The following post is brought to us by guest blogger Simon Burgess, Creative Director at Coelement Inc.
There’s great power in a story. A good story not only entertains us, it has the power to inspire, influence and even shape our outlook on life. In today’s connected world, stories are being shared more than ever, and can spread around the globe in seconds.
Be Well Stories launched last week, and we really believe these are stories worth telling. These three stories, from three people who are living the Be Well philosophy, will be shared online, on Facebook and on the Be Well blog. Our hope is these stories will inspire others to create and share their own, and add to the movement of living well, being healthy, and connecting with others.
As a video producer, I often think of Marshall McLuhan’s famous remark, “the medium is the message”, and how it relates to video and new media like Facebook, Twitter and blogs.
If you think about it, it’s still about the stories. It always has been. Before all this great technology, we humans were the media, and stories were the original messages. Stories allowed us to share our knowledge and experiences, our lessons, our hopes, our dreams and our fears.
Before we connected on the Web or sat in front of the television or radio, and even before we had the written word, we listened to the storyteller. We came together, and gathered around a fire. We sat, absorbed in the experience, as the storyteller gave context to the world around us, and made sense of the experiences we all share as humans.
We were the medium. And even today, with all our technology, when that medium is another human being, the message becomes all the more powerful.
To bring it back to McLuhan’s idea, the power isn’t only in the story we tell (the message) it’s also due to the fact that we are telling the story.
We are sharing ourselves and our experiences, and immediately we can all see that we are more similar than different, that we are not alone in our experience, and that there is a great power in releasing these stories into the world.
By taking the stories outside of ourselves and sharing them with others, we can change the world.
One of the great things about my job is that I get to help people share their stories, and my goal is always the same: to allow the viewer to see themselves in the story, and connect with it emotionally. When that happens, we can inspire change.
So, as you watch Be Well Stories, I hope you see yourselves in Getty, MJ and Doug, and find inspiration in what they are doing.
Stories like theirs can be found all around us, in ourselves, our friends, our families, our communities.
We all have a story to tell. And with Be Well Stories, we’re looking forward to sharing them with the world.
Be Well…Simon
Simon Burgess is the co-owner and Creative Director of Coelement, a Winnipeg-based marketing firm that specializes in video production, animation and visual storytelling. Simon has a background in new media and television production, and has been at it since 1998.
He is a husband and Dad of two beautiful children. They enjoy taking advantage of Winnipeg’s proximity to some of the world’s most spectacular wilderness as a family.
