Carol's Corner

“Be unpredictable, be real, be interesting. Tell a good story. ” James Dashner.

Stories have certain elements that help them engage the audience’s attention. You need characters for all stories have characters. You can be one of the characters, this makes the story easy for you to remember since it is personal experience.

A good story will have some type of conflict or obstacle that the character is dealing with. The obstacle or conflict needs to be believable, relatable to your main point. But you can not leave the character in conflict. There must be a resolution to the situation, there needs to be a cure. Someone needs to win and if the underdog wins it is much better. Finally how does this resolution change the character, change the outlook and what message does it send.

You have your theme for the presentation. You have an outline, main points and your statistics. You also have anecdotes or stories to illustrate and enhance the main points. You have crafted your stories with the crucial elements of character, conflict, cure and change. But now what?

To make sure the story adds to your presentation, engages your audience and is memorable you need to work on making the oral presentation of the story as strong as possible. We need to know our presentation, our theme, our message but we also need to know the audience. However, I believe the key word to achieve this is PRACTICE! No matter what skill we are working on, including storytelling, we need to practice, practice, practice. We need to practice the timing to have it be smooth and the right length for the type of presentation we are doing. We need to practice so we can be enthusiastic in our delivery of the story.

Therefore, no matter how dry and boring the subject matter may seem to be, bring it alive by finding the story at the heart of it all and practice until you can tell it effectively.

John Kotter said, “We learn best and change from hearing stories that strike a chord within us.”

I love adding stories into any speech, presentation or message I deliver. How about you? Do you add stories into your presentations? How has the audience responded.