You have a story. We all have stories. How well we tell those stories depends on how willing we are to experience them in our own lives. If you worry about what someone will think, or feel, or say…you pull back. You eliminate a feeling, or impression, or thought. You begin writing or speaking to appear stronger, better, smarter or whatever to the audience that you’re anticipating. You quit being authentic.

Far too many people believe that “being authentic” means someone who agrees with our viewpoint, but being authentic means being true to yourself, your experience, your beliefs, integrity, thoughts. The more authentic you are, the greater the power of your story.

I’m speaking at TED Global 2009 on July 21st for six minutes about … my experience being homeless in 2006. I’ll post that speech here after I give the talk and there’s a TED.com link to it. But in the meantime, this is a story I wrote for Seth Godin’s Triiibes Case Study ebook. (The ebook is free. You can click on the link below to get the entire book. There are many talented, gifted storytellers in it.) The ebook accompanied the release of his book, “Tribes” which came out October 2008. It’s about a one-legged homeless woman who “led” her tribe of homeless people:

The need to be in a tribe isn’t limited to status, income level or occupation. Belonging is hard-wired into us.

Lines for free meals start forming at 10 a.m. for the noon lunch - a sandwich, a piece of fruit, a glob of potato salad or macaroni. Lines for free medical treatment - anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, HIV cocktails, start forming at 5 a.m. for doctors who arrive at 9 a.m. Being homeless doesn’t mean you don’t have a schedule any more. It just involves more waiting, usually in longer lines and usually with people who talk to dead relatives, scratch their crotch, howl or simply stare while they wait. But even among the down and out, tribal leaders emerge.

Joyce did. An amputee with a leg lost to a freight train after she mistook a train yard for a bedroom early one morning, Joyce still soldiered on from her wheel chair outside Denver’s homeless headquarters. A self-proclaimed “crack head” and admitted addict, Joyce none-the-less ruled her “tribe.” In filthy purple sweatpants and sweatshirt, face grimy with weeks of unwashed dirt, she wheeled her wheelchair up and down the line of homeless people, addicts, recently released prisoners, the mentally ill and the morally bankrupt and plied her skills.

“Gotta match? Gotta cigarette? Joe I gave you some of my crack last night you owe me a cigarette.” When Joe claimed not to have any, 10 minutes of cajoling and wise cracks managed to produce a half a pack in spite of his initial pleas. Up and down the line she went…collecting cigarettes, food, a ratty scrap of a blanket. She stopped fights, calmed tears, stared down men four times her size as she rolled along. Her empty pant leg dragged the street as she leaned forward again and again to reach for a cigarette. The cigarettes that disappeared under her thigh would reappear slyly, almost magically when someone else needed one. The rag of a blanket she had begged from a man lying in his own vomit turned up minutes later, wrapped around an infant whose mother had simply tossed its dirty diaper in the street. This went on for four hours.

But when the doors to the free-clinic finally opened, Joyce disappeared. She was not waiting for medical care. She was tending to her tribe. This was the only time of the day they were all together and it was almost safe to do so. Yes - her tribal skills, the barter, the connecting, the networking and support were probably 90 percent self-survival driven, but it showed me that even when people can’t sink much lower in life the drive to belong to a tribe - even a tribe comprised of the mentally ill, the addicted, the walking dead and the criminal - is there. We still need to belong to something - if only to stay warm for the night, fed for the day or to be needed for a smoke.

CurrentTribesCasebook