Everybody Has a Story: A Tenx9 × TEDxNashville Story Circle

What happens when nobody is the audience?

For this special Tenx9 × TEDxNashville gathering, there’s no stage and no lineup of speakers. Everybody in the room is a storyteller.

You’ll gather in small circles of three, where a simple prompt will invite each person to tell a true story from their life. You’ll listen, get curious, ask questions, and discover the lives hiding behind the people sitting across from you. Then the timer sounds, the circles change, a new prompt appears, and three new stories begin.

You might tell about a time you took a risk. A person you’ll never forget. A moment you realized you were wrong. Something you lost. Somewhere you unexpectedly belonged. The prompts will be simple; where the stories go is entirely up to you.

There’s nothing to prepare. You don’t need to consider yourself a storyteller. You don’t need an extraordinary life or a perfectly polished story.

You just need to have lived.

Because everybody has a story. And sometimes fifteen minutes with a stranger is enough to remind us just how interesting, surprising, funny, heartbreaking, and wonderfully strange the people around us really are.