STAR method felt robotic until someone told me to just tell the story and let the structure happen underneath

Every practice answer came out sounding like a form I was filling in out loud, "the Situation was, the Task was," stiff enough that one interviewer actually asked if I'd memorized a script. A mentor pointed out the structure is supposed to be invisible, you tell a normal story about a specific moment and it naturally has a beginning, an obstacle, and an outcome without labeling the parts. Rewrote my go-to answers as things I'd actually say to a friend at a bar first, then checked afterward that they still hit the situation-task-action-result shape. They did, every time, because that's just how people describe things that happened to them.