In today’s fast, data-driven world of hyper-connectivity, we find ourselves feeling lost, lonely, and disconnected. We lack connection and purpose. We are missing our place in the world. Ancient storytelling, specifically the Epic, offers powerful tools to energize our audiences, explain complex ideas, align around shared goals and form an emotional connection with the people around us. Five tools of the Shaman; learn to tap into this ancient art.
Fiona Passantino, early June 2025
Our world is increasingly complicated and interconnected.[i] The pace feels lightning-fast. Intricate products and processes require near immediate understanding and rapid implementation, and we’re expected to adapt, retool, change, or die. At the same time, we find ourselves disconnected, disengaged, and uninspired.
Our jabbering media breathlessly announces massive, rapid change. We are all about to lose our jobs to AI, and we are supposed to feel amazed and excited by what the tech-bro billionaires have built.
Our tech gives us the illusion of connection, and our workplaces give us the illusion of a tribe. Our workplace teams have become our tribes and our offices act as the Longhouse. Our shamans are our CEOs, for better or worse. Our stories are about Digital Transformation, AI and Big Data.
But the transfer of information and knowledge to run this machine of our lives is not as simple as a thunderbolt cable connecting two Human brains. Facts in a vacuum are fine to feed ChatGPT but meaningless and quickly forgotten in the organic brain.
It is our Human ability to create connection, assign value and purpose and be the signal amidst the noise of our current world. As our world becomes ever more complex and distracting, we need the skills of the ancient Storyteller and the tools of the Epic to deliver us the information we need and to inspire, to align and to remind us of who we are.
What’s an Epic?
Let’s go back to the year 42.000 BC.
A Storyteller gathers her tribe in warmth and safety and tells a story. A story that has been told for hundreds, thousands of years with slight variations over time. A hero on a quest to overcome an impossible challenge. The Storyteller holds her tribe’s attention with her mastery of a few simple tools: repetition, simplicity, silence. Wrapped in this fantastic story are lessons the tribe needs to learn in order to survive:
Be of service to the tribe.
Put the needs of others before your own.
Don’t trust scary monsters when they promise you stuff that’s too good to be true.
An “Epic” is the story of a Human born at the edge of the membrane separating two worlds: the normal, everyday world of daily tasks and irritations and the fantastical world of myth.
The hero receives a divine calling: a monster to slay, a mystery to solve, a person to rescue. He passes through the membrane and enters a dangerous, beautiful realm where bravery, loyalty and the ability to sacrifice are tested. He gathers allies along the way and a few magical tools. He faces his challenge and returns victorious. He rejoins his tribe with the prize he fought for, but so much more: his wisdom. New lessons, new information and knowledge crucial for his people’s survival.
Every single civilization on earth developed their own version of this, from the Maori to the Mapuche, Hindu to Hawaiian. Epics exist in every culture on earth, and many of these stories are the same. From Africa to Asia to Central America, we will find a great flood, one-eyed giants and sun chariots.[ii]
The Epic was meant to entertain, inspire and align. But also, to teach. It is the vessel containing the collected wisdom and culture of the tribe. Humans are hard-wired to relate to and engage with stories. Our brains light up when we hear a story, with as much intensity as if we’re having the experience in life[iii]. Stories wake up our emotional centers in the brain, enveloping dry facts like a layer of dark chocolate. The facts they deliver are clearer and more understandable, and the lessons they tell lodge into our memory centers for good[iv].
Once ‘switched on’ in this way, we are at our most focused and receptive to new information[v]. We are happier, more connected, motivated and attentive; all of which conspire for a positive learning cycle[vi].
Five Tools of the Shaman
Have you ever noticed how grandma can tell a story in a way that has your kids spellbound, intensely focused and engaged? Naturally, she is using the tricks and techniques of the Shaman.
Today’s Master Storytellers recreate the cave, the stars and the fire in our conference rooms and training platforms. They have the ability to make us forget about our busy lives for a little while, help us put down our phones and bring us across the membrane into a different world.
Tip 1: Go Big
“Going Big” means taking our day-to-day struggles and challenges and making them epic, heroic. What follows is a fantastical tale of bravery, loyalty, sacrifice and supernatural, meant to pull at us emotionally, containing valuable lessons and knowledge crucial for our survival.
Big stories inspire. If we feel that we are all in this together, united behind a common goal, this triggers our basic tribal instincts to rise up beyond ourselves, to strengthen our bonds, to make large sacrifices and overcome our challenges. We create new connections within our tribe to align them towards a common purpose, a single enemy to be defeated. Even if the enemy is too small to be seen, or too large to ignore.
Tip 2: Go Small
At the same time, these big stories connect with the us on the smallest scale. That’s because these huge tales have plenty of detail about our very small battles we face every day; the difficult mother-in-law, rivalry between brothers, a foolish leader, a greedy businessman, a rebellious teenager. All of these are still with us today. Only the technology is different.
And, what we’re wearing.
Tip 3: Use Metaphor
The metaphor is a powerful tool for getting us there. The term comes from the Greek metapherein which literally means “carrying something somewhere new”. A familiar, mastered idea has the capacity to carry our understanding to a new, place.[vii]
Consider the folder, files and trash can on your desktop, stowaways from our analogue workspaces.[viii] The shopping cart helps us grasp e-commerce. Metaphors allow us to organize and structure information meaningfully and convey insight through essential combinations.[ix]
A meme is a metaphor machine, carrying us to an unexpected, new place on the backs of what we already know. The combination makes us laugh, makes us wiser, makes us share. Their immediate understandability, emotional charge and spread-ability make them highly effective for sales or awareness campaigns. That’s why we love them and that’s they work.
Metaphor adds rocket fuel to corporate storytelling. An ‘Achilles’ Heel’ was the fatal, hidden weakness in an otherwise immortal super warrior. Today, we know this as a software security risk. A ‘labyrinth’, once a maze hiding the ferocious Minotaur, is now an unhappy customer flow. A ‘Trojan Horse’, the structure that won a war for Greek warriors is now a type of malware attack.
The tales are fictitious but the insights they bring us are real. These shortcuts connect with our universal understanding that transcend time and technology.
TIP 4: Repeat
Repetition is essential for a short story or epic poetry to succeed.
Repetition creates predictability, cadence, a cycle.
Repetition highlights and emphasizes important points in the story.
Repetition facilitates the narrator’s memory and makes the poem easier for the reader.
Repetition creates rhythmic patterns that make the story more memorable and engaging.
Like music.
Music powerfully and instantly affects our brain.
Music binds with our emotions.
Epic language uses the rhythms and cadence of music.
See?
Many of the epics – the Iliad, Odyssey, Beowulf, Mahabharata, Book of Change – began life as spoken word because they were there long before writing was invented. Traveling storytellers had to memorize their tales and repeat them over and over again with every new village they visited. Rather than memorizing every detail of every story, they implemented repetition as a mnemonic aid, to help them remember. And, at the same time, their audience remembered the stories, too.
TIP 5: Silence
Albert Einstein once explained that empty space isn’t “nothing”. The physical world we know and understand, all the matter and energy we have ever observed with our eyes or our instruments, is only a small portion of the total mass of the universe. Some 68% of the universe is dark energy; a mysterious force that we can neither see nor measure, much less understand, but that profoundly impacts the behavior of everything around it.[x] Dark matter, no less mysterious, makes up about 27% of our world. We know that it is unmeasurably powerful, even if we cannot say how.[xi]
Silence is the dark, twin sister of Speech. While Speech babbles on, filling the room with chatter, Silence creates the void we need to reflect, to allow the message to echo in the chamber of the mind, connect with our emotions and memory centers, and land. Silence is an essential ingredient for a story to take root in the brain. Our fear of the void, our compulsive insistence on filling up any available space with words weakens the effectiveness of our communication.
Like the law of supply and demand, fewer words means that each one has a higher value and lands with greater force. Our quick-thinking survival brains are able to process a river of flat information in a nanosecond. But to unlock the larger machinery of our abstract and emotional brains and allow them to connect with the information it hears, ponder it deeply, there must be negative space.
Silence allows the listening brain to wander beyond the immediate crucial processes that facilitate our immediate survival and dig into our memories for unexpected associations. To pull on the buried threads of old emotions and the hear the whisper of our collective knowledge.
Mastery of the tool of silence is why the grandmother can tell a story to your kids that has them eyes-wide, hanging on her every word. Why she can hold their attention, effortlessly, even as she closes her eyes and cleans her glasses. Moments tick by with nothing being said, but no one seems to care. This is dark energy at work, pushing and pulling the physical world in ways we cannot understand.
Skillful use of silence takes practice. It is uncomfortable at first. The audience might shift in their chairs and exchange nervous laughter. They might look around the room as you pause for what feels like an eternity. But when you speak, the words you say go straight to the core.
Epic Thinking
In today’s world, we long for connection, meaning and vision. We are distracted, entertained and far too busy to look up into the night sky, and ponder what we see for a moment.
When we direct our gaze to the few visible stars above city lights, what is it we see? It’s not the latest AI model nor the face of Apple’s CEO. We see Orion and the Scorpion battle in our Northern Hemispheres. We see Aquila the ancient falcon of Egypt.[xii] Speaking to us from thousands of years ago, whispering, reminding us of who we are, why we are here and what we are meant to do. We are, all of us, heroes in an Epic Journey of our own lives.
We still need the stars, the cave and the fire. The ability to tell our stories, make them understandable and convincing, to inspire and align people of many different backgrounds is the key to our resilience. Our contrasting need for both fact and myth, our past and our future, can all co-exist peacefully in the vault of our minds.
We are not so advanced that we cannot long for the Epic as urgently as we await the latest tech.
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Working Humans is a bi-monthly podcast focusing on the AI and Human connection at work. Available on Apple and Spotify.
About Fiona Passantino
Fiona helps empower working Humans with AI integration, leadership and communication. Maximizing connection, engagement and creativity for more joy and inspiration into the workplace. A passionate keynote speaker, trainer, facilitator and coach, she is a prolific content producer, host of the podcast “Working Humans” and award-winning author of the “Comic Books for Executives” series. Her latest book is “The AI-Powered Professional”.
[i] Tsai (2008) “Corporate marketing management and corporate‐identity building” Marketing intelligence Magazine.
[ii] Foley (2004) “Epic as genre” The Cambridge Companion to Homer, 171–187.
Aládé (2015) “A Model for Animation of Yorùbá Folktale Narratives”. African Journal of Computing & ICT. 8 113 – 120 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308352527_A_Model_for_Animation_of_Yoruba_Folk
[iii] Gillett (2018) “Why We’re More Likely to Remember Content with Images and Video (Infographic)” Fast Company https://www.fastcompany.com/3035856/why-were-morelikely-to-remember-content-with-images-and-video-infogr
[iv] Noyes (2019) “Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? Evaluating the Design of Instructional Animations in Veterinary Education”. Journal of veterinary medical education, 1–9.
[v] Mutiarani (2019) “Indonesian Folklore Animation as English Learning Media and Students’ Character Education for Primary School”. Semnasfip.
[vi] Kalyanaraman (2004) “Arousal, memory, and impression-formation effects of animation speed in web advertising”. Journal of Advertising 33, 1, 7–17.
[vii] Eppler (2003)” The image of insight: The use of visual metaphors in the communication of knowledge”. Proceedings of I-KNOW (Vol. 3, September), 2–4.
[viii] Colburn, Shute (2008) “Metaphor in computer science” Journal of Applied Logic, 6(4), 526–533. https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S1570868308000463?token=42683557168FEAD047B2C566767E5BB7D6E7FCF76082D3DA7D3688C8972BD5298702C793E170948B99A29CE5B4715098
[ix] Eppler, M. J. (2003). The image of insight: The use of visual metaphors in the communication of knowledge. Proceedings of I-KNOW (Vol. 3, September), 2–4.
[x] NASA (2021) “Dark Energy, Dark Matter”. https://science.nasa.gov/universe/overview/building-blocks/#dark-matter
[xi] NASA (2021) “Dark Energy, Dark Matter”. https://science.nasa.gov/universe/overview/building-blocks/#dark-matter
[xii] Berio (2014) “The Celestial River: Identifying the Ancient Egyptian Constellations”. SPP, 253, 1–61. https://archive.org/details/identifying-the-ancient-egyptian-constellations-alessandro-berio-sino-platonic-papers-december-2014