet Union grew up with very little. And yet this vibrant tradition of storytelling for my Ukrainian Jewish lineage helped me understand that I could do almost anything if I understood how to communicate what I wanted to people. And so by the time that I got to New York, I was breaking records and closing deals, multi-million dollar deals that I had no business of doing. People twice my age hadn’t done that. And there was this one moment I’ll never forget. It was the day after Super Bowl Sunday, freezing cold February. I’m in my office. I look at the screen and I get a commission check because I just broke company records for this one technology we had, and I’m staring at a check that has more zeros than I’ve ever seen in my life. And that was my bonus for closing that deal. And I felt nothing. Jonathan, I was I was like, dead inside. I didn’t even want to call my mom. And that was like the whole house of cards falling down. Because if money equals happiness, and yet I have more money in my bank account than I’ve ever had, and I’m miserable.

ViKA Victoria: [00:17:17] What the hell is going on? And if that story isn’t true, what other stories aren’t true? And have I just been living my entire life buying into this story? Holy shit, what’s going to make me happy now? And so I walked downstairs in the middle of Flatiron, and the wind was whipping and whispering between my ears, and I was like, you know what? Just go buy something. Treat yourself. Because we didn’t have a lot of money growing up. So treating myself felt like the right thing to do. And I bought a pair of disgusting gladiator sandals and, um, I felt nothing again. I called my mom that day and I was like, I have to leave this industry. This is soul-sucking. And. And she was like, honey, this is the American dream we work for. Please don’t do anything crazy. And I had saved up for seven years knowing that at some point I would buy my freedom. And so when that moment happened, I became really interested in being a student of story, because right before that, one of my clients said, ViKA, I think you should do The Moth. And I was like, listen, there is no way I’m getting up in front of 300 strangers and telling a true story. And I had no idea that The Moth was one of the most serious storytelling competitions in New York, much less the US.

ViKA Victoria: [00:18:31] But I did it. And when I got off that stage, an old man hugged me and choked back tears, you know, and a group of girls from Harlem High School hugged me and told me that my story mattered to them. And all of a sudden it was this, like, kind of shift turning point moment when I recognized that this wasn’t just me gabbing. This was a universal thread that stories connect us, that they are the glue that bind us. And it wasn’t an accident that by sharing my story, people opened up because that kept happening over and over again. And so someone found me on YouTube and asked me to teach storytelling at a conference, and I just said yes because I was like, I quit my job. I don’t want to work. I’m burnt out. I have developed an autoimmune condition. I really need to take care of myself. Let me just enjoy this new hobby. And it turned out to be a complete new life. It fundamentally understanding the power of story for myself transformed the way I related to myself. And once I saw that I could not only do this for myself, but teach it to other people, I was like, oh, I’m never going back to advertising again. I’ve got to open up an advisory and teach people how to do this. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last five years.

Jonathan Fields: [00:19:52] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. And I know part of that also for you was you leaving New York, you sort of going out and journeying in the world for a chunk of time, as we have this conversation right now, I’m in Boulder and you’re in Lisbon, Portugal. I’m curious what role that plays. And when you decide, yes, this this thing story, it is my thing. And you start to realize how do I deepen into it? How do I share what I know? How do I learn more so that I can share and understand even what I know, and then figure out what is worth sharing? Um, what does travel have to do with the journey that you began to take?

ViKA Victoria: [00:20:33] Mm. Travel is one of the most direct ways that we gain perspective. The first kind of world tour that I did was when the economy crashed in 2008. My dad walked out on the family. The job that I had gotten from a Fortune 500 company dropped, and I found myself completely barren and depressed and grief-stricken by all of this change. And so instead of going to therapy, I bought a one-way ticket to Vietnam, and I started backpacking. And in every kind of town, I asked where the orphanage was and I would visit these kids. And I thought to myself, Holy cow, I thought I had it bad, but they don’t even know who their dads are. And some of them don’t even have limbs Because Cambodia had the highest UXO ordinance coming out of the Vietnam War. And it just made me realize how much I had in my life. And it shifted. The story. And travel is also not just perspective-shifting, but it’s relational wealth building, the ability when you travel to make friends with somebody in five minutes and decide that you’re going to live together for the next two weeks and travel down the coast of Lao. I did this with five Irish guys who I’m still in touch with 16 years later. It’s it reaffirms your faith in humanity and the other part of travel, I’d say the third part is you get a glimpse into other people’s traditions, the way that they cook. I tried to take a cooking class in every city I went to, the way that they pray, the way that they read, and suddenly you realize that you are just a speck of dust and we are just living on this pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan says, and the enormity of your self-obsessed problems dissipate in the awe of travel. And I studied with Dacher Keltner, who talked about kind of the eight pillars of or he did this big study. Collective effervescence was one of them. But travel hits upon all eight of those pillars of awe, and what travel gave me was permission to break all of the old stories that I had inherited, because I saw that I could live my life totally differently. And, you know, Maya Angelou says, when you know better, you do better. Travel helped me do better.

Jonathan Fields: [00:23:03] I’m curious about the impulse when you first land in Vietnam. I think a lot of people would say, okay, so I get it. You want to go to someplace that is profoundly different than where you are. You you backpacking. So you’re living sort of like in a much more basic way. You really want to be a part of what you’re experiencing. What was the impulse, if you recall that said, I actually want to go to orphanages. What was underneath that?

ViKA Victoria: [00:23:29] Yeah, I think the little kid in me was really hurting, and the only thing that has ever made me feel better is, is playing with kids. I think my childhood was really tough in some ways, you know, as a child that’s plucked out of their origin and going through the immigration process and dealing with kind of the emotional chaos of two parents that are learning a language they’ve never spoken before and having to figure out how to make money and all of it. I definitely had a wonderful childhood in many respects, but I felt like kids connecting with kids was the purest form of love. And so from the age of ten years old, I had a babysitting empire. And every summer my mom would try to send me to summer camp. But instead I just wanted to babysit for $4 an hour. And that money I saved for seven years was the money that helped me go to Southeast Asia. And so I had just this, like, deep love of being a kid with kids. And there’s nothing more heartbreaking than seeing kids disadvantaged. And right before I left to Vietnam, I had an internship with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, which is the largest pediatric cancer hospital in the southeast. And so I was the right arm to the fundraising director. And I thought, look, that’s what I want to do with my life. I just want to raise money to help kids who are suffering. And when my dad walked out, I could no longer intern there because I was only making $7.50 an hour. And so, you know, the story of money had to change in my mind. But the kind of story of children and being in service and paying it forward never left me, no matter how much money I was making.

Jonathan Fields: [00:25:16] So it seems like everything really comes together in this moment where you’ve had experience with travel already, reclaiming what really mattered to you, but then ended up really chasing what is sort of like the very common definition of success, the the dream for many years. And then and then it’s like there was an inciting incident where everything just kind of said, okay, it’s time for a bigger reclamation. It’s time for me to, in part, discover who I am, but also reclaim who you’ve always been.

ViKA Victoria: [00:25:46] Yeah. I think when you’re just surviving, you don’t get to indulge in those fantasies. And often the most painful thing that happens to us that changes the entire trajectory of our story is also the most liberating. You find out who you are in crisis. And so had my dad not left, had the 2008 financial crisis not happened, I probably would be working at a children’s cancer hospital as director of fundraising, and that’s one way that I could have lived that story. But what I find so much richer now is that by living a multiplicity of stories, by studying with teachers, and really seeing storytelling as the most ancient form of technology that has helped humans since the beginning of time, adapt and face adversity and redefine reality. I feel like I’m living a bigger, deeper, richer life than the one that was originally given to me. And that’s my highest hope, is that everybody wake up to the realization that you are the author of your story, that you are directing the sails through the storms as much as through the sunny days. And that comes with this resolution to not give up agency. You know, Sam Harris talks about free will being an illusion. And it doesn’t matter where you are on the spectrum of free will to determinism, whether you believe on one end that life is a series of neutral events, or on the other, that everything happens for a reason. What matters is that you have the courage to examine the stories that have shaped you, and then you have the conviction to reimagine a brave new story.

Jonathan Fields: [00:27:42] So beautiful. I remember years ago working on some writing and just thinking to myself, A good life is a storied life or a well, storied life so many of us opt out of. I guess it’s not even saying that we opt out of telling those stories that we would love to read or see or hear about, because you never opt out of a story like you are at every moment, every second of your life. You are telling a story. You are in a story. You’re part of the you’re co-creating a story. And if it’s a story of living in, you know, like that gray twilight, that doesn’t mean nothing’s happening. That means that that’s the story that you’re participating in. Um, and I love the notion that you can say, okay, so what if I want to actually tell a different story? When you start to deepen into this because you’re coming from a place where it seems like there’s a lot intrinsic in you, that just is okay. I’m a storyteller. You get up on the mall stage and it sounds like, and maybe I’m wrong here, tell me if I am like, without, you know, extensive training and storytelling. You get up on the stage, tell your story, and all of a sudden you’re just opening minds and hearts. And that has been this persistent throughline since then for you. How do you then go from there to say, this is stunningly powerful? I want to do this. I want this to be my thing, to feeling like I know what I’m doing. Like, I actually I’m not just a great storyteller, but I understand what story is and what’s underneath it and how to then turn around and teach others about this.

ViKA Victoria: [00:29:13] Yeah. Oh, I got chills when you were just describing my story because it’s, um, it’s a beautiful thing to be witnessed in your own story, so thank you for that. I told The Moth ten years ago. It’s taken me a decade to firmly believe that I can and do transform people’s lives. Because now there is proof. I think when I told The Moth I was just doing it out of a place of catharsis. If you watch it, it’s on. It’s on YouTube. I break down crying on stage the very first time that I’m on stage, because there’s so much energy, it’s hard to explain what it’s like to have 300 people watching you with warmth and generosity of spirit, in a city where you feel so disposable and invincible. And I was really in the midst of so much heartbreak. My adopted mom had died of cancer. I broke up with the guy that I thought I was going to marry after three years of living together, and I went to the Moth to feel that my life mattered, that maybe if I told my story, it would release something in me, and it did. What I didn’t anticipate was that it wasn’t just a release, it was an opening for other people to come and tell me their story. And so that fundamentally shifted it from being a I’m doing this for me to, oh, I’m doing this and we get to have this collective experience together. When somebody found me on YouTube a few months later and asked me to teach, I said yes, but I had no idea what I was doing, and I was on a flight down to Costa Rica to teach, sitting next to a Navy Seal.

ViKA Victoria: [00:30:54] And I was telling him, like, hey, I’m teaching for the first time storytelling. And it’s it’s this thing that my grandpa did since I was a kid. We didn’t have a lot of money, but my entire childhood is speckled with memories of me and my grandpa walking through the woods and him blowing up my imagination with stories. We would go to the cemetery and he would tell stories about these people that had died. And so how do I relay this gift that was given to me through this oral tradition of my ancestors onto other people? And the Navy Seal turned to me, and he’s like, he’s like, well, you just you got to create a system. And, you know, you got to like, abbreviate it. And so I created the brave system, and each letter stood for something. And then I went on stage and I taught. And that was the first time when people came up to me after I taught and they asked me to work with them, I realized that there’s something here now, I was not an entrepreneur. I was intimidated by entrepreneurs because, you know, coming from my culture, Jewish, Ukrainian culture, it’s like if you’re a doctor, a lawyer or an advertising, you’re making six figures. You’re a success. Entrepreneurs is not a territory that even in my inner or close outer circle, I had experience with, and the only person that had tried to be an entrepreneur was my father. And he failed miserably.

ViKA Victoria: [00:32:13] And I was like, well, he’s already a challenging character. The last thing I want to do is fail as bad as he did. And my mom said something to me and she was like, Victoria, what are you, the laughing stock of the Ukrainian community? What are you doing with your life? Go get a job in advertising, make good money. And I was like, mom, if this is what I have to do to be accepted into this community, I don’t want it. And so the second part of it was cutting off that primal sense of belonging to everybody and everything. You go from being super successful and making a lot of money, and people are rooting for you and proud of you. But then it gets real quiet and lonely when you’re building from scratch. And I found myself traveling to escape the prying eyes of family and of culture. And so I’d say the first two years of speaking, they don’t pay you. This is kind of like an insider thing. It’s an honor to be on stage. So luckily I had saved up for seven years and I had enough money to get me through. And when I was on stage, people would often come up to me after and executives or entrepreneurs they wanted me to coach them. Now the word coach is like a dirty word in my world because again, lots of charlatans. I said, I can’t coach you, but I can create a curriculum custom and I can help accelerate your process of self-awareness, of self-belief, of courage through understanding your stories.

ViKA Victoria: [00:33:49] And so that was the first time that I took myself seriously because I started to see that it worked. Fast forward five years. I’m now working with, you know, top strategy firms like Boston Consulting Group and Big Fortune 500 brands and and speaking at conferences I never dreamed of with my heroes. And I would not have gotten here if I didn’t wake up for a decade with a delusional belief in myself and in my mission, and on the days when I didn’t believe in myself, I counted on, I’d say, a handful of best friends that breathed belief into me until I could believe in myself again. So it has not been easy. There were months I didn’t know how I was going to pay rent. I mean, it is also the most spiritually confronting process becoming an entrepreneur and it’s also the most rewarding. So, uh, yeah, I just want to share that because sometimes when we see people on podcasts, we think like, oh, it just happened. No, it’s a decade in the making to get here. Jonathan, when you sent me that email, I thought it was spam, I really did. It’s this kind of full circle moment because your podcast saved me during Covid, and there was this one episode that I listened to over and over again. And seeing what you have done with media is a thing of beauty, because if we’re going to have our attention hijacked, make it worth my while. And so that has been my prevailing philosophy, is that I will only create the media that I would consume. And now we’re here.

Jonathan Fields: [00:35:26] Well, thank you so much for those kind words. I appreciate it, and I agree, I think entrepreneurship is one of the most powerful cauldrons for the development of like, your humanity, your spirituality, your identity that has ever existed. It is brutal and beautiful and all the things in between. And you often don’t see what happens behind the scenes. So I appreciate you sharing that. And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. As we have this conversation, you’re you’re living internationally. You’re speaking no longer for free, but as a like very established keynote speaker, facilitating leading programming. You have a very well defined points of view. And from my lens methodologies, I don’t know if you could call them systems formulas And when I look at the work that you do, I kind of see these two different, two different things. One is really looking at the stories that we tell ourselves often about ourselves or about the world around us, or about the circumstance, and also the stories that we tell others, often again about ourselves and the world around us, or what we might want it to become. I’d love to parse those a little bit. I’d love to sort of like dip into each one of those and explore a little bit more. When we think about the stories that we tell ourselves, it seems like before we can even get to the stories that we tell others, we’ve really got to drop into what are those stories that I’m telling myself about myself, about the world around me? Because it’s going to inform how you bring yourself to anything that you might then turn outward towards the world. Does that make sense?

ViKA Victoria: [00:37:02] Yeah, it absolutely makes sense. It’s a core philosophy of my teaching is that it’s an inside-out job that in order for you to be as effective as you want to be, you got to do the inner work of weeding and seeding the garden of your life. And so I’ve, I love nature and I think we are nature. And I try when I teach, to bring us back to nature. And so one of the things that I do with my students is I say, let’s walk into a beautiful garden and imagine that it’s it’s broken up into a few quadrants. There’s health, there’s relationships, there’s wealth and there’s creativity. And the garden is blooming in each quadrant. There are flowers and plants and it’s just such fertile soil. But as you walk around one part of the garden, you notice that there’s a weed growing and that weed is sucking out vital nutrients from the soil of your soul. And if you cut that weed at the top, it’ll just grow back. So you got to get down on your hands and knees and really be a gardener and pull it out. And in this moment that you’re pulling out this weed, get a tap on the shoulder. And as you look up, there’s this ancient elder standing above you. And the sun is creating a halo around them, and they have a tiny little golden seedling. So now you have this gaping hole in your garden and a little seedling, and you ask them, what is this for? And they whisper in your ear, and they tell you that this is the seedling of a brave new story that’s going to replace the weed of that half-truth story that you have accepted in this part of your garden, and people do that, and then they just often cry because it’s the first time that they recognize that they don’t have to live with the stories that harm, because stories can heal and stories can harm.

ViKA Victoria: [00:38:59] And when you become a conscious storyteller, you become aware of the power to interpret events. And so when I ask you, Jonathan, tell me about a breakup a week after it happened, you’ll have one version of the story. But when I say, Jonathan, tell me about that breakup. A year later, you’ll have a totally different story, because stories are a snapshot of our emotional evolution. They’re also a tool for emotional regulation, and we’ve been telling stories since we were kids to calm us down. We lost that, but we can tell stories to calm us down as adults. We can do that at work and we can do that at home. And once you recognize that you have this kind of superpower inside of you, it changes everything how you relate to yourself, how loving and kind you are to yourself, and how loving and kind you are to everyone else.

Jonathan Fields: [00:39:49] I mean, it feels very similar to what therapists call cognitive reappraisal. What occurs to me is there’s a meta-skill here, and that meta-skill is awareness. Yes. You know, we’ve got to actually be aware that there’s a garden that exists. We’ve got to be aware that there’s oh, that’s actually a weed down there. And that what is the weed is a weed of half-truth. And then we’ve got to be aware of the fact that there is this, this person standing behind us with a seedling in its palm. And so often I wonder if we move through life having all of these things available to us at all times, yet being utterly unaware of their presence.

ViKA Victoria: [00:40:25] Yeah, you’re absolutely spot on. Cultivating self-awareness in the age of AI and quantum computing and a massive upheaval of technology is the most profound thing we can do for our emotional well-being and ability to live a purposeful life. If you cannot see yourself, you are just walking blindly in the dark forest of your mind and people can’t find you. And so you feel really lonely and isolated. And I listen. I was a tornado when I was a kid. I had zero self-awareness. It is the work of a lifetime to see the self. And the cool part is that today is richer than ever with the internet, with modalities to really understand who you are. You know, I think back on Soviet-era parenting, very little self-awareness. My best friends and I talk about what our parents put us through. They just had no idea, because they were raised by parents that were coming out of a war that also had no self-awareness. So I get really excited when I see my friends now who have cultivated self-awareness through meditation and journaling and somatic practices and dance and storytelling. The kind of parents that exist from a place of self-awareness are parents that create children who are generation shifters. So it’s your responsibility to become self-aware. And if you’re not going to do it for yourself, do it for your kids.

Jonathan Fields: [00:42:04] Yeah, or if you’re not a parent, for anyone who might even be looking at you or towards you as a model of how to be in the world.

ViKA Victoria: [00:42:11] Totally. I’m not a parent, but I think I am a motherly figure to people. So yes, when I say parents, I also mean like you’re just a figure where somebody is inspired by you or looks to you for comfort.

Jonathan Fields: [00:42:25] One of the things I’ve heard you talk about also, and I think it sort of touches into, is, um, use the phrase curiosity, intelligence.

ViKA Victoria: [00:42:33] You did your homework. We tried.

Jonathan Fields: [00:42:35] Um, which is really sort of, you know, it seems like this has become an evolving methodology for you to say, like, like, okay, how do we actually get to the root of all of these things? Like, what is is there process here that is distillable and shareable in some sort of methodical way?

ViKA Victoria: [00:42:50] Yeah. Uh! Curiosity intelligence is one of my favorite things to teach. And it came from really right around kind of Covid and recognizing that increasingly we’re becoming very polarizing. And there is a lack of compassion where there is a dominance of judgment. And so when I started researching what happens to the mind when we’re curious, it became kind of foundational for all my teaching on communication, because it is the ultimate flow state. So there was a research study done out of UCLA and they had subjects put on fMRI scans on their brains, and they exposed them to a trivia question. And then they waited like 15 seconds. And in those 15 seconds, they showed them some random images. And the next day they gave a pop quiz. And those that had the highest memory recall of images were also those that showed the highest curiosity in their brain, inextricably linking memory, recall and learning to curiosity. And if we take this a step further, you know, there was a study out of Harvard that showed that children from the age of 2 to 5 ask, guess how many questions?

Jonathan Fields: [00:44:08] Hmm. I can’t even imagine how many 30,000, 30,000 questions.

ViKA Victoria: [00:44:14] How many questions have you asked yourself today? Curiosity is the learning machine. It comes out with a question, but what? It is actually just trying to make sense of the world. And so if we think about like what do we want to create as leaders, as teams, as companies, it occurred to me that curiosity would be the engine to fuel innovation. And if we could show people that you were born curious, you lost it because you were institutionalized. And now here’s a way to think about curiosity as a critical life skill, to bring forth an eroticism of life again, to wake you up to the awe of this one human experience, then maybe people wouldn’t be so depressed because when I was depressed, I was not curious. And so curiosity for me personally was a boy in a very dark sea. And I find that that’s the case with a lot of people. When you’re in a dark place, it’s very hard to be curious. But curiosity is a muscle. And if we keep practicing curiosity every day in micro-moments like yesterday, I got into a fight with my mom, you know, four foot 11 Ukrainian spitfire of a woman. Why? Because I made an assumption instead of getting curious. And it could have saved us a fight. And that’s just on a familial scale. Imagine if we could do that with friends, with coworkers. So I feel like curiosity, intelligence, just like storytelling. I like to go for the underdog. I like to teach the underrated, invisible life skills that aren’t sexy, but are so critical to living a meaningful, connected, vivacious life.

Jonathan Fields: [00:45:58] I mean, curiosity really is so powerful. I remember actually the first time I sat down with Liz Gilbert, which is, I think, back in 2017, and we had this conversation about how she had walked away from telling people that they needed to find their passion because she had this encounter with a woman who said, like that was devastating to me, like, I don’t have it. And now I feel a sense of brokenness and shame, and she’s like, wow. And she said, from that moment on, she replaced it with curiosity. You know, like that is a thing that she’s constantly seeking. And now also like encouraging people to inquire into. It also reminds me of there’s a study that was done by Richard Wiseman, which is kind of related to this in terms of how curiosity can open a door to possibility. He literally had newspapers printed. Where on the inside front cover of the newspaper, in two-inch block letters. There was a particular message, but he gave people the newspapers and said, tell me how many pictures, how many photos are in this newspaper? And then before that, he had people identify self-identify as either people who were lucky or unlucky. And what he found was that the people who self-identified as being lucky, for the most part, they would say there are 43 pictures. And it took them about 10s the people who identified as unlucky, they would come up with the same number of pictures, 43 pictures, but took about three minutes.

Jonathan Fields: [00:47:17] And what he found was that. So on the inside of that front cover of the newspaper, in those two-inch block letters were the words. There are 43 pictures in this newspaper. Stop reading the people who were lucky. They had a level of openness and curiosity to not just count, but to see everything that was coming at them, that let them see this thing. That was not just the photo people identified as being unlucky. All they were, they became myopic. All they looked for was the photos. They ignored everything else. They weren’t curious about anything but the immediate task, rather than a more expansive sense of openness and curiosity. And you wonder how much that shift can just make a profound shift. Literally, like this was the difference between people who felt like everything was lucky in their lives versus everyone. People who thought everything is unlucky and nothing good happens to me. You know, if it’s a shift in openness or curiosity that can make such a, you know, if it did that in the context of a newspaper. By the way, a couple pages in also, there was another message that said, basically, when you’re done with this, ask for your $200 bonus. The people identified as being lucky. Also a lot of them got $200. The unlucky ones did not because they didn’t see it.

ViKA Victoria: [00:48:27] I mean, this is the power of internal narratives shaping your external world. Exactly. And that’s just like you said. That’s one magazine article. What if that’s the difference between getting a job interview or not, or being on a date and that being, you know, a lifelong partnership or not, or just your entire experience of life being narrated by unlucky feels like a life half lived.

Jonathan Fields: [00:48:53] Is there a particular exercise or prompt that you would invite people into to start to explore? Being more often in a state of curiosity?

ViKA Victoria: [00:49:03] Uh, yeah. If you want to be in a state of curiosity, this is an exercise. Keep a journal underneath your pillow. Wake up. First thing you do before you get out of bed is you stream of consciousness. Write down eight questions. Do that for two weeks straight. Do not look at them. And on the 15th day, make yourself a really nice meal. Have a few highlighters in front of you and start looking at the questions. Because what happens is, right when we’re coming out of our sleep state, our brain is still in theta. We haven’t been hit up by our phones or by people that need something from us. We’re in this kind of like dreamy state. And like you said, we are pattern-making machines and so your your highest curiosities are not a coincidence. I totally agree with Liz Gilbert. And when people started telling me follow your passions, I said no, I’m going to follow a breadcrumb trail of my highest curiosities. And I started a men’s dinner salon talking about emerging narratives of masculinity that made no sense for five years until now. It has hugely practical applications to a business world where 69% of executives are male. Right? My curiosity has led me there. So there are questions that are brewing inside all of us that have never had the space to be seen. And when you write it down and you see it, there will be a thread that arises. It might be about your sense of purpose, it might be about your partner. It might be about whether to have kids or not. Whatever it is, you now have real solid snapshots of what you’re curious about every single day for two weeks. And back to what you were saying about making deliberate choices. You can make more informed, more conscious decisions from that bank of your curiosities than you could have when it was all kind of mud in your mind.

Jonathan Fields: [00:51:04] I love that morning exercise, and now I know what I’m doing for the next 15 days. And first thing in the morning I’m adding it into my morning routine. I’m going to follow up.

ViKA Victoria: [00:51:11] I’m very curious what your threads are 100%.

Jonathan Fields: [00:51:14] I mean, I already have a pretty extensive morning routine, but this sounds like I’ll keep that journal right next to me. I also want to. We’ve been talking really a lot about the internal stuff, the stories we tell ourselves, and had a really deepened into that. And at the same time, a lot of the work that you do is like, what are the stories that we tell other people? How do we show up and be seen in a particular way, acknowledge in a particular way, and tell the stories that we want told so that they land? So when you think about, okay, when it’s time for us to actually then turn our insights out toward the world, and as you described earlier in the conversation, we all have this primal need to be seen to be known. And stories are such a powerful way to do that. I feel like everybody we tend to really stumble when it comes to this. Our heads start to spin. We have no idea where to start. And yes, everything that you’ve been talking about internally, first get all that alignment really dialed in. But when we decide it’s time to actually step out and turn outward, how do we actually even begin to know? And I guess this is a question that’s come up for me. It’s a question that I’ve actually asked some of the folks at The Moth and other, you know, like, I think one of the big things that people struggle with is what story do I tell and what story is worthy of being told?

ViKA Victoria: [00:52:27] Oh, those are such great questions. I think every story is worthy of being told. It just depends on the audience. There are some stories that you will only ever tell yourself, and they will go to the grave with you. There are some stories you can entrust to the closest people to you, And then there are some stories that if you tell them well, and you tell the right story at the right time to the right audience, it’s a big breakthrough. At a dinner, at a conference, at work. I think the thing that that people do when they tell stories is they go into a performative mode. And so I recognize that people need frameworks. And so I created a framework called story. And I’ll run you through it real quick. But basically I listened to that Navy Seal. And so story framework starts with S. S is for sincerity. There is no stronger quality of resonance than authenticity. And so when you’re telling a story, being in a space of living, that story is the most effective way you can transmit the meaning of that story, the emotional quality of that story, what it did for you. One of the greatest compliments you can ever get as a storyteller is, wow, I feel like I was right there in the room with you.

ViKA Victoria: [00:53:50] It’s this quality of vicariousness. That’s why we love great storytellers. It’s no surprise storytellers are usually incredibly relationally wealthy, are usually salespeople, are usually, you know, really rich in ecosystems of community because everybody wants to be entertained. But what I think makes an unforgettable storyteller is this trifecta of can you be as entertaining as you are, educational as you are enlightening, you can’t really promise the enlightening piece that’s up to them. But if you can tell a story with wit and humor and intensity and you can educate someone in that process, there’s a riddle. There’s something for them to glean and take on this journey of life that will alleviate their pain and some unforeseen experience moving forward. They’ll remember your story. That’s a real jewel. So S is for sincerity, T is for tension. And that’s what a lot of people miss when they’re telling stories. They’ll just like, start and they’ll forget about the narrative arc, and then they’ll go off and it turns into a spiral. Think about when you’re telling a story. What was that moment that, like really got you? And then build up to it and then share it and tell a story with tension is to to kind of be clever and to be seductive of the senses. It’s to pull people into what was I feeling? And instead of saying something like, like my palms were sweaty, you can say, like you could hear a pin drop. I could barely breathe. Right? So you’re telling this interoceptive experience of self which highlights your level of self-awareness. So the O is double in the story framework. There’s offer and there’s omission. Every story that you tell has the capacity to offer something valuable. And chances are, the stories that you love the most were the ones that, like a great joke, just got you thinking deeper about life. So make sure that when you’re telling a story, you’re adding a gift of wisdom, a pearl of knowledge. On the other side of the O is omission. So we don’t want to be Jackson Pollock with our stories. We want to be more of Miro. We want to recognize that when you’re telling a story, just like a painter is guiding the eye with a line, you are guiding the listener with their ears, with their imagination. And we live in a world of way too much cognitive overload. So less is definitely more and slower is better, and cadence is everything. Then we go into the AR and the AR part of the story framework is relationships. So this really speaks to context. Intersectionality. Who is your audience? How much time do you have? I cannot tell you how many times I have been at a dinner party, and somebody just dominates the conversation with a story that’s ten minutes long and you’re like, listen, there’s like 14 other people here. We all want to talk, you know? So not having that awareness of context, really easy way to mess up. A great story relationship also means how are you delivering the story? Is this an email? Is this spoken? Is this a PowerPoint? Is this a pitch? So relationship is having the EQ to understand all of the facets that go into this communication. And then the last thing is why. And that is you. You are the instrument through which story comes through. And so your energy, your vibrance, your eye contact, your body language is going to make a story go from good to unforgettable. And the people that understand that they speak full sentences with their eyes first before a word ever comes out of their mouth. So that’s the story framework. I hope that helped.

Jonathan Fields: [00:57:54] Um, no, that is incredibly helpful. Each one of those I literally think could be like a detailed conversation with sub conversations around it. But it’s great to just have sort of like that, the meta lens of that framework to really start thinking about the tension part of it, I think also is something that so many of us get wrong when we’re trying to figure out how to bring it to us. But if you read anything, whether it’s a book on story, the science of story, like whether it’s speaking, there’s always this question in the end, which you’re asked to, you know, like, which is like, like a story happens when somebody wants something. Exactly. And there’s a tension between like where you are and what you want.

ViKA Victoria: [00:58:32] Yes

Jonathan Fields: [00:58:32] So like the craft is how do you convey that in a way that invites people in rather than pushes them out? And I feel like that can be really delicate balance. I’m curious what your take is.

ViKA Victoria: [00:58:43] Yeah. I think, you know, when I read a lot of books about storytelling and one of the statistics that struck me was that researchers were trying to define story, and there were over 80 different definitions. But ultimately, it came to a character who is overcoming obstacles in search of resolution. And so as long as you’re sincere in your explanation of that attempt to resolve, you can get away with a lot. Because the cool part about storytelling is, no matter if you’re telling a story about trying to put your kid to bed or trying to close a series B, the human experience is universal. And so themes of effort, themes of success, themes of failure will show up in every story that you tell. People can connect to a theme. You got them. So when you think about I get this question a lot, how much is too much and what do I cut out and what do I keep? Imagine that you’re dead and that this story is being retold years and years after you’re gone. By your coworkers, by your friends, by your family. How would you want that story retold about you? You are a curator of stories, and you are living your legacy by sharing each of these stories. You know, when my grandpa did the died, the rabbi said, the dead are only dead when they’re forgotten. And in that moment, I recognized that’s why telling stories about him is going to be so important. Because stories are the way we remember the dead. And so if stories are the way we remember the dead, stories are also the way we remember the living.

Jonathan Fields: [01:00:25] Yeah, I’ve heard that described as the second death, by the way. There’s the first death when somebody actually passes and the second where their story is no longer being told. You used a word when you were sharing the story framework. Also, you use the word seduction, which makes me curious about the relationship between storytelling and seduction.

ViKA Victoria: [01:00:45] Oh, storytelling is incredibly erotic Storytelling is an appeal to all of the senses. When we experience a really great storyteller telling a story, we can smell it, we can taste it, we can see it. We’re right there with them. And so the capacity to tell great stories is is really connected to your capacity to feel that aliveness inside of yourself and transmit that aliveness through the story. Does that make sense?

Jonathan Fields: [01:01:18] It does, it does. I think seduction also. Seduction. I think often people have a weird feeling about the word. Um, you know, it’s sort of like one person is doing this thing to another person and often for the purpose of their own pleasure, rather than, what if we could actually just experience the sort of like the ecstasy of a collective seduction, knowing that this this is not about like, oh, I’m trying to lure someone into a particular situation or to do a certain act, but there’s a certain bliss that comes from the state of just being in the experience of seduction that I think can be so rich in our lives that we we never really explore it, just as a sort of standalone thing, you know, like just an exquisite experience that we get to drop into.

ViKA Victoria: [01:02:07] Opph! I love the way that you phrased that, because what this articulates is that we have a whole story about one word. You and I hear seduction. We get excited about it. That’s our story. Somebody else hears seduction. And because of their cultural, societal conditioning, they think of it as manipulation. And so when I think of seduction, I think what a moment of grandeur to be fully present, to have someone’s attention. We live in an attention economy. So you’re going to be seduced by apps and by social media, or you’re going to be seduced by a great story. Choose.

Jonathan Fields: [01:02:43] And maybe we just allow ourselves to be seduced by the possibility of our own story in the world and inviting others into it. Yeah, it feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So in this container of Good Life Project., if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

ViKA Victoria: [01:03:00] To live a good life means to have the courage to recognize the stories that are holding you back, and the wisdom to redefine your reality. And then the second part of that I’d say. To live a good life means to be in awe of the present and present, to the awe. And from that state of awe, the greatest stories will unfold.

Jonathan Fields: [01:03:29] Hmm. Thank you.

ViKA Victoria: [01:03:30] Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [01:03:33] Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode safe bet, you’ll also love the conversation we had with Catherine Burns about the craft of storytelling. You can find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adelle for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project. in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did. Since you’re still listening here, would you do me a personal favor? A seven-second favor and share it? Maybe on social or by text or by email? Even just with one person? Just copy the link from the app you’re using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen, then even invite them to talk about what you’ve both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.