Telling Better Stories

Annette Simmons is the author of Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins: How to Use Your Own Stories to Communicate with Power and Impact. Her book is intended to help you get into “story thinking,” using stories as tools for persuasion in your personal and business life. She defines stories as “a reimagined experience narrated with enough detail and feeling to cause your listeners’ imaginations to experience it as real.”

Although storytelling is as old as humankind itself, not everyone Is a natural storyteller. Telling a great story takes practice, Simmons says. In a previous post, I listed the kinds of stories you should have in your inventory. One of them is the Why I’m Here story. Simmons describes the Why I’m Here story this way: “When someone assumes you are there to sell an idea that will cost him or her money, time, or resources, it immediately discredits your “facts” as biased. However, you chose your job for reasons besides money. Tell this person what you get out of it besides money.”

This is a great place to begin your career-related story thinking process. Why did you choose your career? How does what you do make life easier for your customers, co-workers, or the world at large? What gives you the motivation to come in to work every day?

Once you have the ideas in place, the basis of your story, you can practice telling it to yourself. Simmons admits that storytelling is an art, but there are also tried and true principles that will help you get better. She says the first is brevity: your stories should last no more than three minutes. I might take exception to this if you’re new to storytelling or not confident in your skills. Set a timer on your phone for three minutes and you’ll see that it’s a long time. A long time. Unless your story is a proven, compelling, audience-tested hit, I’d suggest keeping your stories to less than 90 seconds.

Simmons also says that every story should be personal. That’s the point of telling stories – to share your personal experience. It’s perfectly acceptable to tell someone else’s story, a story someone told you, or a story from a book or movie that made an impression on you. But the story should end with what it meant to you – how it changed your actions, your mind, or your life.

In fact, that’s the purpose of getting good at telling stories; they are your most powerful tool for persuasion. When I taught undergraduates public speaking skills, I emphasized that almost all business communication is intended to persuade. Whether you’re trying to get someone to follow you, work for you, hire you, or buy something from you, you’re trying to persuade.

Data is helpful, but seldom persuasive. In fact, many people make the mistake of relying solely on data, objective facts and charts or diagrams to persuade. They may set up the situation, but a compelling story is what will change your audience’s hearts and minds. I call stories “presenting data points of one.” You can talk about the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., but telling a story about how one of them works, pays taxes, and lives in constant fear of deportation will be the only way to make the data real and create change.

We’ve been told that facts are more accurate and thus more valuable than anecdotes. Most scientists will insist that “the plural of anecdote is not data.”

Simmons says “Most of us were trained to use thinking habits that help us be more rational, more logical, and more scientific in our approach to work. Unfortunately, three of these thinking habits can also make you a lousy storyteller. The secret of becoming a good storyteller is to develop the ability to toggle back and forth between fact thinking and story thinking.”