Story telling
21 Aug
In my post-BBC incarnation as a public speaker/conference moderator/speaking coach I’m constantly drawing on a journalist’s tool of the trade – story telling. So much so that I found myself running a communications workshop for a major European finance company in which story telling turned out to be the main attraction.
After helping the CEO polish up a speech, peppered with anecdotes, I was approached by two different teams wanting to flex their story telling skills too. Why? Well they’d seen how their CEO was using stories – rather than grandiose policy pronouncements – to get across complex business themes. And they wanted to have a go too. The results were surprising and immediate.
Even the skeptics (and there were a couple of obvious skeptics) quickly got the hang of it – and found powerful, unexpected examples from their own lives – which worked equally well in a business context. The anecdotes featured confused Americans holidaying in France, an Indian in London whose bank account was hacked, the sensitive decision to set up a joint bank account after marriage… and many other intriguing tales. What they had in common was how a personal story set up and segued into a more complicated (sometimes off-putting) business message, in such a way that the main message became less ‘corporate’ and more memorable.
For the workshops’ participants the surprise was how easy it was – how animated and relaxed they felt when telling stories instead of hammering out jargon-laden pronouncements. And the feedback from the group reinforced that - everyone could see how their colleagues came alive when bringing something of themselves into their corporate communications. The power of stories, we’ve been telling them since the start of time.
thanks nisha for beginning to hack through the verbiage of meaningless management-speak ! next the politicians !
That’s a great idea Nisha. Stories are much easier to relate to and infinitely more exciting than jargon.
What comes across to me is that by getting people to personalise the message, and illustrate it with stories/anecdotes from their own lives, they are able to bring the presentation of the business idea to life, and to present it so much more memorably and meaningfully..hopefully even with some passion.
Hi Nisha! I totally agree. I find that i do the same when I am giving my media training and public speaking sessions. I urge executives to abandon the temptation of going for the easy data presentation pre-prepared by their office or drones of consultants, and to relax instead, and tell a story that allows their passion to shine through. Only then can they reach their audience.
Loved it – you’ve explained the virtues of storytelling in 200 odd words for exactly what others have wasted many a weighty tome trying, perhaps, to explicate, and thus, complicate it. Can’t wait to read ‘The Power or Ask’. The idea itself is so captivating!
it’s about selling: the target audience comes first, not the speaker. But that, of course, requires one to check the ego at the cloakroom before walking into the room. So, most of the time, it is still all about grandiose policy announcements… sad, because we all come from a long line of story tellers.