Storytelling – Beyond Bedtime

Angie Kellen, Director, Client Services, Open Sky Communications

Today, it’s more important than ever to develop solid storytelling skills. Not only to entertain our children, but to differentiate ourselves and products in business.

My experience with storytelling began just after birth. As a member of an Irish family, I grew up in the Midwest in a neighborhood that was mixed with Italian and Irish families. While I am not fond of stereotypes, I am an Irish girl that grew up communicating through storytelling. This is the way my whole family communicated, and by their example, I learned this too. In fact, one of my brothers has taken this skill set on the road, literally, and is a successful stand-up comedian! Now, are all Irish people good storytellers? No. But to improve on our skills, we can learn communication styles from other cultures and incorporate some of it into our own.

For example, back to our neighborhood, our Italian friends did communicate using lots of hand and arm gestures. As you can imagine, between all of the storytelling and gesturing, our sand-lot baseball games and snowball fights were wildly entertaining. In fact, over time, we learned to adopt a little of each other’s communication styles to make things perfectly clear on what was being said. While this new hybrid communication style cleared up who was safe on base and other important discussions, it did wonders for my dancing skills. Since traditional Irish dancing keeps the arms still at your side, I incorporated my Italian friends’ gesturing and dancing became even more fun.

This photo illustrates the neighborhood, hybrid communication style perfectly. Mary O’Hara included a few gestures to support her story of where exactly that snowball was going to land on Vittorio Cassini. By adopting both physical and verbal communication styles, Mary’s audience (Vittorio) was crystal clear on the message.

The experiences I had growing up in our little neighborhood are some of my fondest memories to date. But what I learned from our Italian friends was that visual communication was equally as important as verbal communication. An observation not wasted on my brother as his style of stand-up comedy incorporates both physical and verbal humor. For me, this experience has fueled my passion for speaker training and eagerness to help align physical communication with a speaker’s verbal communication to tell their story well.

So here we are today, all grown up and working in various industries and jobs. Communication comes to us from many places, including friends, TV, computers, phones and much more. It’s very noisy out there and when communicating for business, how can we rise above? It’s through storytelling. Good storytelling. As a result, storytelling skills are more important than ever. Not the ‘once upon a time’ style, but using basic elements of what makes a good story to present your message. This format allows you to be relatable with your audience. It draws your audience in and keeps their attention so they can truly understand what you are presenting, whether it’s a technical paper at a conference, a new company to investors, a new product to potential customers, or a press release to the media. I believe that some of the best storytelling examples can be found among the TED Talks videos (https://www.ted.com/talks ). If you aren’t familiar with these, meet John Bates (https://executivespeakingsuccess.com/about-johnkbates/), who is a speaker, trainer and executive coach that teaches the TED format. Below, I will share a few expert tips from John Bates’ training classes that focus on better storytelling for business.

1 – Stop talking about you and begin relating to your audience

I feel this is one of the most important tips when developing your presentation. When it comes to telling a story, people want to hear about your failures, not a laundry list of your accomplishments. Why? First, you don’t want their eyes glazing over at the beginning of your talk and missing the good stuff later on. Human beings can relate to failures because none of us are perfect. “People don’t connect with your successes, they connect with your messes,” notes John Bates. “Your message is in your mess.” Bates uses the analogy that you don’t want to be the Luke Skywalker of your story, but instead be the Yoda: “You’re not the hero of your talk, your audience is.” I personally love this statement! The presentation should not be about you, but about your audience.

2 – Include the 5 Cs – Circumstance, Curiosity, Characters, Conversations and Conflict

To create a truly mesmerizing story and engage the audience, you must include the 5 Cs, the basic building blocks of a good story. Circumstances set the scene by providing the key information that will give the proper context for your reader. Develop curiosity to leave the reader wanting more (this works when creating headlines too). Without curiosity, the reader won’t keep reading. Characters and conversations go hand-in-hand. If you’re telling a story without any people or dialogue, you will lose your readers. And last but not least, conflict, which is easily the most important element. As Bates explains, “When there’s no conflict, there’s not much of a story.” If we go back to our photo of Mary and Vittorio above, I bet you can determine the 5 Cs! 

3 – Start your story in the middle

I know this seems unusual, but no doubt you have experienced many occasions where storytellers or marketers give way too much detail upfront. They bury the lead! Their story begins in chronological order, which can put an audience to sleep before the exciting information is revealed. “Life happens in chronological order – that’s boring!” states Bates. “Start in the middle, where things are exciting. It’s much more interesting.” Give this a try when crafting your presentations. You can always take a trip backward in the timeline to avoid seeding confusion. It is a simple tip, but you need to incorporate this when you are crafting your presentation, not on-the-fly as you are presenting for the first time. Design your presentation for flashbacks when necessary, but start in the middle with an interesting opening.

4 – Know what matters to the audience and give it to them

Bates said it well, “Give us what matters to us. Pick three points and don’t cram unnecessary information in. Bring just the key things to the top.” This is where your level of planning will be most evident. First, know your audience and then give them what they want. For example, are they a technical audience with engineers? Then you will want to craft your storytelling to give them what they want, which will be a few key points that include as much relevant technical detail and numerical data.

5 – Hit them in the senses and tap their emotions

For business, Bates reminds us, “None of the facts and figures matter until you have some sort of emotional connection. Stories are a great way to connect emotionally. Adding emotion gets the entire brain engaged instead of just a thin slice.” When crafting a story, think about what emotion you want to communicate and then provide information to support that emotion.

Bates follows the principles of VAKO: Visual (Seeing, Reading), Auditory (Listening, Speaking), Kinesthetic (Touching, Doing) and Olfactory (Smelling). By incorporating these four elements into your story, you’re more likely to draw in your audience.

Make sure not to overdo it though – delivering your presentation as you perform an interpretive dance while burning incense is clearly sensory overload! Remember, your story needs some meat (the 5 Cs), along with elements to draw in the senses and emotions.

As you can see, honing your craft as a storyteller can serve you well in business. It will differentiate you from the pack and help your message rise above the noise. Who knows, you may even decide to take your storytelling skills on the road!

Be clear, be interesting, be you. Good Luck!