19-07-2021
Weekly Training Booster Episode #9: How to Tell Stories at Work
Telling Stories at work
Join Andy Palmer and Darren A. Smith in the ninth episode of the Weekly Training Booster. This episode was about telling stories at work and how to improve your presentation skills. Using stories to achieve greater engagement with your audience. Everyone can tell stories - Tell me about an accident you had, or a time you were embarrassed.
You Can Read the Storytelling Episode Transcript Below:
Darren A. Smith:
Hello and welcome to week nine with Andy Palmer. We're talking about the Weekly Training Booster. And this week, Andy, we're going to talk about storytelling and how to tell stories at work.
Andy Palmer:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think for me, this is one of those learned skills that actually become incredibly useful because the majority of us spend a lot of time influencing, persuading, communicating, ultimately presenting to people. And what we're ultimately looking to do is to improve that ability by becoming far more persuasive. And storytelling can just be a super powerful way of doing that.
Darren A. Smith:
And my understanding of storytelling is it comes from when our ancestors sat around a cave, where we can sometimes see Dances with Wolves with Kevin Costner. And they're telling stories around the campfire and they're really intriguing. And partly, there's no telly to distract them or mobile phone, but the storytelling, that's how it was passed on for years and years and generations.
Andy Palmer:
Absolutely. So, I mean, way before recorded history, at any time before recorded history, it's the vehicle in which humanity passed information from generation to generation. And yeah, I think it still plays out true now.
And yes, there's all those influences, but actually, if we all think back, we can probably remember that story our grandmother told us when we were a kid. Maybe, that cartoon that we saw on the TV when we were five, maybe the thing we learned in school about how the telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell. And they're the things that stay with us because we have such strong emotional connections to stories, as opposed to just simple information gives.
Darren A. Smith:
And one of the stories that I remember was back when I was in corporate and this guy was doing a training course on time management. Now, I got intrigued by time management, as you know for the last 20 years.
But, the story that stuck with me from that whole day was this guy said, "I want you to remember, I've got tickets."
Now, he started with that and that was intriguing. I have no idea what he was on about, he's a mad American. And then, he told this story about how he had tickets for a baseball game. And did I know that during that day, he was the most productive he's ever been? Because at five o'clock he had to leave the office because he had tickets. And were we surprised how productive he was? No, we weren't, because he had a goal. And it was brilliant, loved it.
Andy Palmer:
For me, that is the power of bringing stories to life by having a single central clear message. His clear message was, "I have tickets." Now, there was a whole load of other stuff going on, but that's the bit that stuck with you.
When we can come up with that simple clear message and that could be as much as, "I've got tickets," or, "I want to launch a new line," or, "I want to run a promotion, I want to negate," whatever that thing may be, if we're absolutely crystal clear on what it is, and then we can surround it with an appropriate narrative, we become so much more engaging in the way in which we're delivering that thing, whatever that thing may be.
Darren A. Smith:
And I agree. I was at a workshop, a different workshop some years later, with a guy called Richard White. God bless him, he's now passed on. But, we were in a storytelling workshop. There was 30 of us there and most of us started moaning as people, I think, were watching.
"I can't tell stories, Richard, I can't."
He said,
