How To Be A Better Storyteller

Some summary takeaways from our recent webinar on the same topic.

Our speaker

Quick clarification – storytelling in this context is in reference to using stories in conversation, presentations, business, and professional. Not in the fictional writing sense.

Step 1: Selecting the right story

1. The story should serve its purpose – convey your intended message/lesson.
2. It should be personal – something that your audience will relate to.
3. Be charismatic – bring your own personality into the telling of the story, don’t just monotonously describe it.

Step 2: Editing your story

Now that you know which story you want to tell, it’s time to refine it for the purpose of your talk/presentation/conversation. The best and most natural sounding storytellers aren’t just doing it impromptu, they’ve often rehearsed and told the same story many different times.

There are 3 key elements for customization

1. What is the turning point?
2. Zooming In
3. Emotion

Turning point

Considering the message/lesson you’re trying to convey, what is the “aha” moment in our story, what made you realize you were doing things wrong/needed to change/adjust your worldview.

e.g. My father in-law lives in a senior care home. When visiting him, I often notice that he has terrible bedsores. I was upset about this and decided to raise it with the caregivers at the facility, I asked “What’s going on here? How do they develop? What are you all doing to treat it?” and I was told “bedsores are a common problem for seniors in our care home. It happens when a person is lying in bed or sitting in a wheelchair for a prolonged period of time. Our caregivers have no easy way to track and determine when we should reposition a patient in our facility to avoid this from happening”.

I thought to myself “there must be a better way, I can solve this with my background in engineering” – and that has lead me to create this special wearable device that will track a patients movements and alert a caregiver if they have been in the same position for too long.

I’ve highlighted the turning point in green in this example of an entrepreneur’s product origin story.

Zooming In

This is where you set the scene, how you lead up into the turning point. When considering how long or how concise you should be with Zooming In, ask yourself:

• How much time do I have to tell this story?
• Are the points that I’m sharing to set the scene contributing towards understanding the turning point? Or are they excessively superfluous?
• If appropriate, below are some following bonus tips that will help you immerse your audience in the setting:
  • Appeal to sight, sound, smell, taste, touch where appropriate.
  • Use the actual dialogue in the moment instead of paraphrasing from a 3rd party perspective.
  • Expose your inner dialogue – I thought to myself…

Emotion

It’s obvious here, people connect better through emotions. Why? We may not all share the same experience/skills/or backgrounds, but as human beings, we all share the same range of emotions.

Since this is about storytelling, I’ll tell a story here to illustrate the point:

A friend of mine Stevie, was on a plane and found himself seated beside the Vice President of Universal Studios Singapore. At that time, Stevie was still a college student. He was grappling with how he could engage in meaningful conversation with much older and wiser gentleman despite being a young student with not much experience under his belt.

Stevie started sharing about his experience as the president of the AISEC club at his college, and he noticed that the VP was more engaged when he was sharing about his frustrations with managing his club executives, his concerns and worries for the future direction of the club, and his excitement with doing new and meaningful things.

By picking up on that, he directed the conversation and focused more on common emotions behind managing a team. This allowed him to have a more meaningful conversation and build a stronger connection with the VP.

Expose your emotions, let the audience know how you felt in the moment.

Most people prepare their pitches/presentations in text, then they speak it out, then they record and review. You may notice that you struggle with communicating an authentic and emotional story if you do it this way. When writing in text, we tend to naturally be more logical and deliberate.

Instead, tell your story verbally, record it, then edit it.

Practice telling your story with others to see how they react and if they light up and engage in conversation. If they do, your story will likely do well for a larger audience too.

How do you practice your storytelling with others? It may be a little awkward to just randomly jump into narration mode. Start by leaning into the topic, then you can naturally transition to the story.

e.g. with the entrepreneur’s product pitch above, a way to lean into the topic might be “Did you know that you can get hurt by sitting or lying down for too long?”

Use arousing emotions

Many people avoid using negative emotions in storytelling, they fear that it will bring down the energy of their listener. Negative emotions that are arousing can be powerful too (anger, frustration), they hook the audience and it creates for a more viral story.

Check out Jonah Berger’s book Contagious: Why Things Catch On to learn more about how to use emotions correctly to improve virality.

More detailed tips

Being Charismatic

3 elements of charisma

• Power – not in a dominating way, but to exude confidence and to make your listener feel comfortable.
• Presence – good eye contact, active listening (listening for the sake of understanding, not for the sake of replying)
• Warmth – a sincere desire to participate in service.

Being authentic

You are always authentic when you share stories from your personal life.

You will seem fake when you pull from stories/quotes/jokes that are external.

On another related note – on behaving authentically and wearing multiple masks when interacting with different people

There is no such thing as your ONE true authentic self.

We all behave differently with different people, you wouldn’t behave the same way in front of your grandmother as you would with your siblings. Same goes for behaving when you’re at work, speaking to a customer, speaking to your boss etc.

Instead, authenticity happens when you’re sharing from a point that aligns with your values.

I see this disconnect happen most often when salespeople are selling products that they don’t personally believe in. You can easily tell that they’re not being authentic, that they’re trying too hard to be a different person.

Collect your stories

Take note of interesting moments that happen in your life or in the lives of the people you interact it, create a catalogue of stories which you can pull from and repurpose for different talks.

When we’re preparing our presentations, we often know what we want to communicate, but struggle to find the most appropriate story to paint the picture if we’re trying to pull from memory while we’re writing our scripts.

Many stories can be repurposed to convey different messages. Stories can be used as analogies to help people understand different concepts.

Renee gave the example story of her making homemade breakfast muffins that her husband thought were better than McDonalds, and used that to help contrast the struggle or lack of confidence that entrepreneurs have when they’re up against big and established competitors.

Personal stories vs. borrowing stories

If you don’t own a pet, but are speaking with someone who adores his/her dog, you can borrow stories from the people you know too.

e.g. I don’t have a pet, but this one time, John brought his dog into work and…

The caveat here is that borrowed stories may not be as powerful and authentic as personal stories. Stories are most engaging when the listener wants to know what happened to YOU! Because they know you, they want to relate to you.

Storytelling online

Some random tips:

For videos – if you’re creating YouTube content/speaking to an audience etc.

• Avoid having slides as your main screen. You should be front and center, speaking directly to your audience.
• Remember, you are the star, your slides are your supporting actors.
• If you have to use text to more logically elaborate points, transition to full-screen text, then back to you so that you’re still the main highlight of the talk.

For written copy on website/ads/social media etc.

• Start with the subject (subject as in WHO this is about, not topic), and ensure that you subject is relatable to your customer
• People are less inclined to continue reading/watching if they don’t feel that it speaks to them.