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“The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms,” Muriel Rukeyser. In this episode we will continue to explore the importance of storytelling for our brand.
The mechanics of storytelling can come easy to us in social situations. You can share a funny anecdote using the right speed and the right emotion in the right places. You can get your audience going.
The issue is translating that to a business setting.
In this podcast, we will break down effective mechanisms for storytelling.
In the last episode, we talked about the importance of engaging in ongoing dialogue and interaction with your audience, with the people you are communicating with. In order to leverage nonverbal feedback to improve your communication. In this episode, we’re going to focus on the particular challenges that you have when it’s your turn to present your turn, to communicate to the information.
Michel Shah:
Welcome to upSkill Talks brought to you by McGraw Hill. I’m your host, Michel Shah lead UpSkiller at UpSkill Community. UpSkill Talks is a podcast for leaders, leaders who are actively seeking innovative and creative ways to interact lead themselves and others. In every episode, through real life stories and enlightening conversations, we will explore the challenge. And opportunities real leaders face in today’s everchanging workplace. We will present you with real strategies for you to leverage your soft skills and produce transformative results. Thank you for joining me on this journey. Let us begin.
Michel Shah:
I’ll now take you back to UpSkill Community, where Colleen Stewart is continuing the conversation on storytelling and stories with Upskillers. Come on. Let’s join.
Colleen Stewart:
So I’m gonna show you what a story actually is. We hit on a few points of not being sure what level of detail, how do I appeal to different audiences, how do I ignite the audience? And, you brought up the pace of how we speak when we are in storytelling mode, our brains know how to present. We know it. We don’t need to be told, pause here, slow down here, put your emotion in here. We don’t need any of that.
When we are sitting in the coffee shop telling a story to our friends, we know how to do it. So if we can get into storytelling mode in our business communications, then we can use those skills we already possess.
So I have a 14-year-old son named Julian and when he was five or six years old, I had a washing machine that was in desperate need of repair. During the spin cycle, it sounded like a twin engine aircraft was trying to take off from my basement. And we had our TV down there, that’s where the boys and I would watch movies. And if we had the movie on and the spin cycle was starting, I had to pause the film because nobody could hear the movie.
So we were down there one night and sure enough, spin cycle comes on and the two boys and I were trying to watch something, but I had to pause. Julian’s older brother, who’s seven and a half years older, looked at me and said, “Mom, it sounds like that machine is going to blow up.” Well, he and I had a chuckle. The five-year-old was not laughing. He had seen things blow up in “Spider-Man” movies, in video games.
The next time I did laundry, Julian went outside to play, and the next time he went outside to play. It wasn’t until it was a crappy day, it was cold. There was like sleet in the air, and I put the laundry on and Julian goes outside to play and finally figure out, oh my God, this kid is scared. He’s afraid of the machine. Now notice he saves himself. Like he left the rest of us in the house, but you know, he’s out the door saving himself.
Anyway, so I get the washing machine repair man over, and I figured this is a good time to bring Julian downstairs, put his mind at ease. And the guy has pieces all over the floor. And I bring Julian down and I say to the washing machine, repair, man, “Sir, it sounds like this machine is going to blow up, but will it actually blow up?” And he said no. And then he goes into detailed description of every single piece on the floor, and then he talks about how each piece fits together. And then he talks about how it operates in the machine.
Now let me ask you, do you think that detailed explanation did anything to put Julian’s mind at ease? No. So outside of work, we are his older brother. This is how we talk, right? We say, “Hey, that machine sounds like it’s gonna blow up.” But the minute we step through the doors of the office, even metaphorically in this space, we are the washing machine repairmen. We think our audience needs to know every single little piece and how every single little piece works together, and we give them way too much information and this is how we lose. And the thing is that we don’t really change as we get older. We’re still those five-year-old kids, just hoping somebody makes us feel something so we can remember it and we can use it to make a better decision.
And that’s ultimately what we want to do with our business communications. But to do it well, we first have to understand what a story actually is. What is it that you’re doing at the coffee shop already? Or in the pub or around the dinner table? That is absolutely a real story. And my, my son has been in the house during these sessions and he always comes down after and he’s like, “Mom, can you stop telling that story about me?”
So when you’re preparing any piece of communication, whether it’s a presentation or you know, you’re going into a meeting and you have to present a certain idea or concept and you wanna make sure you pitch it properly, a story is a great way to illustrate it. You wanna think about three building blocks of every story.
First, this is how to start, and the first building block is, every story has a hero. And this is not a superhero that has a cape on and flies down from the sky to save the day. This is an ordinary hero. You know, a furry told little Hobbit named Frodo who has a second breakfast and enjoys his pipe in the Shire. You know, it’s just an every day ordinary person. But if you can stay focused on a central character in your story, it helps. It prevents you from going off on tangents and putting in too much information that you don’t need in into your message. So that is your first building block.
You need to decide who is this story actually about? And if it’s a presentation, who is the presentation actually about? And here’s a hint. If it’s a presentation, it’s about your audience. They don’t care about you, you don’t, you don’t really care about Perfect Pitch. If I had opened up this talk and saying, well, let me give you a history of perfect Pitch Consulting Group. It all began in 2012. I mean, you don’t care. You care about what am I going to get out of this and how am I gonna use it? Right? So you need you, you need the presentation to be about you, and that’s your first building block.
Now, to move the story forward, the hero needs a goal. What are they trying to achieve when they walk in the door to have a conversation with you or to attend your presentation or your pitch? What is it that they want to achieve? What are they hoping to? That is what’s going to move our story forward. So with our little furry-toed hobbit, when we go to see the movie and we sit down with our buckets of popcorn, we learn that Frodo has to throw a ring into a pit of fire.
But let’s say the next 10 minutes of the movie was Frodo walking through a sunny field. Then he goes into this peaceful forest and the birds are chirping and he strolls through the forest, and then he very easily steps across the creek and all of a sudden there’s a pit of fire there and he throws the ring in and he brushes off his hands and says, “Well, that was easy.” I think I’ll go home now. Make it in time for second breakfast.
Is everybody enjoying that movie? Boring. There’s no drama in it. What are we craving? We’re expecting something, right? Where is the drama gonna going to come from? Do you think? You’re absolutely right. It’s missing. It’s the piece. A challenge.
And so what I’ll say the last building block is, and this is the one, this is the one that is missing in my 10 years experience doing this. This is the block that’s missing from business communications. We don’t talk about the conflict for a couple of reasons. We either assume that our audience already knows it, so why would we talk about? They must know what problem we’re trying to solve. So we don’t need to talk about it, or we’re not clear on it ourselves, or we just don’t wanna talk about the dark spots in our presentation. We’re too anxious to get to the good things. “Well, I have a business and this is what it does,” or, “I have this job and this is what I can do for you.”
But the problem is that’s boring. We don’t care yet because until we know what the conflict is, we’re not overly interested. When you think about conflict, it’s two forces banging up against each other. That’s what it is. So, you know, if I was opening a presentation about storytelling, I could say every single one of you, you are my hero. You want to deliver pitches and presentations that not only engage your audience, but are memorable and help them make a better decision with you afterwards. That’s your goal.
The problem is the very thing that you think makes for a great presentation — more information — is actually making for a poor presentation. So we are going to talk about ways to solve that conflict.
If we can identify that there is, you know, there’s some other force that’s pushing on that, then we get even more specific and more vivid in what that issue actually is. So it’s a way of thinking about conflict to keep the story interesting. Now I’m gonna come back to these building blocks, because I want to show you now the structure of a story. I wanna read what Catherine wrote though. Right? So we, we might think we’re being competitive or maybe, you know, even to take this idea a little further.
Like maybe, maybe we’re not implementing quickly enough because we want to make sure we get it just right and we go after the competition, you know, in just the right way. However, meanwhile they’re killing us, right? So as we take all this time to perfect and make sure it’s exactly right, our competition is actually killing us. So, let’s go back to these blocks. I wanna show you a basic story structure.
Michel Shah
So interesting how storytelling comes back to understanding the basic building blocks. And being able to take those basic building blocks one brick at a time to build out effective stories. And understanding that we won’t get it right at once, but we develop the basic framework and then we begin using it. We have others give us feedback on it and take our time to perfect it over time. But it is important to note that the imperfect story can still garner interest and engagement. And perhaps sales. Or buy in. And that gives you time to continue to build out the story. Let’s continue our conversation. On storytelling in the next episode, looking at a very specific structure for you to use over and over again, to make sure you get your story just right.
Michel Shah:
Thank you for listening to this episode of UpSkill Talks brought to you by McGraw Hill. We bring you new episodes every Monday. Please take a moment to subscribe, leave a five star rating and a written review at apple podcast. Or follow us on. By Google podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, don’t forget to share UpSkill talks with other leaders like yourself. So they too may gain the skills and insights to produce amazing results. Please go to UpSkillCommunity.com to review show notes and learn how you can join a community of leaders from across the globe. Collaborating to lead in a more meaningful and impactful way. I’m your host, Michel Shah. And again, thank you for joining me on this episode of UpSkill Talks.
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